There is a point at which a community can become so accomplished at explaining the hostility directed against it that it gradually loses the ability to distinguish hostility from criticism, criticism from consequence, and consequence from evidence. The danger does not begin with lies. It begins with something more respectable: concern, vigilance, memory, solidarity, the desire to protect. Yet when these are joined to an interpretive system that already knows in advance what every event means, protection can turn into a machine for preserving an image of the world rather than recognizing the world itself.

Oscar Wilde gave Dorian Gray an impossible privilege. His face remained untouched while the consequences of his life accumulated somewhere else, on a portrait concealed from ordinary sight. Politics can produce a similar separation between self-image and consequence. A state, a movement, a media ecosystem, even an entire community may continue to see itself as defensive, responsible, endangered and morally serious while the effects of its own conduct accumulate elsewhere: in the lives of other people, in diplomatic isolation, in public distrust, in radicalization, in language, and eventually in the very hostility that the system then cites as proof that its original picture was correct.

Consider a real attack on a synagogue in the United States. The event deserves factual description, investigation, security analysis and moral condemnation. We should want to know who attacked, why, with what ideological background, what institutional failures made the attack possible, and what might reduce the danger of repetition. Yet watch what can happen after the facts have been established. The event enters an interpretive machine whose categories existed before the event itself.

One attack becomes evidence of a climate; the climate becomes evidence of a wave; the wave becomes evidence of a civilizational hostility already believed to be everywhere. Newspapers cite organizations, organizations cite commentators, politicians respond to the organizations, and newspapers then report the political response as further evidence of the seriousness of the original phenomenon. Soon dozens or hundreds of texts appear to confirm one another, although many may be reflections of the same interpretive structure.

This is where the hall of mirrors begins. The number of reactions is mistaken for the number of independent observations, and repetition acquires the authority of verification. An event may be real, the fear may be justified, and the danger may be serious, while the interpretive amplification surrounding it still becomes epistemically defective. One fact reflected a hundred times remains one fact; a hundred reactions to it do not automatically become a hundred separate pieces of evidence about the world.

The problem becomes more serious when the same structure is applied beyond direct antisemitic violence. Criticism of Israeli policy becomes evidence of hostility to Israel, hostility to Israel becomes evidence of antisemitism, and antisemitism then confirms the claim that earlier criticism was never really about policy at all. Protest confirms the diagnosis,........

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