Josh Gottheimer has spent years perfecting a single political trick: wrapping the slaughter of Palestinians in the blood-soaked flag of “fighting antisemitism,” then demanding applause.
Last week, the New Jersey congressman—Donald Trump’s favorite Democrat, and a man so obsessively dedicated to defending Israel’s every atrocity that he makes AIPAC lobbyists look like peaceniks—rushed to Twitter to celebrate Rutgers University’s cowardly cancellation of a commencement speech by biotech CEO Rami Elghandour.
The reason? Gottheimer had scanned Elghandour’s social media, spotted a retweet of the phrase “New Jewsy” accompanied by sun, bikini, and basket emojis, and solemnly declared it hate speech worthy of deplatforming.
That’s not a parody of McCarthyite censorship; that’s the actual basis on which a sitting U.S. congressman demanded a Palestinian-American voice be silenced.
This is at a time when tens of thousands of Palestinian voices were silenced permanently.
Let’s savor the absurdity for a moment. Elghandour, an outspoken critic of Israel’s mass killing in Gaza, made what anyone with an ounce of cultural literacy would recognize as a cringey “Jersey Shore” joke—the emojis were literally a reference to gym, tan, laundry.
The phrase “New Jewsy” was, according to Elghandour, a playful riff on the local accent’s “New Joisy.”
Gottheimer, ever eager to sniff out antisemitism where none exists while turning a blind eye to actual hate, screenshot it, denounced it as “hateful,” and pronounced Rutgers right to “kick this graduation speaker to the curb.”
A man who retweets a sun emoji and a pun about New Jersey is purged from campus; the congressman who cheers on the pulverization of Gaza’s hospitals and schools is hailed as a moderate hero in the pages of The New York Times.
This is the moral universe Gottheimer has built.
That op-ed, published just days after the Rutgers affair, is the key to understanding the congressman’s entire grift.
Under the masthead of the paper of record, Gottheimer performed his signature symphony of selective outrage: Democrats are courageously united against right-wing antisemitism, he writes, but shamefully silent when it comes from the far left.
He name-checks streamer Hasan Piker, accuses Senate Democrats who voted to block weapons to Israel of a double standard, and wrings his hands about Iran while ignoring the actual bodies piling up under American-supplied bombs.
He even wonders aloud why no one calls Middle Eastern nations “apartheid” for their treatment of women and LGBTQ people—as if that somehow excuses the apartheid system he spends his career laundering.
The whole essay drips with the smugness of a man who has confused his own bigotry for bravery, who believes that demanding unconditional support for a far-right Israeli government currently being investigated for genocide at the International Court of Justice is the epitome of principled centrism.
What Gottheimer calls “double standards” is actually something far grimmer: the weaponization of antisemitism to shield a genocide supporter from accountability. He frames any criticism of Israeli state violence as a left-wing hate contagion, then uses that frame to crush dissent.
Rami Elghandour was canceled not because he said anything bigoted, but because he had the temerity to call the mass killing of Palestinians what it is: a genocide.
Gottheimer couldn’t let that stand unchallenged, so he ginned up a fake scandal over three emojis and a misunderstood pun, leveraging the full weight of his congressional platform to bully a university into submission.
This is not the act of a man combating hatred; it’s the act of a man manufacturing hatred to protect a political project built on the bones of children.
And that project has a name.
Gottheimer is a genocide supporter—not in the abstract, not as hyperbole, but in the literal, undeniable sense that he has voted to fast-track arms shipments used in indiscriminate bombing campaigns, smeared human rights monitors as antisemites, and now polices language so fanatically that even a retweeted beach joke can get you canceled if you’re Palestinian.
He stands with a military apparatus that has killed over 40,000 people, the majority women and children, and then lectures the rest of us about the language of hate.
It’s a staggering inversion of morality, made all the more nauseating because he performs it with the bland smile of a man who thinks he’s the adult in the room.
The laughable cherry on this rotten sundae is that Gottheimer has become Donald Trump’s favorite Democrat. And why wouldn’t Trump love him? Gottheimer does the MAGA right’s work for them: he polices thought on the left, smears antiwar voices as bigots, and reinforces the lie that any critique of Israeli policy is a gateway to antisemitism.
He’s the Democratic congressional mascot for a Republican-authored culture war, a backbencher who has discovered that the fastest way to cable news glory is to adopt the same brutal playbook that once had Trump labeling all Mexicans rapists, but repackaged with the oozing sanctimony of a self-styled moderate.
“Hate is hate,” Gottheimer intones in his op-ed, but the only hate he consistently rallies against is the hate that threatens to interrupt the flow of bombs.
Elghandour, to his credit, apologized anyway—not because he had done anything wrong, but because he, unlike Gottheimer, actually cares about the safety and dignity of all people.
He clarified the misunderstanding, deleted the tweet, and reaffirmed his opposition to hatred and bigotry. He still plans to release his speech.
The contrast could not be sharper: on one side, a man who makes a dumb joke and immediately seeks to repair any unintended hurt; on the other, a congressman who sees a misinterpreted sun emoji as a five-alarm fire while treating real, documented crimes against humanity as political inconveniences to be spun.
This is the state of the Democratic Party that Josh Gottheimer is fighting to preserve: a party where it’s career suicide to stand on a picket line with a left-wing streamer but a badge of honor to sic the censors on a Palestinian-American CEO who says “genocide” out loud.
It’s a party that genuflects before the anti-Semitic marchers of Charlottesville while extending a trembling hand of silence over the anti-Arab racism and anti-Palestinian bigotry embedded in its own ranks.
Nobody should be silenced for holding unpopular opinions, because that’s what freedom of speech is for. What’s needed is a restriction on the pulverization of pluralism that is made possible by consolidated wealth and media ownership.
Rutgers should be ashamed for capitulating. The faculty unions, the 36,000 petition signers, and the students who protested understand exactly what happened: a university traded its commitment to free expression for a pat on the head from a politician who will never stop demanding more concessions.
Gottheimer isn’t a profile in courage; he’s a profile in cowardice, an errand boy for a foreign government’s propaganda machine, and a faithful servant of the carceral liberalism that equates speech critical of Israel with a hate crime.
But the ultimate shame belongs to Josh Gottheimer, a man who has chosen to make himself the inquisitor of a blood-soaked orthodoxy, mistaking a retweet for a pogrom while real pogroms are carried out with his enthusiastic blessing. He is not fighting antisemitism. He is fighting the truth, and the truth is coming for him anyway.
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