Are Antisemitism and Islamophobia Problems of Digital Media or Our Move Away from Critical Thinking?

I come to this essay with experience of both Islamophobia and antisemitism. These two cases compelled me to think more deeply about religious racism and how digital media relies on old stereotypes and contextualizes them for the political or social moment so that the onlooker can be swayed. Here are two examples:

Case 1

In late October 2023, my Muslim Students Association wanted to screen Born in Gaza (2014), a documentary on the trauma of Gaza’s children. As their faculty advisor, I was there to support them.

When the technology failed, I fell into conversation with one of the students about October 7. She showed me a video on Instagram — IDF soldiers, shouting in Hebrew, appearing to fire on civilians in Kibbutz Be’eri, Nir Oz, Kfar Aza, and other border communities.

“Everyone has seen this video,” she told me. I said the killings there were carried out by Hamas, and that she should be wary of unverified footage. What struck me was not that she believed the video, but what the belief did: it let Hamas, a group that claims to speak for Muslims, disappear from the frame, while confirming an image of Israeli aggression that fit neatly into a longer story of antisemitism. The roles were inverted, and I’ve seen that inversion many times since.

Case 2

There was also the recent election of Mayor Zohran Mamdani, on November 4, 2025. At a café, two friends were appalled that I didn’t think Mamdani was tied to any terrorist organization. I had a “bad algorithm,” they said. I laughed — my feed is full of Center events, travel, and flowers. What unsettled me was watching two smart people want something they’d seen online to be true. They called Mamdani violent, pointing to his use of Intifada — a word that can mean peaceful resistance, but to many Jews carries violence. Whatever one makes of his politics, what struck me was how fast disagreement collapsed into something else: his religion became the explanation, offered almost without noticing, for why he couldn’t be trusted. That collapse — from political disagreement to religious suspicion — is Islamophobia’s most ordinary, least examined move. I thought of Jihad, which reads as “holy war” to most non-Muslims but signifies an internal struggle to most practicing Muslims in the US.

 Digital hate speech, misinformation, and disinformation are not new — they sit within a long line of progression in American journalism. As humanities departments shrink and we rely more on social media to navigate research in history, culture, religion, and literature, what happens to the work of the serious journalist, scholar, and thinker?

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are two different types of prejudice with different roots and outcomes, but we see that both hatreds are reemerging in a glaring way. The two hatreds have gone through many iterations; however, this essay focuses on religious racism.  

 We can recall the images of Jews from the death of Christ to Nazi Germany in Der Stürmer, the propaganda magazine published by Julius Streicher, whose imagery has resurfaced today: the Jew who controls and puppeteers the world with strings, the baby-killer of blood libel, and the Dreyfus Affair, the infamous case of a Jewish officer framed as unpatriotic. Islamophobia, on the other hand, is a more modern term but does have a deeper history, reaching into what Edward Said termed “Orientalism” (Said, 1978), reaching back further still, to the era when Muslims were depicted as a bloodthirsty cult adhering to a “false” religion: images of men on camels and horses racing through the desert, swords raised, turbaned, screaming “Allahu Akbar.” These images have resurfaced in the media, now sharpened by fake and misattributed video that weaponizes this extreme racial and religious imagery.

 To understand why these old images resurface together in digital hate, rather than as two separate and unrelated hatreds, it helps to locate both within what scholars have called the racialization of religion. Nasar Meer, introducing a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies devoted to the subject, argues that scholarship on antisemitism and on Islamophobia has too often developed in separate silos, obscuring the extent to which both operate through shared mechanisms of race and racism, even where their targets, tropes, and histories diverge sharply (Meer, 2013). I use the term religious racism here to name that shared apparatus: hatred that treats a religious community as a permanent stereotype, whether or not the individual target is personally observant. As Gilman notes, “National, religious and ethnic definitions of the Jews, both from within and without the communities themselves, demand that there is a constant juggling of labels needed to understand ‘religious’ culture in a self-consciously multicultural world.” (Gilman, 2026, p. 37)

Antisemitism and Islamophobia are not identical hatreds, even as both remain at the forefront of digital hate. Matti Bunzl has argued that the two are not, in fact, the same: Antisemitism, he writes, “was invented in the late 19th century to police the ethnically pure nation-state,” while Islamophobia is instead a modern formation meant to safeguard a unified, secular Europe (Bunzl, 2005, p. 499). The imagery already at hand in this essay bears him out. The puppeteer of Der Stürmer and the blood libel cast the Jew as secretly and conspiratorially powerful — a hidden hand pulling visible strings from behind the scenes. The rider with sword raised, screaming across the desert, casts the Muslim as openly and physically threatening — a visible, embodied danger rather than a hidden one. These are not the same fear, and collapsing them into one would flatten a real difference in how each operates. Yet the question of religious racism still remains in terms of social media and digital hate for both communities depicted as homogeneous, aligned with the onlooker’s stereotypes of Judaism and Islam.

What these two hatreds share is not a common image of the enemy but a common function: both license surveillance, exclusion, suspicion of loyalty, and justification for violence, and both are rewarded by a social-media infrastructure that favors images that are instantly legible, emotionally activating, and detached from context. This shared racializing mechanism, not shared content, is what religious racism names here, and it is what allows the two cases above — and the platforms that carried them — to be read together rather than as coincidence.

A companion concept helps explain how that mechanism gets triggered in the first place. Mark Juergensmeyer’s work on religious othering describes the discursive move by which a religious community is cast as the essential outsider to a national or civilizational “us” — not merely different, but constitutively opposed to it: “an attitude expressed in the common phrase, ‘thank God we’re not like them’” (Juergensmeyer et al., 2022, p. 1). 

Scholars who study this terrain describe a similar dynamic at the level of policy.  Kassra Oskooii’s research tracks how the perception that Muslims are inherently linked to terrorism and violence translates into public support for measures that single out Muslim Americans for scrutiny — from restrictions on gun ownership to mandatory security checks. He points to “a prevailing perception among Americans that Muslims hold values that are particularly incompatible with their own,” and argues that this perception helps normalize forms of surveillance and restriction on religious expression that would otherwise be considered incompatible with American civic life (Harvard Magazine, 2024).

These cases, and countless others circulating across social media, are explosive and have contributed to real-world violence, polarization, and hate. In the two months following the October 7 attacks, the Anti-Defamation League recorded a 337 percent increase in antisemitic incidents compared with the same period the previous year (ADL, 2023), and the Council on American-Islamic Relations recorded a 178 percent increase in bias complaints over the same comparison period (CAIR, 2024).

This pattern is not confined to incident counts. Following the October 7 attacks and the escalation of the war in Gaza, researchers documented a sharp rise in both antisemitic and Islamophobic hate speech online, a rise that tracked closely with the increase in hate crimes against Jewish and Muslim communities, and that was in turn absorbed by white supremacist groups as recruitment material. This kind of speech, the researchers found, imposes “a strong bottleneck on the lexico-semantic diversity of subsequent conversations” — a feedback loop that has helped sustain harassment against both communities well past the initial spike (Rosen & Dale, 2025).

 The social media user is not naïve but is complicit in social media hate (or, if we are lucky, we could be complicit in peacemaking) because as we engage every day, and for some every moment of the day, with viral campaigns from politicians, antisemitism, and Islamophobia, we give them credence. We are saying, “give me more,” especially when we like a post and tell it, “yes, I agree.”

Sabine von Mering, in the same Harvard panel, makes a point worth sitting with: engagement itself, not agreement, is what the algorithm reads and what advertisers pay for, so arguing with hateful content in the comments can amplify it as surely as praising it does. Her recommendation was blunter and more useful than debate: report it, and document it before it disappears (Harvard Magazine, 2024).

 These examples are what we face today: hate and digital media synthesizing with short attention spans and fake videos engineered to draw us toward images of killing, terrorism, dead children, and polarization. This polarization is built on naming the “Jew,” the “Muslim,” or the “other.” It offers a kind of righteousness we can watch from afar: make a comment, send a like, and move on. This has become a dangerous, lazy game. My work sits at the intersection of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and the digital machine has fused itself to the oldest tropes of Jewish control and Muslim barbarism. We have laid down our critical faculties and succumbed to our desires — a Trojan horse we’ve wheeled in without reading the warning.

These desires reflect a deeper problem in the United States’ history of antisemitism and Islamophobia, both increasingly visible in the digital era. Old tropes remain fixed in the minds of viewers raised to believe Jews and Muslims are unwanted immigrants who will somehow take over the nation. Despite limited platform data, antisemitic content remains easy to find across every major social media platform; the Institute for Strategic Dialogue estimates that antisemitic tweets make up more than ten percent of all tweets about Jews and Israel (ISD, 2022, p. 7).

Religious hate speech shifts the focus onto Islam as a belief system, often mocking its practices or associating it with violence and extremism. As in the Mamdani case above, the assumption is that he must have violent roots because he is Muslim — that Muslims “don’t belong here” or “cannot compete with our democracy.” Anti-Muslim rhetoric has surged in recent years, especially toward immigrants, often dehumanizing Muslims as “creatures” or accusing them of “stealing” a country. In the student’s case, the trope inverted: the assumption that Muslims couldn’t commit such crimes, and that Jews must be to blame — the oldest trick in the antisemitic playbook.

How, then, do we engage critically and rely on information rather than sensation? Do we still have the capacity to educate ourselves about Judaism and Islam? It has become harder with research tools that draw us toward surface-level results, and libraries shutting down, amid a culture that resists reading seriously about religion and the humanities. I want to end where I think this essay’s real argument lives: social media does not control you — you control it. That claim only holds if we act on it.

First, it means treating AI as a research tool that can surface sources, chase down a citation, or organize an argument — not a substitute for reading the source itself or sitting with a primary text long enough to notice what it says. Used that way, AI does not replace critical thinking; it restores time that shrinking humanities budgets have taken away. Second, it means treating platforms differently — not as places where a like settles an argument, but as places where pausing before amplifying is itself resistance, since the system depends on speed and our unwillingness to check.

We would do well with some nuance here. Gilman writes that such stereotypes become a problem in the new space of artificial intelligence, “where existing associations in large data sets become too easily translated into prejudicial images so naturalized… that they are no longer understood by their customers as constructed” (Gilman, 2026, p. 58). The same instability runs through Islamophobia and antisemitism: both are moving targets, not fixed diagnoses, which is why no single technical fix will resolve either one.

 So how do we move forward with these forms of religious racism in the digital world? Parents worry in schools; communities remain polarized, especially Jewish and Muslim. We can look at these platforms as places to think critically and build tools that engage younger generations in nuance, history, and religious literacy.

For example, ConnectED, an organization I work with and serve on its advisory board, has created excellent materials to help young people understand how algorithms work (ConnectED, n.d.). We go into schools to discuss Islamophobia and antisemitism and share tools with audiences. For non-Muslims seeking to understand Islam, the Intercultural Networks Group (ING) has developed similarly valuable resources (ING, n.d.).

Next time you click something you “believe,” remember: you have resources online to help you navigate the terrain of digital hate, and a choice about whether AI is a tool for that navigation or one more accelerant. There is space for understanding if you use the greatest tool of all: critical thinking.

Funding Disclosure

None to disclose 

Conflicts of Interest

None to disclose 

Relevant Institutional or Advisory Roles

The author serves on the advisory board of ConnectED.

AI/LLM Disclosure

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