Many of the responses to a chilling Instagram post from Maureen Galindo, who is running for the Democratic nomination in Texas’s 35th Congressional District, depicted her statement advocating the corralling of “American Zionists” into an internment camp as proof of her mental illness.
I have no doubt that Galindo—a breathtakingly stupid individual who nonetheless says she is a “marriage and family therapist” by trade, and who came first in the March 2026 Democratic primary with 30% of the vote—is deeply disturbed. She is clearly in thrall to her perverted fantasies of state-orchestrated violence against those with whom she disagrees. But I’d also argue that her mental stability is beside the point.
Were Galindo a Hamas politician in Gaza or one of the handful of female parliamentarians in Iran, a statement like hers would hardly be remarkable. In the West, however, where we consider ourselves sufficiently civilized to automatically eschew such proposals as heinous incitement, we have a tendency to fall back on the term “mental illness” to describe those who go against the grain.
I don’t want to play that game. The solution for someone like Galindo is not therapy. Rather, we should take her at her word and recognize her as the budding genocidaire that she clearly is. As the scholar Naya Lekht correctly observed in a post on X, Galindo belongs among the volunteer women who served as guards at Nazi concentration camps, “known for brutality and active participation in mass murder operations.”
Galindo later replaced her Instagram post with a pathetic attempt to portray the reaction against her as a distortion of what she originally said. “Billionaire Zionists” were, she insisted, organizing a “blitz campaign” falsely claiming that she “wants Jews in warehouses.”
Actually, the post she took down was far more graphic.
Galindo pledged to turn the Karnes detention center near San Antonio “into a prison for American Zionists,” adding that the facility could also function as “a castration processing center for pedophiles, which will probably be most of the Zionists.”
She wasn’t just simply using dehumanizing language in associating “billionaires” and “pedophiles” with Jews: Galindo announced a plan of action to launch a second Shoah, along with a venue to begin its implementation.
To cover herself—in the slimy, cowardly manner that comes naturally to Jew-haters—she resorted to the trick of replacing “Jews” with “Zionists,” so that any legal scrutiny of her comments would conclude that she was targeting, however distastefully, a political group that she opposes rather than an ethnic group with immutable characteristics.
Just because the First Amendment sets an extremely high bar for speech to be deemed as incitement to imminent violence doesn’t mean that we are obliged to give Galindo a pass. We know exactly what she means, even if she worded her remarks in such a way as to give herself some legal wiggle room.
Galindo is emblematic of a process that I’ve previously described as the “Nazification” of anti-Zionism. She should not be seen as an outlier, but rather as a faithful representative of the monstrosity that anti-Zionism, which I prefer to call “antizionism,” has become.
The fact that not a single one of the organizations that celebrated the Hamas massacre in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, has condemned Galindo is no accident. She speaks for them. Her agenda is their agenda. The pogromists who have gathered in mobs outside synagogues in New York—egged on by the city’s Islamist Mayor Zohran Mamdani—share her views. The student encampments displaying signs urging the exclusion of “zios” share her views. The social-media influencers and podcasters of left and right, who have bonded through their hatred of Jews, share her views.
Every single one of their utterances contains the inner logic that Galindo articulated, in a faithful reflection of the historical trajectory of antisemitism as described by the late Holocaust scholar Raul Hilberg: “You have no right to live among us as Jews; you have no right to live among us; you have no right to live.” The only change is replacing the word “Jews” with “Zionists”; the fundamental intent is exactly the same.
Jews in America need to equip themselves with the tools to fight back, and they need to do so quickly. That means embracing the self-defense and weapons-training programs that are increasingly available to members of the community. It means boycotting, undermining and relentlessly attacking any politician, like Mamdani, who seeks to destroy the national rights and the general security of the Jewish people through the elimination of the State of Israel.
Above all, it means educating ourselves and our allies outside the community about the lethal nature of antizionism.
The current tool communal organizations are using to determine whether something is antisemitic—the definition of antisemitism promoted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance—is simply not up to this task. While it contains examples of when rhetoric directed against Israel is antisemitic, it does not include the terms “Zionism” or “anti-Zionism,” nor does it state explicitly that the goal of eliminating Israel “from the river to the sea” correlates to the elimination of Jews.
What’s required is a new definition that puts anti-Zionism, which is the primary expression of antisemitism in this century, front and center.
This would involve acknowledging Zionism, understood as the spiritual and political redemption of the Jewish people in their own state, as an integral, non-negotiable component of Jewish identity. It would involve interrogating and exposing the concepts—such as nakba and “genocide”—that undergird attempts to portray the Palestinian Arabs as the passive, innocent victims of rapacious Jewish colonists. It would stigmatize attempts to exclude Jews from the public square through groundless accusations such as “dual loyalty,” proudly asserting that there is no tension and no contradiction between being a patriotic American and supporting the Jewish state.
As the late President John F. Kennedy once stated, Israel, like America, “carries the shield of democracy and honors the sword of freedom.”
As I witnessed for myself at a symposium on anti-Zionism held last weekend in Toronto, where I was among the panelists, a good number of scholars and activists have now begun this important work in earnest.
The goal is not to seek an accommodation with the anti-Zionists or to engage them in the honest debate that they are morally and intellectually incapable of. It is to silence them, defeat them and drive them out of public life. After nearly three years of unceasing harassment, violence and terrorism aimed at Jews inside and outside the State of Israel, we cannot settle for anything less.
