Ambassador Yehuda Kaploun, the Trump administration’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, said on Monday that his office, under President Donald Trump, had been given a broader remit across the federal government, including assisting in the recent arrest and indictment of an alleged mastermind of attacks on Jewish communities in Europe and the U.S.

Kaploun said at an Orthodox Union conference that his office had worked with the Department of Justice, FBI, intelligence community and the White House to help bring Mohammed Al-Saadi, an Iranian Iraqi Kata-ib Hizballah operative allegedly involved in more than two dozen attacks and attempted attacks across Europe and the U.S. to justice. 

“That is not the role of the previous ambassadors that had this role, but the president made certain that when I took the job, that every agency in Washington was told to work with me to combat the scourge of antisemitism,” Kaploun said. “Antisemitism has to have consequences.”

Kaploun emphasized that the threat of antisemitism is global — describing an attack in a Jewish neighborhood in Montreal on Monday as an antisemitic terrorist incident — and comes from international organizations, foreign terrorist organizations, “unchecked mass migration,” online radicalization and “hateful rhetoric from all sides.”

Montreal police said on Monday they were still investigating the shooting suspect’s motive and had not yet deemed it a terrorist attack. 

Kaploun said that a new approach to antisemitism is needed, because the old “script” — more conferences, more groups, more “empty commitments from different governments around the world” — has clearly failed.

“America’s response to antisemitism has to be a collective response and a united response. Let’s face this moment and realize that it’s not slogans that are going to make a difference,” Kaploun said. “It’s real action, it’s real education, and we have to go back to Jewish unity, about teaching our children to be proud of being Jewish, to understand our Jewish history, to understand what makes our Jewish nation unique and to restore the pride that people have in being Jewish.”

He said the Trump administration is “leading by example and taking very decisive actions to protect Jewish communities worldwide.” He pointed to the administration’s moves against universities, hate crimes prosecutions by the Department of Justice, an “extremely tight visa vetting program,” the U.S. withdrawal from various international bodies that have demonstrated antisemitism and its push for other countries to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s working definition of antisemitism.

“These are benchmarks that every country should really be doing the exact same thing,” Kaploun said.

He also touted his work on a trip to Belgium after a synagogue had been firebombed. He said that he began the visit by meeting with members of the Jewish community, who expressed their fear, only to go next to a meeting with Belgium’s foreign minister, who insisted that the country did not have an antisemitism problem.

He said he left the meeting having secured a commitment for Belgium’s military to protect the Jewish community — an effort that just two days later caught a group of Iranians trying to set fire to a Jewish grocery story in Antwerp.

“Because that happened, the Belgian government had to designate the Iranian terrorist group as a terrorist group. Little things matter,” Kaploun said.