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(The Conversation) — This article includes examples of antisemitic hate speech.

The men accused of carrying out high-profile antisemitic attacks in the United States in recent years shared an important characteristic: They posted hate speech on their social media accounts beforehand.

The FBI said the man who drove his truck into a synagogue outside Detroit in March 2026 posted on Facebook that “Israel is a cancerous/malignant growth” and “Israel is pure evil.” The online footprint of the gunman charged with shooting and killing two Israeli Embassy staffers at the Capital Jewish Museum in May 2025 contained anti-Israel comments. The shooter sentenced to death for killing 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in October 2018 frequently used antisemitic hate speech in his social media.

Hate speech uses feelings, emotions and attitudes that seek to dehumanize individuals or groups. At times, animosity is clear. But it can also take a more hidden form, using code words or terms understood only by like-minded people. Coded hate speech can evade online content censors and recruit people who might balk at more clearly discriminatory speech.

There are an estimated 5.7 billion social media accounts worldwide. Even when hate speech is explicit, content moderators struggle with the volume and deciding how much to monitor users’ speech. There are also alternative – some argue extremist – sites that limit content moderation, including 4chan, BitChute, Gab, GETTR, Parler, Rumble and Truth Social.

We are a group of interdisciplinary researchers at American University who study the rhetorical strategies behind overt and coded hate speech on social media. Our Unmasking Antisemitism project uses artificial intelligence, qualitative analysis and survey experiments to develop studies and tools to detect both types of terms. This article discusses examples of antisemitic hate speech that are disturbing but illustrate types of terms and how to counter this dangerous influence.

Two types of hate speech

To understand the difference between direct and coded hate speech, consider shooter Robert Bowers’ language before the Tree of Life massacre. On Gab, he used older, virulently antisemitic slurs such as “kike,” a “highly offensive term used to insult and denigrate people of Jewish faith or ethnicity that is widely considered to be a form of hate speech,” according to the American Jewish Committee.

A fence outside the Tree of Life synagogue, site of the 2018 mass killing, holds artwork from schoolchildren on April 21, 2003, in Pittsburgh, Pa.
Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

Other extremist terms are just as offensive but less obvious, such as “oven dodger,” which Bowers also used on Gab: a reference to how German Nazis systematically exterminated Jews during the Holocaust. Like overt phrases, coded terms often draw on older, well-researched antisemitic tropes, such as “Jews have too much power,” repacking them in new words and phrases.

They can also have double meanings, which makes hate speech harder to moderate. The original definition of “globalist” refers to a person who believes that policies should be planned with the whole world’s interest in mind rather than just one country. But globalist also has an antisemitic connotation.

As the American Jewish Committee “Translate Hate” glossary puts it, antisemites often use “globalist” to disparage Jews, promoting a conspiracy theory that “Jewish people do not have allegiance to their countries of origin, like the United States, but to some worldwide order – like a global economy or international political system – that will enhance their control over the world’s banks, governments and media.” This repackages long-standing Nazi and Soviet propaganda about Jews based on historical antisemitic tropes.

How terms develop

In the early days of social media, companies responded to criticism of the more hateful content on their platforms by using a combination of AI and human analysis to moderate content. The automated tools use natural language processing to analyze context, detect slurs and flag content. Human workers analyze more complex language, such as irony and slang.

Content moderators work at a Facebook office in Austin, Texas, in 2019.
Ilana Panich-Linsman for The Washington Post via Getty Images

But keeping up with the volume of posts is challenging, especially for more subtle hate speech. Our team’s goals are to identify coded antisemitic terms, understand how they develop, and create technology to track them.

The key is to understand that hate terms have a life cycle. Some take a path toward more public use, while others disappear.

New terms tend to emerge from a small set of people considered leaders or influencers in antisemitic circles online. In some cases, their communities adopt the term and normalize it; other times, it’s dropped from use.

The term “cultural Marxism,” which has its origins in the antisemitic belief that Jewish intellectuals seek to subvert Western culture, was adopted into wider use. “Jew jab,” on the other hand – a white supremacist conspiracy theory claiming that COVID-19 vaccines were a Jewish plot to harm people – soon disappeared.

Tracking hate

In our initial pilot project we started with 46 antisemitic terms, both overt and coded, from the American Jewish Committee’s glossary. We entered the terms in Pyrra, now called Alert Media – a private software company that allows users to scrape posts from a collection of social media sites.

Researchers trained in definitions of antisemitism, historical antisemitic tropes and hate speech detection identified 24 additional terms. White supremacists use the symbol “1488,” for example, to identify each other. The first part, “14,” references the “14-word” slogan of white supremacist leader David Lane. The “88” stands for “Heil Hitler,” based on “h” being the eighth letter of the alphabet. Other coded terms are less well known, such as “DOTR” or “Day of the Rope,” a reference to the 1978 book “The Turner Diaries,” which was written under a pseudonym by neo-Nazi William Pierce.

To track which coded terms have spread to the general public, we scrutinized mainstream media content and ran survey experiments to see whether people recognized them. We also developed an AI software tool designed to automatically track how coded language evolves. The app is trained on data from Pyrra and learns to identify new antisemitic terms based on the context in which they appear.

First, the app identifies distinctive terms based on how frequently they appear in each post, versus how rare they are on the platform in general. To find out whether these terms have an antisemitic connotation, we encode their context, such as other words in the post, and calculate whether it is close to the context of already known antisemitic terminology. Some of the terms our app has identified are explicit, while others are coded.

This approach can also be applied to hate speech targeted at other groups, such as Latinos, LGBTQ+ people and women. We aim to create a tool kit that can be distributed to nonprofit groups, think tanks and policymakers considering legislative efforts to curb hate speech.

Humans and machines

Given the massive number of posts on social media every day, our work illustrates how detecting new hate speech requires an interdisciplinary group of researchers working with machines.

One academic discipline working independently is too siloed, and humans alone can’t handle the scale. But machines alone can’t understand sophisticated human language, slang or context.

History shows that at every moment of profound technological change in our communication systems, incidents targeting Jews or other minority groups go up dramatically. This era’s technical innovation is unprecedented – but unfortunately, hate speech now travels around the globe almost instantly. Technology may be part of the problem, but its immense power can be harnessed to create a solution.

(Wendy Melillo, Associate Professor of Journalism, American University School of Communication. Jeff Gill, Professor of Mathematics and Statistics, American University. Nathalie Japkowicz, Professor of Computer Science, American University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

(The Conversation) — Many Muslim Americans are fearful following a shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego that left three worshipers dead. Investigators reportedly found hate speech and anti-Islamic writing inside the vehicle of the suspected shooters, who killed themselves soon after the attack.

The director of the Islamic Center, Taha Hassane, condemned the attack while also encouraging individuals to respond with tolerance and love. “All of us are responsible for spreading the culture of tolerance, the culture of love,” he said, while lamenting the conditions that had led to such violence.

The attack comes just one week before the celebration of Eid al-Adha, an annual festival celebrating the Prophet Abraham’s – Ibrahim in Arabic – willingness to sacrifice his son in obedience to God, and the conclusion of the annual Hajj – the pilgrimage to Mecca, one of the five pillars of Islam.

It also comes on the heels of ongoing tensions in the Middle East and increasing political rhetoric in the United States. Republicans in Congress held hearings during the week of May 13, 2026 titled “Sharia-Free America.” This reflects a long-standing anti-Muslim trope that portrays Muslims as invaders who want to impose sharia – Islamic religious law – on all Americans. Many Muslim Americans are concerned because the rise of anti-Muslim bigotry among politicians has been mostly met with silence.

Muslim Americans have been warning that the increased rhetoric targeting Islam and Muslims endangers their community. As a scholar who studies Islamophobia and its impact on Muslim Americans, I have observed how the war with Iran intensified anti-Muslim sentiment online. A study by the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found that in the first six days of the conflict, the average number of Islamophobic posts on X jumped from an average of 2,000 posts daily to 6,000.

Research consistently shows that negative portrayals of Muslims shape public attitudes toward them and can lead to increased discrimination, psychological harm and hate crimes like the shooting in San Diego.

Increase in Islamophobia

Islamophobia in the United States tends to surge during global conflicts, political campaigns and terrorist attacks. Human Rights First, an organization that works to promote human rights in the U.S. and abroad, documented surges in Islamophobia in 2015 following the Syrian refugee crisis, when a large number of people were displaced. That same year the 2015 attacks in Paris and shooting in San Bernardino, California, intensified public anxiety about terrorism. A surge in crimes against Muslims followed.

Islamophobic rhetoric in the U.S., in which Muslims were often framed as a security threat, intensified during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and continued into his first presidency. Burton Speakman, a scholar of digital media, and I found an increasing acceptance of such rhetoric among the political right in social media posts from 2016-19.

Social media posts and comments showed an increasing use of dehumanizing language toward Muslims. In a study I conducted in 2020, a majority of 830 Muslim Americans reported encountering the most Islamophobic content on Facebook, followed by Twitter and Instagram. This shift was also reflected in the language and coverage of Islam in right-wing media, which often portrayed Muslims as invaders wanting to impose sharia and as a drain on social welfare.

Mainstream media can also amplify negative depictions of Muslims by often discussing Islam within the context of terrorism and portraying Muslims more negatively than other racial, ethnic or religious minority groups.

Hate crimes tend to increase alongside Islamophobic rhetoric. During 2016, a period with high rates of Islamophobic rhetoric, there were 307 reported incidents – the highest recorded number since immediately following 9/11. The numbers dropped in 2017 but were followed by an increase in 2024 with the start of the Israel-Hamas war. That year, 288 anti-Muslim hate crimes were reported.

A 2025 poll found that 63% of American Muslims reported experiencing religious discrimination, with many reporting at least one such incident every year since 2016.

Mental health of Muslim Americans

The cumulative effects of Islamophobia have an impact an American Muslims’ mental health and access to care.

Higher rates of depression among Muslim Americans are associated with Islamophobia.
triloks/ E+ via Getty images

Numerous studies since 9/11 link the high rates of discrimination experienced by the Muslim American
community to higher rates of depression. Experiences of discrimination also lead some Muslim Americans to believe they are not viewed as being American.

Thirty-one percent of participants in my 2020 study described the impact of social media on their mental health. Many said they avoided displaying their Muslim identity in social media posts, supporting a Muslim political candidate on social media, or even sharing religious content or videos. Some just withdrew – 27% deactivated or deleted their social media accounts.

In addition, many Muslims reported feeling discouraged from seeking both physical and psychological treatment from non-Muslim providers. This leads Muslim Americans to significantly underutilize available services compared to other ethnic and religious minority groups.

A 2015 study found that nearly one-third of Muslim Americans reported experiencing discrimination in health care settings, which has an impact on their trust in providers. The majority reported rude treatment by providers, insensitivity regarding modesty requirements, or having their pain disregarded. One participant in that study said: “Going into a surgery, health care providers didn’t recognize the importance of me keeping my hijab on and wanting most of my body covered.”

In my 2023 study, a number of participants described personal experiences with mental health professionals who seemed not to see them as individuals beyond their religious affiliation. One participant described a provider as being “quick to attribute problems” to religion or culture. “I worry about them stereotyping and end up feeling as if I’m on the defense,” this participant said.

My most recent study, conducted in 2024, which is currently under review, asked 325 Muslim Americans who had used any psychological services about their health-seeking behavior: 56% said they were worried about provider bias; 57% were worried about being misunderstood.

Following Trump’s travel ban targeting several Muslim countries in 2017, a study conducted by researchers at the Yale School of Public Health found that many Muslim Americans skipped their primary care appointments. At the same time, their visits to the emergency room went up.

Addressing the challenges

In response, a number of initiatives have emerged at the local and national levels.

One approach involves increasing mental health literacy within Muslim communities and creating networks of mental health professionals working with Muslim clients.

For example, mental health professionals and community leaders are working to increase mental health literacy both digitally and through in-person education. Muslim community members learn about symptoms of mental health disorders through training, such as Mental Health First Aid. Online directories of Muslim mental health providers have also been created.

Another approach involves training mental health professionals. A team at Stanford University has created a six-part training module that provides therapists with knowledge of religious norms and an opportunity to reflect on their own possible biases.

Finally, Muslim researchers and providers have begun to develop therapies and resources that integrate Muslim beliefs and spiritual approaches with treatment. These include psychotherapy that is inspired by the Quran, the teachings of the prophet and spiritual practices such as self-reflection, prayer and mindfulness.

A vulnerable community

The war with Iran has fueled an increase in anti-Muslim rhetoric that has increasingly spilled into political discourse. In February 2026, for example, U.S. Rep. Randy Fine of Florida posted on X that “the choice between dogs and Muslims is not a difficult one.” In another post he wrote, “We need more Islamophobia, not less.” Similarly, U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill of Texas called for stopping the entry of “Muslims immigrating to America.”

The shooting at the Islamic Center of San Diego has deepened fear of harassment and violence among an already vulnerable community.

Muslim Americans can often feel powerless in the face of such hostility. Greater public awareness, stronger advocacy and efforts to address the mental health impacts of anti-Muslim hatred are critical for a community that already feels vulnerable.

This is an updated version of an article first published on April 17, 2026.

(Anisah Bagasra, Associate Professor of Psychology, Kennesaw State University. The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)

ROME (AP) — A calendar featuring close-ups of young, handsome men in priestly attire has been a perennial Rome souvenir for the last two decades — but few, it seems, are actually men of the cloth.

Giovanni Galizia has been the cover shot for the so-called sexy priest calendar for many of the last 23 editions. In the same photo used year after year, Galizia wears a clerical collar and flashes an enigmatic smile worthy of the Mona Lisa against the granite wall of a church in his native Palermo.

“It was the smile of an embarrassed kid, because I saw all my friends in front of me laughing out loud because I was dressed like I was a priest,” Galizia told The Associated Press during an interview Wednesday in his Verona living room.

For Galizia, the shoot was a lark that left no mark on his life, until a story in the Rome daily La Repubblica this week revealed that the “sexy priest calendar” could be more accurately called “the fake priest calendar,” drawing nationwide attention.

The calendar is not affiliated with the Vatican, which declined to comment.

A popular souvenir with 12 black-and-white portraits

Now a 39-year-old flight attendant for a Spanish airline, Galizia was just 17 years old when mutual friends put him in touch with photographer Piero Pazzi, who has also created a calendar featuring Venetian gondoliers and has founded museums in Budapest and Montenegro on the history of cats.

Officially named Calendario Romano, each edition features 12 black-and-white portraits of men mostly in clerical attire — many of which are recycled year after year. Galizia only knew one of the other subjects, a French man who also was not a priest.

Pazzi told the AP that at least one-third of those pictured in the already released 2027 calendar are actually priests but provided no details.

Galizia said he has never been stopped on the street, though his cousins once gave the calendar to their grandmother as a gift, “and they all died laughing.”

The calendar was intended as art, not deception

Galizia sees the photographs depicting priests as part of an artistic tradition, noting that no one watching a TV drama involving priests believes they are actually played by clergy.

“Of course, it winks a bit at the dynamic between the sacred and the profane, because it is clear that seeing a world that is distant and in some ways so lofty as the ecclesiastical world, with such a fresh-faced young man, creates a kind of dissonance,” he said.

But he also said he doesn’t understand why the black-and-white close-ups have been interpreted as sexy. Pazzi also said that was not the point.

“There’s a tendency to confuse what is beautiful with what is sensual, because nowadays, especially in today’s world, which is quite sexualized, beauty is expressed only through sensuality,” Galizia said.

“That said, I appreciate the observation and take it as a compliment — because managing to be sexy in a priest’s collar is no small feat.”

It has the blessing of at least one real priest

Pazzi won’t say how many of the Roman calendars have been sold — but estimates several thousand a year. While Pazzi says he receives royalties, Galizia, who signed a release form when the photo was taken, said he has never sought payment.

The calendar sells for around 8 euros (around $9.30) in shops that surround the Vatican and crowd Rome’s historic center. One shop clerk, Hassam Mohammad, said he sells a handful of them every day.

Pazzi includes a page of information about the Vatican in the calendar, but its production is independent and unrelated to the Holy See.

A priest from South Korea walking near the Vatican this week said that the calendar is well known in his home country, especially among young people who view the calendar with humor.

“They often think priests are stiff and distant,” said the priest, who identified himself informally as Father Domenico. “But looking at this calendar, they think priests are more familiar, and priests can be funny. I think in Korea this calendar is very famous, and it is OK.”

____

Barry reported from Verona, Italy. Giada Zampano in Rome and Nicole Winfield in Vatican City contributed.

JERUSALEM (AP) — Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has remained in power for most of the past 17 years due in part to a tight alliance with ultra-Orthodox religious parties.

But that alliance is tearing apart his governing coalition and proving to be another major liability for the long-serving Israeli leader as the country heads to elections later this year. The Oct. 7, 2023, attack — and the inconclusive wars that have followed — are also weighing on him.

After 2 1/2 years of active fighting in multiple countries, much of it involving reservists, many Israelis are tired of a longstanding system that has allowed ultra-Orthodox men to skip military service. That anger has spread to Netanyahu’s own base.

The ultra-Orthodox are meanwhile furious at his failure to legalize their exemptions. They withdrew their support for the coalition two weeks ago, leading to an initial vote to dissolve parliament, known as the Knesset, on Wednesday.

That set in motion a process that could move elections up from October to September.

Here’s a closer look.

The clock is ticking

Netanyahu is still trying to pass a bill that would legalize the exemptions and fulfill a promise to his religious partners, but that appears to be a long shot given the strident opposition of many within his own coalition.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sharren Haskel, who served for three years in a combat unit and is a vocal supporter of Netanyahu, said she was among at least seven members of the coalition who will not support the draft bill, rendering it impassable.

“The ultra-Orthodox are trying to extort us. It’s immoral. It’s not fair,” said Haskel, who wore her military uniform at the dissolution vote on Wednesday to highlight her opposition and highlight her own service.

Two major ultra-Orthodox parties deserted Netanyahu earlier this month after he told them he did not expect to be able to pass the exemptions bill. That left his coalition without a parliamentary majority, and is one of the main reasons for the bill to dissolve the Knesset.

“He made a promise to his most loyal allies in the coalition, and he could not deliver, he kept postponing,” said Shmuel Rosner, a senior fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute, a Jerusalem think tank.

Yitzhak Pindrus, a lawmaker from one of the factions, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that it has no plans to return to the coalition.

“We need the draft bill,” he said.

The ultra-Orthodox can make or break Netanyahu’s coalition

Israel’s political landscape is highly fragmented, and no one party has ever won a majority in the 120-member Knesset.

Instead, parties must build alliances to cobble together a majority, which often involves bargaining that gives smaller parties outsized influence.

The ultra-Orthodox currently have 18 seats in the Knesset, a similar number to previous years, but have long been indispensable to Netanyahu. In exchange for his support for government subsidies and the draft exemptions, they have stood by him through regional crises and longstanding corruption allegations.

Netanyahu has long relied on “automatic support” from the ultra-Orthodox, said Gilad Malach, an expert on the ultra-Orthodox at the Israel Democracy Institute, a research group in Jerusalem.

That support helped Netanyahu remain in power through the worst attack in Israel’s history.

The coalition, which also includes ultra-nationalist parties, “was much more stable than I ever imagined,” said Rosner. “Maybe it’s because they realized in a new election, they’re going to get defeated, and that’s why they stuck together.”

Imploding the coalition from within

If Netanyahu somehow passes some form of the draft exemption bill, it could dramatically alter the electoral map. It would push large sectors of the population, who have previously supported Netanyahu but are buckling under hundreds of days of reserve duty, to vote for rival parties that promise equal service, Malach said.

Netanyahu appears to stand little chance of remaining prime minister after October’s elections without ultra-Orthodox support. And he is probably their only hope of a bill that would avoid mandatory enlistment coming up for discussion in the next government.

But sticking with the ultra-Orthodox risks harming Netanyahu’s standing with the broader public, leaving him in a bind as the country heads toward elections.

Why the ultra-Orthodox reject military service

Most Jewish men are required to serve nearly three years of military service, followed by years of reserve duty. Jewish women serve two mandatory years.

Each year, roughly 13,000 ultra-Orthodox men reach the conscription age of 18, but less than 10% enlist, according to a parliamentary committee.

Faced with a severe shortages of soldiers, the military is looking to extend the period of mandatory service.

The ultra-Orthodox, who make up roughly 13% of Israeli society and are the fastest growing sector, have traditionally received exemptions if they are studying full-time in religious seminaries. The exemptions date back to the birth of the state in 1948, when a small number of students sought to revive the Jewish scholarship system after it was decimated by the Holocaust.

Those exemptions — and the government stipends many seminary students receive up to the age of 26 — have infuriated many Israelis. Israel is currently maintaining a simultaneous military presence in Gaza, Lebanon, and Syria, in addition to fighting a war with Iran, which has stretched its robust military to the breaking point.

The Supreme Court said the exemptions were illegal in 2017, but repeated extensions and government delay tactics have left them in place.

Among Israel’s Jewish majority, mandatory military service is largely seen as a melting pot and rite of passage. Many in the insular ultra-Orthodox community fear that military service would expose young people to secular influences.