The Open Celebration of Jewish Death

A man was killed last week while swimming off the coast of Israel. He was a father, a husband, a son. A human being.

The attack itself was horrific — a shark circling out of nowhere, the water churned red, the slow horror of drowning. It was the kind of death that, even without knowing the victim, should move any heart to sorrow. It reminds us how fragile we all are, how close death always waits. But that isn’t what happened. Instead, tens of thousands of Muslims and antisemites flooded social media with laughter. They didn’t see a human being. They saw an enemy. And they cheered his death.

Under videos showing his final moments, the comments piled up like debris after a flood: “Allah sent the shark.” “Martyr shark strikes again.” “Another Zionist fed to the fish — praise be.” “Hamas Shark Division.” “Good riddance. One less settler.” The cruelty was casual, thoughtless, public. Thousands of laughing emojis dotted the videos. Tens of thousands of shares carried the mockery farther and farther across the digital world. Memes spread: sharks in Hamas headbands, sharks waving Palestinian flags, sharks cast as heroes of some righteous resistance.

It didn’t happen in dark corners of the Internet. It happened on Facebook. On Instagram. On TikTok. On the largest platforms in the world, owned by companies that censor the wrong hashtags but have no problem hosting the celebration of a father’s death. There was no shame. No hesitation. No sense that even death should call for silence, for dignity, for restraint. The death of a Jewish father was not mourned. It was consumed, repackaged, weaponized, and laughed at by ordinary people — ordinary Muslims, ordinary antisemites, strangers who, in another context, might have pretended to civility but here showed exactly who they were when the masks slipped.

This is the world Douglas Murray warned of — the world where life is no longer sacred, where destruction is honored over creation, where death, once mourned, now receives the loudest applause. “Where life is not cherished,” Murray wrote, “death will find its loudest applause.” It is what Sam Harris pointed out again and again — not the extremist minority, but the rotting mainstream, where hatred is taught with the milk and bread, where vengeance is not a last resort but a first instinct, and where cruelty no longer even surprises.

When human beings are reduced to symbols — when a father in the water becomes not a man but a “Zionist,” a “settler,” a category — then the oldest instincts of the mob reawaken. And there is always a mob. This wasn’t a political protest. It wasn’t resistance. It wasn’t a misunderstood act of defiance. It was bloodlust, poured into memes and emojis, stripped of even the thin justifications that movements usually cling to.

There is a lie we tell ourselves, especially in the West: that hatred is rare, that antisemitism is a mistake of the past, that we have evolved beyond the savagery of old hatreds. But we haven’t. We never did. We simply changed the language, painted over the rot, dressed it in new slogans. The truth is simpler and darker: when a Jewish man dies and no one expects decency, and the world laughs instead, we are seeing the world as it truly is — stripped of its illusions, stripped of its polite fictions.

If the roles had been reversed — if a Muslim father had been mauled to death and Jews or Christians had flooded the Internet with mockery — the world would have exploded. It would have led every news broadcast. Presidents would have given speeches. New laws would have been written overnight. But when the victim is Jewish, there is no outcry. There is no shame. There is only silence — or quiet satisfaction.

You cannot celebrate the death of a father and still call yourself civilized. You cannot turn a man’s murder into a meme and pretend you stand for justice. When we excuse hatred, when we normalize cruelty, when we laugh at murder, we invite the oldest darkness back into the center of our lives.

This is not about Gaza. It is not about politics. It is about whether we still believe that life matters at all.

The answer, increasingly, is no.