Vita Fellig
The television host Phil McGraw, known as Dr. Phil, has received death threats, been swatted repeatedly and faced an onslaught of hate mail for supporting Israel publicly since Oct. 7.
“You get to a point where you have to decide what really matters in life, and right and wrong is not a relative term,” he told JNS, shortly before taping an episode of his show about Jew-hatred with Eric Adams, the New York City mayor.
“What happened on Oct. 7 was wrong at every level,” McGraw told JNS. “It wasn’t an act of war. It was a war crime.”
The backlash has strengthened Dr. Phil’s resolve to stand up for the Jewish state. “The Jews’ fight is my fight,” he told JNS. “If somebody is picking on a Jew with antisemitism, and I’m standing there watching it and do nothing — that’s bystander liability in my opinion.”
“I’m as guilty as the person picking on him if I don’t step up and say something and do something,” McGraw told JNS.
The talk show host held a conversation, recorded live, with Adams on June 7 at the Tribeca Synagogue in Manhattan, where the mayor broke the news that he signed an executive order recognizing the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of Jew-hatred and urging the City Council to codify it into law.
Dr. Phil told JNS prior to the taping that Hamas’s terrorism represents a broader assault not just on Israel but on core American values.
“Right now, the focus is on Israel and Jews, but if you study Hamas at all and some of the other terrorist organizations, they’re after the West,” he told JNS. “It doesn’t matter whether you’re Jewish, Christian, atheist or somewhere in between. This isn’t a Jewish issue. It is a human issue.”
Recent antisemitic attacks in Washington, D.C., and Boulder, Colo., have been downplayed by the mainstream media, according to McGraw.
“I fear that what has happened is this whole dynamic has been way over-simplified, particularly for a lot of young people that have just boiled this down to a narrative of oppressed and the oppressor,” he told JNS.
“The avant-garde thing to do today is to stand up for the underdog, stand up for the oppressed, and they don’t dig in deep enough to find out what ‘oppressed’ really means,” said McGraw, who holds a clinical psychology doctorate.
“People jump on this idea and find themselves celebrating and cheering on a terrorist organization, who are murderers and absolute psychopaths, and you kind of get the world PR machine behind it,” he said.
McGraw acknowledged that the death toll in Gaza is disturbing to the wider public but said that the blame rests squarely with Hamas for provoking a war against Israel.
“I hate that children are losing their lives over there, who didn’t get a vote,” he told JNS. “But Hamas knew exactly what was going to happen.”
