Seventh-day Adventists have kept the Saturday Sabbath for nearly two centuries, endured the “Judaizer” charge from their earliest critics, and built an entire theology of religious liberty around the conviction that the day you worship is nobody else’s business. They should be paying very close attention to what is happening right now in American public life, because someone is treating the word “Shabbat” as a confession of guilt, someone spray-painted a swastika on a Seventh-day Adventist church last Saturday morning, and the two developments are not unrelated.
The Sarcastic Greeting
There is something almost poetically grotesque about what led Candace Owens to open a recent podcast episode with a sarcastic “OK everybody, Shabbat Shalom,” replacing her theme music with “Hava Nagila.” Three days earlier, Erika Kirk had appeared on CBS and mentioned that she and her late husband Charlie had visited and admired Israel. That was apparently enough. A widow, promoting Charlie’s posthumously published book about his personal embrace of Saturday Sabbath-keeping, offered a Hebrew greeting. Owens treated it as a tell.
The conspiracy Owens has been constructing since Charlie Kirk’s assassination involves, at various points, France, Egypt, and most pointedly Israel. She has implied Israeli government involvement in the murder, claimed Egyptian aircraft had tracked Erika Kirk’s movements for years, and called the evidence in the police affidavit “fake and gay.” When Erika Kirk sat with Owens for four and a half hours, bringing phone records and legal counsel to address the claims, Owens emerged unmoved.
After the “Shabbat Shalom” episode, Blake Neff, producer of The Charlie Kirk Show, pointed out that Owens had “aggressively ridiculed” Erika Kirk for using the phrase, and noted that Charlie’s book was specifically about his love of Shabbat observance. Owens replied: “They need the world to know that Charlie loved Shabbat. We are beyond parody.” She also suggested the book was a fabrication designed to make Charlie appear more pro-Jewish than he actually was.
So in Owens’ framework, a man who kept the Sabbath, wrote a book about it, whose widow uses a Sabbath greeting while grieving, is exhibiting suspicious Jewish entanglement. The ancient Hebrew practice of Shabbat has become a red flag. A greeting becomes a tell. Faith becomes proof of a plot. That is not anti-Zionism. That is not geopolitical criticism. That is antisemitism, and it is worth being precise about that before moving on.
A Swastika on a Sabbath-Keeping Church
On February 28, 2026, a Saturday morning, San Francisco police responded to reports of antisemitic and homophobic graffiti on California Street in Pacific Heights. They found the Central Seventh-day Adventist Church painted with swastikas and slurs, damage estimated at more than $20,000. A suspect, 51-year-old Sadat Mousa, was arrested on the scene and booked on charges including felony vandalism with a hate crime enhancement.
The target was a Seventh-day Adventist church. Not a synagogue. A Saturday-morning Christian congregation whose primary distinguishing public feature is that its members worship on the biblical Sabbath.
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