He condemned the “heinous” antisemitic attack in March on Temple Israel in West  Bloomfield, Michigan. That the perpetrator, who loaded his truck with explosives and rammed it into the synagogue, intended to murder as many Michigan Jews as he could because “Israel is pure evil” should, if Piker were consistent, count as justifiable anti-Zionism. After all, that was his view of Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.

Just last month, the British journalist Lewis Goodall pressed Piker on why he keeps saying that “Hamas is a thousand times better than Israel.” Piker’s response: “Israel has done an Oct. 7 a thousand times over to the Palestinian people.” Piker shrugs off the horrific sexual violence of that day (and the assaults on the hostages) saying: “It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter if f—ing rapes happened on Oct. 7, like that doesn’t change the dynamic for me even this much (holding up his thumb and forefinger to show scarcely an inch). The Palestinian resistance is not perfect.” He ignores the Hamas terrorist who called his parents from Liraz Asoulin’s cell phone after he murdered her as she tried to flee the Nova Festival, exulting: “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!”

Piker demands “decoupling Zionism and Judaism.” Zionism, born out of the conviction that Jew-hatred would never end and that Jewish people needed the protection of their own nation state, cannot be decoupled from Judaism. For millennia, Jews have yearned to return to their historic homeland. The Passover seder ends with the hope “Next year in Jerusalem.” I, for one, am not willing to grant Piker the right to redefine Judaism to fit his worldview.

Then there are his proclamations foregrounding classic antisemitic tropes. He called a listener who condemned the Oct. 7 massacre a “bloodthirsty violent pig dog,” bringing the medieval ritual murder canard that Judaism needs blood into the 21st century. He traffics in the conspiracy theory of world Jewish power. Following a CNN story that mentioned that the United States and Israel struck Iran during Purim this year, he wrote: “This is Jewish supremacy. It’s what netanyahu said after Oct7.”

Piker conflates Zionism with historic evils. Seeking “a totally just world,” he has called anyone displaying a “Zionist tendency” a “rabid neo-Nazi.” Turning Israelis and Jews into Nazis is the antisemitic trick of Holocaust inversion invented by the Soviets.

Piker is convinced that anyone having “positive feelings about the state of Israel” should never even be the “local dogcatcher.” But a recent survey reports that nearly 9 in 10 Jews continue to support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.

When Piker says these Jews are not worthy to serve even as dogcatchers, he is calling to boycott Jews. American Jews know a lot about this kind of discrimination. For decades in the 20th century, colleges and universities had quotas on Jewish admissions. Newspaper want ads, whether for salesmen or secretaries, brought antisemitism to the nation’s breakfast tables as they advertised “Christians only” should apply.

Maybe Piker never meant to embolden antisemitic violence from the left. Nevertheless, rhetoric like his has. In May 2025, a couple leaving an event for Jewish professionals at the Capital Jewish Museum was gunned down by a man who yelled as he was arrested, “Free, free Palestine.” In June 2025, in Boulder, Colorado, a man threw Molotov cocktails at marchers calling to release the hostages still held by Hamas. He burned a demonstrator who had survived the Holocaust. Another died from her wounds. Authorities found a document in the alleged perpetrator’s car calling for the expulsion of the Zionist enemy “from our land.”

What makes the College Democrats of America hosting Piker so shocking is that his animosity extends way beyond Zionists and Israel. He has publicly declared that “America deserved 9/11, dude.” He routinely spews anti-American, anti-Western and anti-women rhetoric as well as antisemitism.

That young Democrats chose to give Piker a platform rather than denouncing him should give all of us pause, not just the Jewish Caucus of the College Democrats of America, who have asked their national leadership to apologize for platforming Piker. At the CDA convention, he denounced “Democrats who collaborate and cooperate with the fascists, who will fund ICE, who will fund Israel, who will help poison the planet, who will stiff workers and help bosses. We don’t need those Democrats anymore.”

The danger is not simply that Hasan Piker has extreme views. It is that he asks Americans — and now the country’s largest Democratic student organization — to accept that Jews cannot define the prejudice directed against them. That is what gaslighting looks like, and we should not be afraid to speak the truth by calling it out — and naming antisemitism for what it is.