Why are Jewish Groups Facilitating Muslim Mass Migration?

We're asked to believe the people talking about Amalek and "War with Gaza" are facilitating Muslim mass migration out of a deep commitment to charity and their love of the Muslim people. We don't.

Over 1,100 American rabbis just signed a letter organized by the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS) demanding that the United States government stop enforcing its own immigration laws. The letter, released in advance of HIAS’s annual “Refugee Shabbat” and signed by clergy from 45 states, quotes the Christian Old Testament, invokes the memory of the Holocaust (obviously), and calls on leaders not to “wrong or oppress the stranger.” Rabbi Jill Jacobs of T’ruah declared that Jewish tradition could not be clearer about the obligation to welcome the sojourner. Rabbi Rick Jacobs of the Union for Reform Judaism called it “a core Jewish obligation rooted in Torah, imprinted on Jewish souls through the many migrations of Jewish history.”

Meanwhile, in Minnesota, 26 Jewish organizations and synagogues jointly condemned ICE enforcement operations in the Twin Cities, calling the situation volatile and expressing deep concern for immigrant communities being disrupted by federal agents doing their jobs. The Reform, Conservative, and Reconstructionist movements piled on with a joint statement condemning what they called the violence of immigration enforcement. Jewish communal leaders told eJewishPhilanthropy that this is not simply a debate about immigration policy but a matter of so-called “state violence against innocent people.” By “innocent people,” they mean people breaking our immigration laws.

The humanitarian framing is clean, emotionally resonant, and has been road-tested across decades of press releases. Jews were once strangers. Jews once fled persecution. Therefore, Jews advocate for the stranger. The narrative writes itself, and the mainstream press reproduces it faithfully every single time without asking the obvious follow-up question. “Since when do you care about Muslims?”

Also, another question might be, “Do these Jewish organizations actually believe that a Somali Muslim refugee is their spiritual equal, deserving of sacrificial advocacy rooted in genuine love for their fellow man?” Because if the answer to that question is yes, it represents the single most dramatic gap between a religious community’s public statements and its actual theological tradition in the history of organized religion.

THE THEOLOGY THEY DON’T PUT IN THE PRESS RELEASES

The Law of Moses does indeed command Israel to love the stranger, and these rabbis are not wrong that the text says what it says. But the Torah was given to a specific covenant people governing a specific national territory, and the rabbinical tradition that developed over the following two millennia built an elaborate legal and theological framework around exactly what obligations Jews owe to non-Jews, and that framework is considerably less warm than the HIAS press office suggests.

The Tanya, the foundational text of Chabad-Lubavitch and one of the most influential works in the entire rabbinical tradition, teaches that the souls of Jews and gentiles are categorically different in nature and divine origin. The Jewish soul contains a divine spark of a fundamentally different quality than anything present in the gentile soul. That’s the operative theology of the largest and most politically connected Jewish outreach organization in the world, with 3500 emissaries in nearly every country on earth. The Talmud’s tractate Sanhedrin and numerous other passages establish a detailed legal framework governing Jewish obligations toward non-Jews that does not remotely resemble the universalist humanitarian ethic these rabbis claim is driving their immigration advocacy. In Jewish teaching, the concept is called mipnei eivah, meaning “for the sake of avoiding enmity,” meaning that Jews are told to help their non-Jewish neighbor not because his soul is equal to theirs before God (it isn’t), but because failing to do so would provoke hostility toward the Jewish community. That is a fundamentally different moral logic than the one advertised to the press. It’s not done out of genuine human compassion, but to maintain good relations.

The theological tradition they operate within does not support the universalist humanitarian reading they are publicly advancing, and the organizations coordinating this advocacy have institutional histories that tell a very different story from the one in the press releases. So, if the theology does not actually generate genuine love for the Muslim immigrant, and if Jews and Muslims have a fourteen-hundred-year history of mutual hostility that makes the current Jewish enthusiasm for Muslim resettlement genuinely puzzling, then what exactly is going on?

HIAS AND THE REFUGEE PIPELINE

HIAS was founded in 1881 to rescue Eastern European Jews from pogrom country. For its first eighty years, it did exactly that, moving Jews out of dangerous places and into safer ones, lobbying immigration law on behalf of Jewish refugees, and building the political relationships in Washington that would prove enormously useful later.

Today, HIAS operates in twenty countries, partners with over two dozen American resettlement organizations (most of them doing exclusively Muslim migration from the Middle East), lobbies Congress to increase Arab refugee admission caps, files amicus briefs in Muslim immigration lawsuits, organizes protests against border enforcement against illegal immigrants, and runs a legal arm that sues the federal government when it tries to pause migration from states that sponsor terrorism. In 2023, HIAS collected $55 million in U.S. government grants, generated $88 million in total revenue, and still spent $131 million, resulting in a $43 million deficit that forced the layoff of 12 percent of its American staff. When Trump suspended the refugee program in early 2025, HIAS joined a federal lawsuit in Seattle within weeks to block it. The organization is simultaneously a charity, a lobbying operation, a litigation shop, and a protest organizer, all running on a combination of private donations and taxpayer-funded federal grants, and all pointed in exactly one direction.

The clients HIAS is currently resettling are not Jews fleeing pogroms. They are Syrians, Afghans, Somalis, and Sudanese, all of whom are overwhelmingly Muslim. HIAS runs what it calls “Refugee Shabbat,” an annual event now co-sponsored by twenty national Jewish organizations, designed to mobilize Jewish congregations across the country in direct support of refugee resettlement. And eleven hundred rabbis just signed a letter to kick off this year’s edition.

OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS

George Soros founded Open Society Foundations (OSF) in 1993 and has since disbursed over $24 billion through it, making it one of the largest private grant-making operations on the planet. OSF describes itself as the world’s largest funder of independent groups working for justice, equity, and human rights. Its migration and asylum portfolio funds legal aid organizations for migrants in Greece, Hungary, Serbia, Croatia, and across Western Europe, media organizations in Spain and Italy that shape the public narrative around asylum seekers, and advocacy groups in the United States that make immigration restriction politically toxic wherever they operate.

During the 2018 Central American migrant caravans, multiple OSF-funded organizations, including Pueblo Sin Fronteras, the Vera Institute of Justice, and the National Immigration Law Center, were materially involved in facilitating, transporting, or legally shielding the movement of migrants toward the U.S. border. Soros himself, in published op-eds and interviews, has described national borders as “obstacles to human flourishing” and mass migration as a moral necessity. The fact-checking apparatus (which Soros himself funds, like PolitFact and the International Fact-Checking Network, which owns or subsidizes most of the others) labored to argue that Soros did not technically fund the caravans. Literally everyone on the planet knew otherwise. What nobody disputed was that his money flowed through the organizations that ran the operation, as if through a human laundering scheme.

In Europe, the pattern is identical. OSF funds the organizations that monitor border enforcement, challenge deportation orders, provide legal representation to asylum seekers, and pressure national governments to maintain open reception policies. When Viktor Orban moved to restrict migration into Hungary, OSF was the primary institutional backer of the opposition. When the Greek government attempted to tighten its border procedures, OSF-funded organizations were in court within weeks.

The geographic footprint of OSF’s migration work traces the exact outline of the demographic transformation of Western Europe over the past two decades. What a remarkable coincidence, right? You could overlay the two maps, and they would match like a hand in a glove, which is either the most extraordinary accident in the history of philanthropy or it is exactly what it looks like.

THE AMERICAN JEWISH COMMITTEE

The American Jewish Committee (AJC) began its campaign for open immigration to the United States in 1914. The Jews have been at this longer than most countries have had functioning governments, and they have never once lost interest, taken a sabbatical, or decided the project was finished. They ran that campaign continuously for fifty-one years until the Hart-Celler Act passed in 1965, demolishing the national-origins quota system that had kept American immigration demographically stable for forty years.

The ADL’s contribution to the demolition was a book called “A Nation of Immigrants,” presented to the public as a thoughtful meditation by Senator John F. Kennedy on America’s noble immigrant heritage, but it was actually a project of the Anti-Defamation League, ghostwritten by a Kennedy staffer named Myer Feldman, and deployed as moral artillery against the quota system. HIAS lobbied the bill directly and received personal thank-you letters from Senate sponsors when it passed.

Since 1965, the AJC has never once eased its foot off the gas. It partners with interfaith coalitions to advance asylum initiatives, advocates before Congress for increased refugee caps, and treats every attempt at immigration restriction as a five-alarm moral emergency requiring the immediate mobilization of every institutional resource it possesses. After Trump’s 2017 travel restrictions, the AJC was among the first and loudest Jewish organizations howling about what they called a Muslim ban. After Trump’s 2025 refugee suspension, Jewish organizations mobilized to oppose it legally, politically, and in the press faster than almost any other sector of American civic life. Sixty years after Hart-Celler, they are still in the game, still throwing elbows, and still acting like the whole project might collapse if they take a week off.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) deserves its own paragraph because its particular contribution to this operation is more elegant than anything HIAS or AJC is doing. The ADL’s game is not money or lobbying. It is narrative control. The ADL owns the definition of acceptable public discourse on immigration, which means that anyone who discusses the documented Jewish organizational role in mass migration too loudly will find themselves described in ADL materials as trafficking in antisemitic tropes, featured in an ADL report on hate, and quietly flagged to every mainstream media outlet that treats ADL press releases as authoritative. Build the pipeline, then make discussing the pipeline a thought crime. It is a remarkably efficient two-step, and they have been running it for decades without anyone in mainstream media noticing that the organization doing the fact-labeling has a substantial financial stake in the facts not being examined too closely.

JEWISH FAMILY SERVICES

The national organizations provide political cover, legal firepower, and federal grant relationships. But Jewish Family Services affiliates provide the boots on the ground in American cities, doing the unglamorous operational work of turning refugee arrivals into permanent residents. Jewish Family Service of San Diego is one of the largest refugee resettlement agencies on the West Coast. Jewish Family Service of Cleveland runs resettlement operations across Northeast Ohio. Jewish Family Service of Minneapolis is embedded in the Twin Cities community, which is currently the ground zero of the national debate over ICE enforcement operations, which is not a coincidence that should slide past without comment. Do you remember how, only a couple of weeks ago, a man named Ayman Mohamad Ghazali rammed his pickup, filled with explosives, into Temple Israel in Michigan and died in a shootout with security guards after four members of his family died in Israeli airstrikes? There were three Jewish Family Service resettlement organizations within a short distance from his home.

These local JFS affiliates are professional social service organizations with government contracts, licensed caseworkers, and established relationships with federal and state agencies. They provide housing placement, employment assistance, English language instruction, legal aid, and the full integration service package that transforms a fresh arrival into a permanent fixture of your city. Their clients, like HIAS’s clients, are overwhelmingly Muslim.

ISRAAID

IsraAID is a Tel Aviv-based NGO that describes itself as a disaster relief organization, which is technically accurate in the same way that calling a surgeon a man with sharp knives is. It operates across the Middle East and North Africa and has been present at most major refugee staging points feeding the European migration pipeline. During the peak of the 2015 Syrian refugee crisis, IsraAID workers were on the Greek islands processing the boats arriving from Turkey, providing immediate assistance to migrants before they moved into the European resettlement system. IsraAID has operated in Jordan, Lebanon, South Sudan, Uganda, and a roster of other locations where displaced populations accumulate before heading toward Western destinations.

The organization relies on funding and political connections closer to the Israeli government than those of purely humanitarian organizations, raising questions about its institutional purpose that go somewhat beyond disaster relief. An Israeli NGO with government-adjacent funding that stations aid workers at the precise chokepoints of the European migration pipeline is a very specific kind of organization doing a very specific kind of work, and the fact that it has received roughly a fraction of the scrutiny applied to, say, a random conservative think tank is a testament to how well the narrative control apparatus is functioning.

HISTORY MATTERS

The charge that Jewish organizations tend to act in Jewish interests rather than the interests of whatever country they happen to be operating in is not something cooked up by unhinged people on the internet. It is one of the oldest recurring observations in Western history. When Napoleon emancipated French Jews in 1806, he immediately convened a formal assembly of Jewish leaders and made them publicly swear that French law came before Jewish Halakha, or Temu-Sharia. Napoleon apparently thought the question of where Jewish institutional loyalty resided was worth putting in writing. That wasn’t because Jews were notoriously loyal to their country.

The Dreyfus Affair in 1890s France blew up an entire society around the question of whether a Jewish military officer’s loyalties ran to France or somewhere else. Dreyfus turned out to be innocent, but the accusation landed with explosive force because it plugged directly into a suspicion that had been humming in European political culture for a very long time. Stalin spent his final years convinced that Jewish doctors were conspiring to assassinate the Soviet leadership on behalf of foreign interests, and it wasn’t a hairbrained conspiracy. Hitler built an entire propaganda empire on the claim that Jewish financiers and intellectuals had stabbed Germany in the back during World War I. The specific accusations varied, but the underlying theme was consistent across centuries and continents, and accusers who had nothing else in common.

In 1996, a group was organized by the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies, an Israeli-American think tank, and produced what was called the Clean Break Document. It was written specifically at the request of incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. It recommended removing Saddam Hussein from power and fragmenting Arab states hostile to Israel. Six years later, those same men were the NeoCon establishment in the Bush Administration, and Saddam Hussein was being removed from power. Is that a coincidence, or are Israeli think-tank veterans setting America’s war policies?

Now, before anyone sprains something reaching for the word “antisemitism,” the point here is not that every version of this accusation across history was necessarily accurate, but the rhetorical move that treats any examination of actual documented Jewish disloyalty as equivalent to medieval blood libel has been thoroughly road-tested and is reliably effective at ending conversations. If we can avoid the tendency to call us antisemites every five minutes, we need to ask why Jewish groups are flooding their host countries with Muslim immigrants.

ONE-WAY TRAFFIC OUT OF THE MIDDLE EAST

Since 1948, Israel has served as the world’s most reliable source of displaced people, and the flow has run almost exclusively in one direction. The 1948 Arab-Israeli War produced roughly 750,000 Palestinian refugees in its first year alone. The 1967 Six-Day War displaced another 300,000 Palestinians and reshuffled the map of the region in ways that have been producing downstream instability ever since. The 1982 Lebanese Civil War, in which Israel’s invasion accelerated an already catastrophic conflict, sent another wave of Lebanese and Palestinian refugees toward Europe and the Americas.

The 2003 Iraq War, fought at Israel’s incessant requests, ranging from endless AIPAC lobbying to Op-Eds advocating for the war in major American newspapers by Benjamin Netanyahu, to falsified intelligence from Mossad, was very much Israel’s war, with America as its proxy. And it destroyed the most stable secular Arab government in the region, produced an estimated 4 million Iraqi refugees, the largest displacement in the Middle East since 1948. Then came the Syrian Civil War beginning in 2011, which generated over 6 million refugees who left the country entirely, with the majority eventually flowing toward Europe through Turkey and Greece. Lebanon’s repeated hammering by Israeli military operations across five decades has produced one of the highest per-capita refugee and emigration rates of any country on earth. The Lebanese diaspora today outnumbers the population of Lebanon itself. Gaza has been under blockade since 2007 and has now been substantially depopulated by the current war. The pattern across seventy-five years is not complicated. Conflict ignites, and populations move west.

The receiving end of that pipeline is Western Europe and North America, and the political consequences have been reshaping those societies for a generation. Germany absorbed over a million arrivals in 2015 alone, primarily Syrians and Afghans. Sweden went from one of the most ethnically homogeneous countries in Europe to one of the most diverse within a single generation. France has the largest Muslim population in Western Europe, drawn heavily from North Africa and the Levant, communities whose presence traces directly back to the colonial disruptions and post-1948 conflicts that made their home regions uninhabitable or simply undesirable.

The United States resettled tens of thousands of Iraqis after the 2003 invasion, tens of thousands of Afghans after 2021, and has maintained a steady intake of Middle Eastern refugees through the formal resettlement program for decades. None of this happened in a vacuum, and none of it was inevitable. It required wars to generate the displaced populations, functional refugee pipelines to move them, legal frameworks to receive them, and organizational infrastructure to settle them.

THE MIDDLE EAST’S BROOM

In 2013, a French-speaking Haredi rabbi named David Touitou, based in Ashdod, Israel, and affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, delivered a sermon that has been circulating in clipped form ever since. The quote in question, translated from French, goes roughly like this: “The Messiah will only come once Europe and Christianity are totally destroyed. So is it good news that Islam is invading Europe? It is excellent news. Islam is the broom of Israel.”

He was not speaking in code or being deliberately provocative for effect. He was explaining his eschatological framework in the same conversational tone a Baptist preacher uses to talk about the rapture. In his theological reading, drawn from the rabbinical identification of Edom with Christian Europe, the demographic conquest of Western Christendom by Islam is a precondition for the arrival of the Jewish Messiah. Muslim migration into Europe is therefore not a crisis to be lamented but a divine instrument to be welcomed.

The clip has been viewed millions of times and dismissed by the mainstream as a fringe position representing nobody but one excitable rabbi with a YouTube channel. That dismissal would carry more weight if Touitou’s framing were not so precisely consistent with the eschatological framework embedded in the Tanya, the Zohar, and the broader rabbinical tradition. He did not invent the theology. He just said it out loud in front of a camera.

So, when HIAS’s president talks about welcoming the stranger as a core Jewish obligation, he is offering one theological frame, and it’s pure heartfelt charity and love for Muslims. When Rabbi Touitou talks about Islam as Israel’s broom, he is offering a different frame that seems slightly more tethered to reality. Which frame better explains the Jewish organizations that have spent a century building the pipeline that moved Ayman Ghazali from Mashghara, Lebanon to Dearborn Heights, Michigan, where he sat in a synagogue parking lot for two hours before driving his truck through the front doors?

WE NEED ANSWERS

Somebody needs to start asking these questions out loud and demanding actual answers, rather than a boilerplate press release about welcoming the stranger. Jewish organizations are simultaneously funding Muslim resettlement into Western cities, lobbying against every mechanism that would slow that resettlement down, and suing the federal government when it tries to pause the program, while Israeli politicians talk openly about Amalek, while rabbinical authorities call for the total defeat of Gaza (instead of Hamas), and while Chabad-connected rabbis explain on camera that Muslim demographic conquest of Christian Europe is excellent news for the Jewish Messiah. These things are all happening at the same time, by people operating from the same Jewish tradition, and the official explanation is charity, or pure humanitarian impulse, or the memory of persecution. Puh-lease. No one believes any of that.

We are asked to believe that the Jewish world currently cheering the depopulation of Gaza is also, out of the goodness of its collective heart, spending billions to relocate Muslims to Minneapolis, Paris, and London. That is not adding up, and the fact that pointing it out gets you labeled an antisemite is itself a data point worth examining. Antisemitism is not going to decrease by pretending these contradictions do not exist. It is going to increase every single time another Ayman Ghazali comes through a pipeline that Jewish organizations built and maintained and defended in court, and lands in an American city. The questions are not hateful. But the absence of honest answers is.

We assume Ted Cruz is not going to provide them. So, maybe we will.