When conflict breaks out in the Middle East, the fallout rarely stays there. It frequently reaches our shores, and Jewish communities are often the first to bear the burden.
In the hours after the U.S. airstrike on three of Iran’s nuclear facilities in June 2025, the Secure Community Network logged 1,680 violent online posts directed at the Jewish community alone. Synagogues, Jewish community centers and day schools didn’t launch the military attack. Yet those institutions were subject to bomb threats and actual assaults as antisemites and others took the conflict as an opportunity to harass and harm the Jewish community.
We see it online, where extremist rhetoric quickly turns into incitement. We see it on college campuses and city streets. We see it at synagogues where attendees are harassed or attacked. We see it in public meetings, where locations for civil debate often turn into places of open hostility.
Federal authorities were placed on heightened alert after the June strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities for threats to the Jewish community as well as potential Iranian sleeper-cell activity. That concern, too, is grounded in history.
The Islamic Republic of Iran remains the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, with an established record of using proxies to target dissidents and Jewish communities abroad.
In 1994, a Hezbollah‑linked bombing in Buenos Aires targeting a Jewish center killed 85 people and wounded more than 300 others. In 2022, a Hezbollah sympathizer stabbed Indian-born British novelist Salman Rushdie in New York after decades of his living under an Iranian fatwa.
U.S. authorities have since disrupted additional Iranian‑directed plots targeting senior U.S. officials. In addition, last June, federal agents in Minnesota arrested a former member of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps with ties to Hezbollah.
Cases like this show foreign threat networks are real and can act inside the United States at any moment.
This is the landscape we face: Online incitement. Foreign proxies. Domestic actors motivated or directed from abroad.
Let us be clear: The targets are Jews and Americans everywhere.
Our response must be equally clear. And forceful.
Fast, seamless information-sharing among federal, state and local authorities and communities is a necessity, so that threats can be addressed before they escalate.
Proactive security planning by faith-based institutions is essential, including risk assessments, staff training, emergency drills and coordination with first responders.
A visible law-enforcement presence during high-risk periods completes the chain, reinforcing deterrence and giving communities confidence that they are protected—a fundamental governmental responsibility in a nation such as ours.
Americans can debate foreign policy and disagree. What we cannot debate is our obligation to protect religious freedom and democracy at home. The threat is rising, and the front line is here. We cannot allow the enemies of America and democracy to breach that line.
