Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

The parallels between 1920s German academic antisemitism and today's "anti-Zionism" are essentially exact

"German students march against the un-German spirit." Book burning in Berlin, Germany, May 10, 1933.

Today's "anti-Zionist" academic environment increasingly resembles the anti-Jewish academic world in Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. I am not saying this as rhetoric - I am saying that the parallels are essentially exact.

German academia’s descent into antisemitism began before the Nazis took power. In the early 1920s, during the Weimar Republic, Jewish professors were already being singled out as carriers of something alien and corrosive. Nationalist student groups disrupted lectures, boycotted Jewish faculty, and circulated petitions demanding limits on Jewish influence in universities. This was justified not in racial terms at first, but in intellectual ones. Jewish scholars were accused of promoting abstract, cosmopolitan, un-German modes of thought that allegedly undermined the nation.

In the 1920s, the concept of “Jewish science” emerged. It was not initially shouted by thugs. It was articulated by credentialed academics. Nobel laureates like Philipp Lenard and Johannes Stark argued that modern physics, especially Einstein’s relativity, was not merely wrong but Jewish in character - overly abstract, detached from reality, ideologically corrosive. The claim was not that Jews should be excluded because they were Jews, but that their ideas were incompatible with German values. Identity was converted into an epistemic defect.

By the late 1920s, this rhetoric had saturated campus culture. Jewish scholars were heckled, isolated, and treated as moral and intellectual threats. Lists of Jewish academics circulated. Entire disciplines were scrutinized for “Jewish influence.”

When Hitler became chancellor in January 1933, the intellectual case had already been made. When the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service was enacted in April 1933, purging Jews from universities, it did not feel like a rupture. It felt like a logical next step. Expulsions overlapped with intensified rhetoric. Book burnings followed. By the late 1930s, Jewish intellectual life had been eradicated from German universities. The state merely finished what academia had already prepared.

This is not ancient history. It is happening now.

This month, the Journal of Emerging Sport Studies published a paper arguing that the considerable contributions of Muska Mosston to the field should be stigmatized because he fought in the 1948 War of Independence, years before he moved to the US and created his theories. From the abstract:

Decanonise the ‘forefather’
Situating Muska Mosston’s Contributions to Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy within the Context of Zionist Settler Colonization of Palestine
Muska Mosston, renowned as a forefather of pedagogical innovation in the field of physical education and sport pedagogy, is celebrated for his Spectrum of Teaching Styles, which has permeated the field for decades. However, an examination of his biography reveals problematic ties to Zionist settler colonialism, including active participation in the dispossession and erasure of Palestinian communities. Using a decolonial lens, this paper critically interrogates the legacy of Mosston, challenging the normalisation of settler-colonial ideologies within academic discourse. In exploring Mosston's legacy through a decolonial lens, we are also compelled to reflect: How do we engage with the work of scholars whose lives and ideologies are deeply intertwined with systems of oppression? Can we separate the value of their contributions from the oppressive systems they may have been a part of? Furthermore, we urge professional organizations and academic institutions to reflect on their complicity in idolatrizing and therefore normalizing such legacies; we suggest instead that they employ practices that uphold truth-telling, advance healing, embrace ethics and actively reduce violence. By foregrounding these self-and institutional-reflective questions, we seek to advance a more equitable, ethical and axiologically reflexive scholarly practice in physical education and the sport pedagogy community more broadly.

Mosston's teaching framework reshaped how physical education is taught worldwide, moving away from rigid command-based instruction toward more adaptive, student-centered models. His work became foundational in the field and was developed entirely after he left Israel (not that this matters.) It had no political content. It had nothing to do with nationalism, war, or ideology.

Yet the reader is told that his military service, and his Zionism, is disqualifying for his theories built in the decades afterwards. It wants to retroactively erase his legacy in the name of morals.

Orwell himself would be astonished at the idea that marginalizing an entire field of study because of a strained conception of guilt by association is "ethical."

There is no real information of what Mosston's role in the 1948 war was. But this is irrelevant to the modern antisemites who want to cancel him. He was a soldier - that is enough to tar him. Jews who fought to defend their land in an explicitly genocidal war started by their Arab neighbors are heroes, not evil colonists, but that fact is hidden behind several layers of lies that are accepted as gospel by a wide swath of today's academics:

1) Zionism is racist.
2) Zionism is settler colonialist, apartheid and genocidal.
3) Anyone who ever joined the Israeli army is a participant in ethnic cleansing and is therefore a war criminal.
4) Anything they have done since then is tainted by the fact they are war criminals.
5) They must be erased, canceled, and their contributions to society should be minimized or dismissed.

These are not even debatable in today's academic environment. They are assumed true as starting positions in going even further.

This is Nazi logic, not academic ethics. This is exactly how “Jewish science” was treated in Germany. No individual wrongdoing was required. No specific acts needed to be proven. Jewishness itself was enough to cast doubt on one’s intellectual legitimacy, just as Israeliness or Zionism is today.. Once that move was normalized, exclusion followed naturally.

We are already seeing the modern equivalent of the 1920s stage. Campus disruptions, boycotts, and protests targeting Jewish or Zionist professors mirror the tactics of nationalist student groups in Weimar Germany. Lectures are shouted down. Speakers are disinvited. Hiring and funding are contested based on ideological purity tests. The justification is always "moral." Zionism is framed as uniquely illegitimate, as a stain that disqualifies participation in intellectual life.

But this article takes things to a new level. A seeming minor piece in a sports studies journal is literally encouraging the erasure of an entire field based on the identity - not beliefs, not history, but Israeli Jewish identity - of one of its founders.

The modern antisemites knowingly target peripheral academic fields as testing grounds to see how far they can push their ideologies in areas that are not sensitive to antisemitism. I've seen anti-Zionist articles in poetry journals, communications studies, gender studies, child studies, environmental studies: the list goes on.

But they have a model they are following, consciously or not: the precedent of antisemitic German students and academics between the world wars and during the rise of Hitler.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Only left-wing "anti-Zionist" graffiti on a synagogue site. Nothing to see here.

The New York Times reports:

Last wee, members of the Pasadena Jewish Temple and Center gathered to remember the devastating wildfire that burned down the synagogue’s campus and much of the surrounding community of Altadena one year ago.

On Sunday, they felt another kind of grief when a member of the congregation drove by the site and discovered anti-Zionist graffiti scrawled on an exterior wall, synagogue leaders said Monday.

In addition to denouncing Zionism, the graffiti said, “RIP Renee,” which Rabbi Ratner took as a reference to Renee Good, the woman who was shot and killed by a federal agent in Minneapolis last week. Rabbi Ratner said that he had mentioned Ms. Good, whose death he described as a tragedy, in the congregation’s recent prayer for the dead.

Photos of the graffiti viewed by The New York Times showed that the message was written in large letters across several feet of a white exterior wall of the campus, which is otherwise surrounded by a chain-link fence covered with green hedges. Congregation members said that there is no signage identifying the site as a synagogue or other Jewish community center.

In an email to temple members, Rabbi Ratner described the graffiti as “hateful and antisemitic.” He said that the temple was working with law enforcement agencies and Jewish organizations to investigate the episode and ensure the community’s safety.

It is nice that the story was covered, but there are no photos of the graffiti so we can determine exactly what it said. Merely calling it "anti-Zionist" is a cop-out, especially when the rabbi calls it "hateful and antisemitic." Did it compare Israel to Nazis? Did it say "we disagree with the Likud"? This all makes a difference, but the NYT is almost certainly sanitizing what it actually said, because it probably mirrored sentiments that have been published in that newspaper over the past two years.

Based on the description in the article, it appears that the graffiti was scrawled on the low white wall at the former location of the synagogue.

The houses across the street appear untouched by the fire. Those residents would have seen the graffiti but it was only reported by a congregation member who drove by the location.

The far-Left are attacking synagogues as much as the far-Right are. Yet the outrage for the former is certainly more muted.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The "I was only joking!" defense of Jew hatred

On October 10, 2023, three days after the murderous Hamas pogrom, a transgender professor at University of California - David named Jemma DeCristo posted this:

Notice the knife, hatchet and blood drop emojis.

It sure sounds like a threat, doesn't it?

The university committee censured DeCristo but recommended against suspension; the chancellor went further and briefly suspended DeCristo without pay, which seems like the minimum that the university should do.

But what is fascinating is DeCristo's defense. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, DeCristo claimed that the post was satire and that they wouldn't apologize:

The panel felt she hadn’t intended to cause harm and had already experienced “terrible real-world consequences.”

In justifying a harsher punishment, which the university’s vice provost for academic affairs, Philip H. Kass, had initially suggested, May pointed out in his letter of discipline that both the investigators and the hearing panel found that DeCristo “failed to acknowledge the deep pain and significant disruption” she’d caused, which he said was “in direct conflict with” her “obligation to protect and preserve conditions hospitable to student learning.” He added that she had “failed to offer clarification or apology that could have mitigated the impacts” of her actions.

Asked by investigators whether she would consider issuing an apology or clarification, DeCristo said doing so would “just fuel the right-wing media that was harassing her.”

So this professor is unapologetic, and claims that it was all a joke. Hilarious!

This is interesting because this is the usual defense of neo-Nazis when they are called out for hate speech that crosses the line into incitement. They were only doing it for the lulz, they say. I had never seen a left-winger make that same claim.

But it is just another way that the antisemites on the Left and Right are learning from each other.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/12 Links Pt2: History is Not Whispering; Israel Won the Information War; Trump: No place for Jew-haters in GOP; Suspect admits to arson attack on synagogue in Mississippi due to its ‘Jewish ties’

From Ian:

History is Not Whispering

Anti-Semitism is never the end of the story. It is the warning flare.

It does not appear when societies are strongest, but when they are losing the ability to tolerate complexity, disagreement, and pluralism. Jews are the first test of that collapse—not because they are uniquely fragile, but because they have always stood at the center of pluralistic systems that extremism cannot tolerate.

This pattern is not subtle. It is not ambiguous. And it is not new.

When Jews are told their equality is conditional, that their safety depends on silence, that their collective existence is illegitimate, societies have already crossed a line. When violence against Jews is explained rather than condemned, escalation is no longer a question of if, but when. When elected officials refuse to name and shame anti-Semitism because doing so would alienate part of their base, the base has already been chosen.

The closing of the horseshoe is not a metaphor. It is a diagnosis.

On the left, anti-Zionism reframes Jews as uniquely undeserving of national rights. On the right, post-liberal populism recycles the language of elites, global manipulators, and disloyal insiders. The vocabularies differ. But the structure is identical. Both reject liberal universalism. Both treat Jews as conditional citizens. Both abandon the same guardrails—and arrive at the same destination.

History does not forgive this convergence. It records it.

Those who imagine they can harness anti-Semitism without being consumed by it misunderstand how extremism works. The societies that tolerated it did not stabilize. They radicalized. Jews were never the last target—only the most reliable early prey.

We are not watching this unfold blindly. We have the documents. We have the precedents. We have the bodies.

This time, ignorance is not an excuse. Silence is not neutrality. Euphemism is not moderation.

We know exactly what is happening.

The only question left is whether we choose to stop it—or whether we allow history to resume its course, once again, at full speed.

Israel Won the Information War By Abe Greenwald

Via Commentary Newsletter, sign up here.
Those who fret about the issue believe that Israel needed to continually explain the reasons for its military actions: It should have been more forceful in demonstrating that Hamas hides behind civilians and operates from civilian structures. It should have debunked Hamas casualty figures in real time, proved that there was no famine, explained the unparalleled effort the IDF makes to spare civilian lives, and so on.

But that’s not the story Israel needed to tell. There’s little point in the Jewish state trying to prove that it’s innocent of all the calumnious charges against it. Why? Because if Israel’s devoted critics could be persuaded that it’s a good and just country under continuous assault by barbaric fanatics, they would have been convinced by the decades of evidence—culminating in October 7—showing just that.

The vital information that Israel needed to disseminate, rather, was this: We will not perish. We are fiercer in battle than you could ever imagine, more accomplished in intelligence and operational execution than any nation in history, peerless in the art of war, and unapologetic in our commitment to survival. We don’t bend to public opinion; we stop at nothing to defend our existence.

And that message came across loud and clear.

Too many American Jews, on the other hand, spent two-plus years swallowing Hamas propaganda and publicly agonizing over Israel’s actions to varying degrees. Their story was: We’re just so sorry for all this ugliness.

And while they explained and apologized, they also bent over backwards to give the Jew-haters the benefit of the doubt. Some went so far as to kasher the mob.

We know exactly how that’s worked out. It’s long past time for Diaspora Jews to tell a different story of their own—one of bravery rooted in reverence for the Jewish tradition. But first they must believe it themselves. The Israelis do, and the world found that out.

No place for Jew-haters in GOP, Trump says

U.S. President Donald Trump said there is no room in the Republican Party for those with antisemitic views and that the GOP should condemn those espousing them.

“From my own personal standpoint, absolutely, because I condemn,” Trump told The New York Times in a two-hour interview last week that was published on Monday.

“I have a daughter who’s married to a Jewish person,” he told the newspaper. “My daughter happens to be Jewish, and the beautiful three grandchildren are Jewish. I’m very proud of them.”

The president also touted his support of Israel and his efforts to obtain a ceasefire in the war between Hamas and Israel.

“There has been no better president in the history of the world as we know it that has been stronger or better and less antisemitic, certainly, than Donald Trump,” he said in the interview. “I have been the best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel, and that’s, by the way, acknowledged by everybody, including the fact that we have peace in the Middle East, and that’s going to hold.”

Trump’s comments came as several prominent Republicans, including former Fox News host Tucker Carlson, have faced criticism from several prominent party members for providing platforms to antisemites and Holocaust deniers, most notably Nick Fuentes. Carlson, a podcaster, was photographed in official images of a meeting that Trump held at the White House recently with oil executives.

At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual legislative conference in October, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), Rep. Randy Fine (R-Fla.) and others went after Carlson for his friendly interview with Fuentes.

Speakers at the conference also aimed brickbats at the Heritage Foundation, whose president, Kevin Roberts, defended Carlson and said the pro-Trump conservative research group was not in the business of “canceling our own people.”

The president earlier passed up opportunities to criticize Carlson, who had a prime-time speaking slot at the 2024 Republican National Convention. “You can’t tell him who to interview,” Trump told reporters in November.

But this time, he went after the antisemites in his own party.

“I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” he told the Times.

British Jewish veterans who fought for Churchill in WWII say the level of antisemitism in modern times feels like 'the whole world is against us'

They proudly fought for Britain to free the world from the clutches of Hitler's fascism.

But 80 years on, three Jewish veterans say they are increasingly alarmed by surging levels of antisemitism in the UK - and fear 'the whole world is against us now'.

Joe Slyper, 106, Don Breslaw, 102 and Solly Ohayon, 99, still remain largely positive about Britain, but believe anti-Jewish hatred today is at levels they themselves did not experience when they were younger.

Their views come in the wake of fellow veteran Alec Penstone, 100, who in November stunned the presenters of ITV's Good Morning Britain by declaring the sacrifice of the lost men of his generation 'wasn't worth' it.

He told Adil Ray and Kate Garraway: 'What we fought for was our freedom, but now it's a darn sight worse than when I fought for it.'

While the trio are not so forceful in their opinion of today's Britain, they acknowledge the Second World War brought an end to Nazism - but not racially motivated hatred.

Don, who was just 19 when he was conscripted into the army, has come to sombrely conclude 'we've always been different - and when people are different, people tend to find cause to dislike us.'

The three spoke to Daily Mail as part of wide-ranging interviews on their wartime experience and how Britain compares today to before 1939.

01/12 Links Pt1: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made; The courage of Iran’s women puts woke Westerners to shame; Trump: 25% tariff on all countries doing business with Iran

From Ian:

Ruthie Blum: What the late great Bernard Lewis knew about Khomeini

The late Bernard Lewis—renowned multilingual Orientalist—didn’t agree that Carter or anybody else had an excuse for ignoring Khomeini’s true identity and agenda. In a 2010 interview that I conducted with Lewis while researching my book, To Hell in a Handbasket: Carter, Obama and the “Arab Spring,” the professor emeritus of Near Eastern studies at Princeton University described his rebuffed attempt to set the record straight.

“In 1978, there was this figure being discussed, Khomeini, whom I knew nothing about,” he recounted. “So, I did what one normally does in my profession: I went to the university library and looked him up. I discovered that he was the author of Islamic Government [a collection of speeches he delivered in Najaf, Iraq in 1970]. And I thought, ‘Well, this is interesting. It could give me some idea of what the man is about.’”

Lewis took the volume home and read it in one sitting. What it revealed was a philosophy of Islamic statehood, using the harshest possible rhetoric to denounce non-Muslims and calling for the spread of Sharia law across the world.

Deciding that something had to be done to expose the ayatollah and his intentions, Lewis contacted then-New York Times op-ed editor Charlotte Curtis and offered to pen a piece on what subsequently came to be known as “The Little Green Book.”

“No thanks,” she answered. “I don’t think our readers would be interested in the work of some Persian writer.”

Whether her response was due to ignorance of the significance of Khomeini’s waiting in the wings to take over Iran from the Shah, or to a lack of desire on the part of the Times to acknowledge that however authoritarian a ruler the shah might be, he was the epitome of benevolence compared to his proposed successor, wasn’t clear.

Nor did Curtis’s attitude surprise Lewis, whose view of the press was already—justifiably—dim. But it did cause him to recall an exchange he’d had in Pahlavi’s office not long before the revolution.

“Why do they keep attacking me?” the shah burst out, as soon as Lewis entered the room.

“Whom do you mean, Your Majesty?” Lewis asked.

“The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times of London and Le Monde—the four weird sisters dancing around the doom of the West,” Pahlavi said. “Don’t they understand that I am the best friend you have in this part of the world?”

“Your Majesty,” Lewis replied, “you must understand that the editorial policies of these papers are based on Marxist principles.”

“What do you mean?” Pahlavi shot back incredulously, since Communism wasn’t on his list of the West’s faults.

“I’m not referring to Karl, but to Groucho,” Lewis quipped.

When the Shah looked puzzled, Lewis asked him whether he was familiar with Groucho Marx.

“Yes, of course,” he responded, almost insulted by the suggestion that he, a buff of American movies, might not be up on Hollywood.

Lewis explained, “Remember when Groucho Marx said he wouldn’t want to become a member of a club that would have him? Well, our media’s posture—like our foreign policy—is to shun any government that wants our friendship, and to placate and pursue our enemies.”

Brendan O'Neill: 7 October was the biggest mistake Iran ever made

Then there’s the Iranian regime itself. It’s in serious peril, courtesy of the staggeringly brave men and women rising up against it. These warriors for liberty are the brilliant agents of the mullahs’ strife, proving to the world that even the most ruthless regimes can be taken to task by those they oppress. And yet it was the lethal folly of 7 October, the fascistic vanity of it, that paved the way for the regime’s crisis. The mullahs’ obsessive harrying of the Jewish State pushed the Iranian people’s patience to breaking point.

The wastefulness of the regime’s war on the Jews infuriated sections of the Iranian populace. As the rial kept falling in value against the US dollar, causing huge hardship, still the regime spunked billions on its anti-Semitic proxies. It’s estimated to have spent $20 billion on Hezbollah and Hamas since 2012. The cost to Iran – and more importantly to the Iranian people – of launching missile strikes on Israel is extraordinary. For example, the events of 1 October 2024, just one day, when the regime fired a barrage of ballistic missiles at Israel, cost Iran an eye-watering $2.3 billion. That’s six times as much as it cost Israel to repel the missiles.

The 12 Day War between Iran and Israel in June last year inflicted huge costs on Iran. In retaliation for Iran’s strikes, Israel struck critical infrastructure across 27 of Iran’s provinces, including airports, oil and gas depots and, of course, nuclear infrastructure. The cost to Iran ran into the billions. Its firing back at Israel cost billions, too. The 12 Day War put ‘enormous strain [on] Iran’s already battered economy’, as one observer described it. And this was a nation where around 80 per cent of the population were ‘fail[ing] to meet the 2,100-calorie daily requirement’.

The mullahs’ cosmic animus for the Jewish State hit the Iranian people hard. The shopkeepers and students of Iran watched their cash lose its value as the theocrats sent billions to the rich racists who lead Hamas and Hezbollah. Little wonder one of the rallying cries on the streets is ‘Neither Gaza nor Lebanon, my life for Iran!’. In short, no more lavish, spiteful warmongering over there – focus instead on here.

After the 12 Day War, Western leftists said Israel’s strikes against Iran would cause the Iranian people to rally behind the mullahs. The opposite happened. Millions were sickened by the profligate hawkishness of the regime and now openly demand that it forget ‘Gaza and Lebanon’. What an extraordinary situation – the privileged keffiyeh classes of the West long for more strikes on the Jewish State, while Iranian rebels say: ‘Enough.’ Our own Islamo-left instinctively wants the Iranian regime to survive, in the catastrophically foolish belief that it is a counterweight to the West, capitalism and Israel. Iranian protesters want it to die, in the searing, true belief that it is a counterweight to their own freedom, and to reason itself

Some on the faux-left say the ‘Zionist lobby’ is behind the revolt in Iran. It is a testament to their own Orientalist bigotry that they would so cavalierly strip the rebels of agency and reduce them to dupes of the Jews. In truth, where 7 October might have pushed to the fore the question of Iran’s future, it is the Iranian people who will answer that question. And millions are saying: ‘No more Islamism, no more theocracy, no more war in Gaza and Lebanon.’ They want Iran to leave behind the Islamofascist experiment and once again take its place among the great civilisations. All good people do.

Melanie Phillips: Iranian protesters are showing courage in the face of tyranny — but Israel-obsessed liberals don’t seem to care

The reason is that the uprising is not just against the regime but against the repressive tyranny of Islam itself. This is intolerable to Western liberals, because it gets in the way of their fixed narrative that, when Islamists commit mass murder against the innocent, it’s justified resistance against Western-backed imperialism.

Such liberals simply cannot acknowledge the reality of Islamic terrorism and repression.

Their belief that the Israelis and Western imperialism are always the villains, and Muslims are always their victims, is essential to their self-image as morally virtuous people.

It may sound incredible, but Islam has become synonymous with conscience itself among Western progressives.

This is because the Palestinian cause has become their signature motif.

The Palestinians are viewed as the ultimate oppressed people, dispossessed of their rightful inheritance and victims of Israeli “genocide,” “apartheid” and war crimes in Gaza.

Every part of that is a lie. But among liberals, it’s an article of faith.

So they’ve failed to grasp how this cause has been leveraged by the Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood bent upon the conquest of the West. This is particularly true of Qatar, which has patiently spread its influence throughout Western universities and even bought up various Western media personalities.

The Palestinian cause has embedded into the Western mind the inversion of truth and lies, victim and aggressor, justice and tyranny, which is a hallmark of the Islamic world and has found such fertile ground in the post-truth, post-moral Western intelligentsia.

So the keffiyeh-clad classes have been cementing Islamic control over Western streets and public space.

In Britain this is far advanced, with the Labour government under Keir Starmer refusing to outlaw genetically damaging Muslim cousin marriage and dragging its heels over dealing with the mainly Muslim rape and grooming gangs.

Western governments have increasingly moved to ban Hizb ut-Tahrir, often classifying it as a terrorist or extremist organization. It is already banned in the UK, Germany, most Arab countries, Russia, China and others. Right now Australia is considering a ban on the group after a recent Sydney conference was publicized where the leaders said the West "sucks blood from humanity," advocated for a "Muslim army" under Sharia, and framed Islam as the only solution for Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

The justification for these bans usually begins with the group’s stated aims. Hizb ut-Tahrir rejects liberal democracy and advocates replacing it with a global Islamic caliphate governed by sharia law. It presents Islam not merely as a religion but as a political system destined to supersede Western civilization. Its rhetoric is frequently antisemitic, dismissive of pluralism, and grounded in a vision of Muslim supremacy.

It is no stretch to say that the group's ideas are hostile to Jews, to women, to dissenters, and to the moral assumptions that underlie liberal societies. If Hizb ut-Tahrir ever held power, its worldview would translate into repression.

There is a problem, though. Hizb ut-Tahrir is explicitly non-violent. It does not carry out attacks. It does not issue operational instructions for terrorism in Western countries. Its leaders insist, consistently and publicly, that their method is ideological persuasion rather than armed struggle. Their ideas are corrosive, but they remain ideas.

It appears to have used socialist concepts to build itself this way specifically to take advantage of Western freedoms and inoculate it from being banned legally in the West.

This brings up the question of where free speech ends and where limiting speech is better.

That distinction matters more than many people are comfortable admitting. Once a society begins banning organizations solely for what they believe rather than what they do, it enters terrain that has rarely been stable and has often proved dangerous for minorities. Jews in particular do not have the luxury of treating this as an abstract concern. Measures justified as exceptional responses to one threatening ideology have tendency to be reused later against Jews, once the legal tools exist and the political mood changes. A framework that allows the state to suppress Hizb ut-Tahrir for advocating a religious supremacist worldview could, under different conditions, be turned against Zionism, against halachic norms, or against Jewish communal self-defense. This is not a slippery-slope fallacy: it is a recurring pattern.

At the same time, pretending that Hizb ut-Tahrir is merely another set of opinions that should be ignored is willfully naive. Its ideology does not sit in a vacuum. It is a sustained narrative that delegitimizes Western society, portrays Jews and non-Muslims as exploiters, and presents the destruction of the existing order as morally necessary. It may not tell followers to commit violence, but it devotes considerable energy to explaining why violence committed by others is understandable, justified, or admirable. Over time, that difference becomes less sharp than Western legal categories would like it to be.

The problem, as I see it, is that the West's concept of free speech is unnecessarily expansive and out definition of incitement is needlessly and extraordinarily narrow. We tend to locate responsibility almost entirely at the moment of explicit instruction, as though speech and action are cleanly separable until a specific verbal threshold is crossed. That approach forces societies to wait until violence is imminent before acting, while treating years of ideological conditioning as irrelevant. It assumes that moral preparation is harmless so long as it avoids certain words.

Hizb ut-Tahrir operates comfortably within that space. It questions the legitimacy of liberal democracy, depicts Western societies as morally bankrupt, frames Jews as agents of global injustice, and presents political Islam as the only path to dignity and justice. Violence elsewhere is praised without being ordered. Martyrdom is romanticized without being demanded. None of this satisfies the Western legal definition of incitement, yet it steadily lowers the moral barriers that make violence against civilians unthinkable. On the contrary, for many, the logical conclusion from being influenced by such ideologies is violence.

Jewish ethical reasoning has never been so constrained. The concept of lifnei iver recognizes responsibility at the point where one predictably enables wrongdoing, not only at the moment of execution. Moral culpability attaches when a person removes obstacles to harm, even indirectly, even without intent. Speech that repeatedly renders violence excusable or noble is not treated as morally neutral simply because it avoids direct commands.

Seen through that lens, the problem posed by Hizb ut-Tahrir is not that it holds extreme beliefs, but that it functions as a preparatory environment. It habituates listeners to a worldview in which violence by others becomes morally intelligible. That places it in a different category from ordinary dissent or even radical critique, and it justifies a different kind of response.

This does not require banning ideas. It requires acknowledging that speech operates within systems. A society can restrict organizational activity, funding, coordination, and amplification when those structures predictably serve as pathways toward violence, without criminalizing theology or private belief. That approach is narrower, more defensible, and far less likely to metastasize than ideological prohibition.

Free speech in the West has gradually ceased to be treated as an instrument and has come to resemble an article of faith. It is defended as absolute, detached from consequences, and insulated from moral evaluation. That was never its original purpose. Free speech was meant to facilitate truth-seeking, protect dissent, and prevent tyranny. It was not meant to obligate societies to host movements whose explicit goal is to dismantle the conditions that make free speech possible - or to dismantle the host societies themselves.

Free speech cannot function as a suicide pact, but neither should it be reduced to a reflex that substitutes for thinking. The harder task is to take ideas seriously enough to evaluate how they function over time, at scale, and in emotionally charged environments.

The question, then, is not whether Hizb ut-Tahrir should be banned. It is whether Western societies are capable of developing a more mature understanding of incitement, one that accounts for moral enablement and foreseeable harm without granting the state a license to police belief. The system should be able to distinguish between reasonable ideas and "Globalize the Intifada!"

If that effort fails, the tools created to address groups like Hizb ut-Tahrir will not remain confined to them. History suggests they rarely do. And Jews are always going to be the first targets.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Since the 1970s, Neo-Nazis and far right extremists in Argentina have been claiming that Jews have been planning to buy up land in southern Argentina and Chile to create a Jewish state there. The conspiracy theory is called the Andinia Plan.

People still believe it. And every year, when there are forest fires, Israelis or Jews are blamed.

It is true that many Israelis go hiking in Patagonia and other regions, and some have accidentally started forest fires - one major one in 2011 that was started negligently by an Israeli backpacker. But now every fire is blamed on Jews, including new ones this year.

خلال التغطية الإعلامية لحرائق الأرجنتين، وفي لقاء صحفي مع امرأة أرجنتينية من المنطقة المتأثرة بالحرائق، حذرت المرأة وناشدت العالم للانتباه إلى حرائق الغابات المدمّرة والضخمة في الأرجنتين، مؤكدة أنها لم تكن طبيعية على الإطلاق .

تقول إن الحرائق دمّرت ما تصفه بجنتهم وتم إحراقه… pic.twitter.com/OPlVkQJD6V
— Tamer | تامر (@tamerqdh) January 11, 2026

The specific incident this year is that one man, Martín Morales, filmed tourists whom he identified as “Israehellis” making fires in Los Glaciares National Park, an area where fires are strictly prohibited. The video gives no indication or proof that the backpackers were actually Israeli. Even according to Morales, when he yelled at them they put out the fire. Yet that by itself was enough to restart incessant rumors yet again that the Jews want to burn down Patagonia to buy it cheaply from the government and make a new Jewish state.

El Diario 24 reports:

On Radio 10, journalist Marcela Feudale claimed that the fires in Patagonia had been started by two Israelis . These statements sparked outrage from figures such as Eduardo Feinmann, the president of the DAIA (Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations), Mauro Berenstein, and even President Javier Milei, who warned that this type of message, broadcast on major media outlets, promotes an anti-Israeli, anti-Jewish, and anti-Semitic stance.

One of the first to criticize Marcela Feudale's comments was journalist Eduardo Feinmann, who called his colleague "irresponsible." "Yesterday I heard the irresponsible Marcela Feudale on Radio 10 saying she had good sources indicating that the fires in Chubut were started by two Israelis. That is completely false. It was a deceitful and anti-Israeli comment ," the journalist wrote on his official X account.

Along the same lines, Mauro Berenstein, head of the Delegation of Argentine Jewish Associations (DAIA), emphasized that pointing to two Israelis as the cause of the fires without evidence is completely irresponsible and dangerous. "It creates stigmas and reinforces an anti-Jewish and hateful narrative . The media bears an enormous responsibility: lies are not opinions, and DAIA will not allow it," he stated.

The words of the DAIA president were echoed by Javier Milei, who described this scenario as "the dark side of Argentina ." The head of state also shared the statement of Congresswoman Sabrina Ajmechet, who warned that Feudale's remarks, in a context of increasing antisemitism, are irresponsible and put the Jewish community in an uncomfortable position.

According to the Buenos Aires City legislator, the Radio 10 journalist's message was not innocent, but rather had a purpose. "I don't think it was a coincidence. They use Israel and Jews to attack the government, and it's completely gotten out of hand. Today in Argentina, many live in fear for practicing their religion. We must consider the consequences of the messages we use as communicators," Ajmechet stated.

Once the conspiracy theory gets spread, people are quick to use it to fit their biases. So this pattern repeat every year.

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"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

01/11 Links: The courage of the Iranian people and the silence of the world; Why the same network that tormented Jewish students now defends Maduro

From Ian:

Why the same network that tormented Jewish students now defends Maduro

In a remarkable piece of investigative journalism published in Fox News, Asra Q. Nomani documented how a network of self-described Marxist and communist organizations mobilized pro-Nicolás Maduro protests across more than 100 American cities within 12 hours of his capture on Jan. 3 by U.S. forces. The minute-by-minute reconstruction reveals the operational capability that I described in my congressional testimony in December 2024: a sophisticated, foreign-funded rapid-response infrastructure operating on American soil.

Nomani’s reporting raises a critical question: What is this network actually built to do? The answer matters profoundly for understanding both the campus antisemitism many Jewish students experienced after the Hamas-led terrorist attacks in southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the broader threat to American foreign-policy coherence.

This infrastructure exists to mobilize immediate domestic opposition to U.S. actions that threaten authoritarian regimes aligned with Chinese and Russian interests. Not all anti-Israel protests fall into this category. But specific campaigns, particularly the “Shut It Down for Palestine” (SID4P) movement that blocked airports, bridges, tunnels and critical infrastructure, were organized by groups with documented ties to Neville Roy Singham, a Shanghai-based American tech billionaire who sold his company for $785 million.

What The New York Times investigation revealed in August 2023 was a global operation. Singham has been co-opting left-wing movements worldwide—from political parties in South Africa to news organizations in India and Brazil, systematically steering them toward pro-China Communist Party narratives. The Times tracked hundreds of millions of dollars flowing to groups that “mix progressive advocacy with Chinese government talking points.”

In South Africa, Singham’s network funded the Nkrumah School, which hosts boot camps attended by activists and politicians from across Africa. According to U.S. tax records, one of Singham’s nonprofits donated at least $450,000 for training at the school. But activists who attended these sessions began noticing something troubling. What was marketed as liberation politics increasingly took a pro-China tilt. New Frame, a South African news outlet funded by Singham, shut down in July 2022 after staff questioned why there was no coverage of Uyghur oppression or Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

This pattern of co-optation was repeated globally. In India, Singham funded NewsClick, which “sprinkled its coverage with Chinese government talking points.” In Brazil, funding went to Brasil de Fato, which interspersed articles about land rights with praise for Chinese leader Xi Jinping. The operational model was consistent: Find genuine progressive movements, provide substantial funding and gradually shift their focus toward CCP strategic priorities.

Who The Left Stands With By Abe Greenwald

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The Western left’s silence and inaction in response to the massive anti-regime demonstrations in Iran confirms what some of us have long known. Progressive activists are not pro-human-rights, pro-minority-rights, pro–women’s rights, pro-freedom, anti-racist, anti-authoritarian, pro-peace or anti-war, and they are definitely not pro-democracy.

What they are is anti-American and anti-Semitic. That’s it. Which means the only things they are for are America’s enemies and the world’s Jew-haters.

Some have asked: Where are the American demonstrations showing support for the courageous Iranians trying to bring down the theocratic regime that’s oppressed them for generations? The answer: They don’t exist, or at least not in numbers significant enough to have come to anyone’s attention.

But that doesn’t mean there aren’t protests happening in the U.S. right now. For example, last night, while Iranians were standing up to the mullahs, a crowd of keffiyeh-clad thugs swarmed a synagogue and Jewish school in Queens waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Say it loud, say it clear, we support Hamas here.” Set aside—if you can—that they were there to intimidate Jews. They were also declaring themselves on the side of the Iranian regime. Hamas, as we all know, is an Iranian-backed terrorist organization. That’s where their sympathies lie.

And that’s been the case for more than two years. Anti-Israel protesters in the U.S. and Europe have regularly waved the flags of Hamas and Hezbollah, which was, up until recently, almost an Iranian statelet in Lebanon. And sometimes they’ve brandished the Iranian flag itself. So long as you hate Jews and the U.S., you’ve got friends on the Western left.

Courage of Iranian women stands in stark contrast to Britain's face-masked cosplay revolutionaries

He styles himself a revolutionary, fighting for progress.

Week in, week out, he and his comrades gather in cities across the UK, chanting their support for Palestine and demanding the destruction of Israel.

On occasion, he’ll turn his attention elsewhere and stand outside a feminist conference, screaming abuse at attendees who refuse to buy into the fantasy that trans women are actually women.

Whether devoting himself to making Jews feel unsafe or spending miserable afternoons threatening women who reject the presence of men in changing rooms and rape crisis centres, the contemporary British radical goes equipped with two essentials.

The first is a terrifying certainty. The second is a face-mask.

I’ve never had much time for these cosplayers, these weekend insurgents with their incoherent views and their violent rhetoric but, over recent days, my contempt for them has only deepened.

Since December 28, people across Iran have been on their streets, demanding the end of the Islamic regime that has terrorised them for decades. With international media denied access to the country, citizens have, through shaky live streams on their smartphones, showed the world what real revolutionary courage looks like.

How small the masked undergraduate waving a Hamas flag on a British street looks when compared with those Iranian women who – under threat of the most horrific punishment – have thrown off the hijabs they are compelled to wear.

While British ideologues align themselves, from the safety of the West, with the Islamists of Hamas and Hezbollah, people across Iran are saying “no more” to the theocrats who, for years, have supported those terror groups.

And they are doing it with humbling bravery.

Watching shaky footage of a group of young women – their heads uncovered, their voices loud and clear – marching in protest while the sound of gunfire echoed around them, I found myself profoundly moved by their courage. Would I, I wondered, step up as they were now doing?

The most honest answer I could give myself was that I hoped so.

It has been depressing, if unsurprising, that those on the British left who scream so loudly about Palestine have had little to say about what’s happening in Iran. There have been no rallies of Keffiyah-clad protestors demanding support for the oppressed people of Iran.

But, then, how could they credibly have done so when Iran, under the leadership of Ali Khamenei, has been funding Islamist terror groups that share their unwavering hatred for Jews?

The only coherence in the incoherence is antisemitism

Here is video of a clash between anti-Ayatollah and anti-Israel protesters yesterday in Bellevue, WA:

NEW: Pro-Hamas radicals and Islamists are clashing with Iranian Americans calling for regime change in Tehran.
This is all happening now in the middle of downtown Bellevue, WA. https://t.co/FdPNYDDYl6 pic.twitter.com/BuqPT9vvmS
— Jonathan Choe (@choeshow) January 10, 2026

Many are noting online the utter insanity of white women who pretend to care about the oppressed fighting against protesters of the quite oppressive Iranian regime which is especially misogynist.

It is similar to the LGBTQ activists who have taken up pro-Hamas, anti-Israel positions when they are the ones who would be attacked if they lived under Palestinian rule.

Finding hypocrisy is easy, but these people have a coherent philosophy in the midst of their obvious incoherence. People and movements are not inconsistent - in their own mindset, they are supremely consistent. The only question is to find what that mindset is.

In the case of these white women in Washington, it isn't "supporting the oppressed." The Iranian people are the oppressed.

It isn't Marxism. They don't look like they've read Das Kapital. They aren't interested in fighting capitalism..

It isn't anti-Trump. Trump may have expressed support for the Iranian people but it is not exactly a centerpiece of his policy at this point.

It isn't anti-America. There are plenty of people who hate America but they are generally not motivated to go out in the streets unless there is a specific event. Anti-ICE protests are one of the sparks that do prompt demonstrations, but what thread is there between anti-ICE and pro-mullahs?

If this were simply about opposing American power or capitalism, we would see comparable mass mobilization around Yemen, Syria, Iran, or Venezuela. We do not. Only anti-Israel protests reliably produce crowds. That fact alone tells us where the emotional and ideological center of gravity lies.

The only coherence in the incoherence is hating Jews under the guise of "anti-Zionism."

Think about it. These women are the most obvious beneficiaries of white privilege on the planet. Many of the Western progressive activists involved here are well-off suburbanites. Israel functions as a moral proxy that allows Western activists to discharge guilt without implicating themselves or their societies. Israel becomes the universal symbol for "white oppressors" and Palestinians the symbol for "oppressed people of color" and in that way they can externalize their own white guilt by blaming the Jews as being everything they hate about themselves. (There is similar logic behind land acknowledgements - empty performance to feel righteous, but no one handing their houses to native Americans.)

This is not simple hypocrisy, because hypocrisy presumes a failure to live up to stated values. Here, the values themselves are not operative. What is operative is a symbolic map in which Israel stands in for ‘everything evil about power,’ regardless of facts.

So if Israel is against the Iranian regime, then the regime must be good. If Israel fights Hamas, Hamas must be good. If Hezbollah or Houthis shoot missiles into Israel, they must be good.

I'm not saying that these activists consciously hate Jews. But their moral framework reliably collapses political evil onto Jews and the Jewish state. Structurally, it is the same thing. And as we've seen more recently, this collapse often becomes classic antisemitism, as protests migrate to synagogues and targeting Jews particularly.

Similarly, most of these activists are not consciously pro-Khamenei. They are structurally indifferent to Iranian agency. Once Israel occupies the ‘oppressor’ slot, anyone opposing Israel is provisionally good – including theocrats, terrorists, or regimes that murder women.

Antisemitism, whether explicit or not, is the only consistent throughline to their otherwise inconsistent positions.

For those who want some pretense of support for their ridiculous and contradictory positions, there are plenty of left-wing writers who can string two sentences together and therefore become all the evidence needed. At this moment, the only article in The Intercept about the Iranian protests, from a week ago (!), blames - Israel.

An entire progressive news site looks at Iranians being shot in the streets and the only thing it can write about is how this is somehow connected to the Zionists.

Once Israel is fixed as the embodiment of oppression, reality becomes optional. Iranian dissidents can be ignored. Islamist brutality can be excused. Women’s rights can be suspended. The only constant is that whatever harms Israel must be good.

That isn't moral reasoning. It is ideological coherence maintained by positioning Jews as the permanent moral antagonist - not coincidentally, the same position Jews have held for centuries.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

Xueqin Jiang is a Chinese-Canadian educator. He went to Yale and is part of Harvard's Global Education Innovation Initiative. He was profiled in the New York Review of Books and written for CNN.

He's also is a rabid antisemite.

Jiang created a field called "Predictive History" where he pretends to use the concepts from Isaac Asimov's Foundation series to reproduce "psychohistory" to predict the future. His YouTube channel has 180,000 subscribers, and he has over 40,000 followers on his Substack.

A brief look at his recent YouTube lectures shows his predictions for 2026:

China, yeah, I mean, Japan and China and India, they're all going to have conflicts with each other. But also, what we should expect is that America starts to embargo China, meaning America uses its sea power to block China from accessing resources, more seas. And China imports most of its oil and a lot of its food. So if there's a blockade of China, you can expect the Chinese economy to really suffer.

But and then what we can expect to happen is America at some point will go to war with Iran and this will destroy both countries. Okay? Iran will not lose this war, but it won't win this war either because America is just going to bomb the crap out of Iran. It's going to send Iran back decades. But America will lose this war. But this is important because America loses war, it's forced out of the Middle East. And once it's forced out of the Middle East, all its military assets goes to Israel, which creates the Pax Judaica. Does that make sense, guys? That's the plan. Okay.

Now you have Pax Judaica. And what Pax Judaica will do is start to control the world because through chaos and conflict Pax Judaica can make a lot of money, right? Because Pax Judaica, what's going to happen is that you have these technology companies like Google, they're going to move over to Pax Judaica and build a global surveillance state. You have civil wars, you need AI to control people. If you're going to war with Russia, you need weapons, okay? But you also need financing as well. So, you can expect a lot of banks to move to Israel and it's possible Israel becomes now the global reserve currency because everyone is trading with Israel. If you're Russia, you need to trade your resources, right? Oil, energy, and grain. Okay? So, Russia controls a third of the world's carbohydrates. Guess what, guys? Israel controls Africa. So, what will happen is that Russia and other countries will sign a trade agreement with Israel and Israel becomes a center of global trade. Okay, does that make sense? So this is how Pax Judaica will profit and remember that Israel has the world's best intelligence agency the Mossad and what they can do is go around the world and create as much chaos as possible. Okay.

So while the world is burning, Israel Pax Judaica is profiting and that's what the future looks like for the next 10, 20 years. And this will of course lead to the rise of the antichrist who will take control of Pax Judaica and force the world to eventually attack Israel in something called the war of Gog and this will of course lead to second coming of Jesus. So, that's a grand plan. Okay. Right.

Starts around 30:00.

He is also an enthusiastic proponent of the Khazar theory and claims that 17th and 18th-century "apostate" messiahs Shabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank created a "Sabbatean-Frankist" cult that infiltrated global banking and intelligence, and that this group is the driving force behind a "satanic" globalist agenda.

Gemini AI estimates that he makes between $10-$30K a month on his Substack alone. Thousands more come from ads on his YouTube platform.

Chinese antisemitism is now a thing. It is unlike Western antisemitism but it is being used politically by the Chinese government to advance its own political agenda. It sees, accurately, that its own geopolitical position is enhanced by antisemitism. And influencers like Xueqin Jiang, broadcasting from the Chinese mainland, are not going to say anything their government does not want them to say.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The Guardian reports:

Circumcision is to be classed as a potential form of child abuse under new guidance for prosecutors, amid concerns from judges and coroners about deaths and serious harms caused by the procedure.

A draft document by the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) on “honour-based abuse, forced marriages, and harmful practices”, classes circumcision as a potential crime alongside breast flattening, virginity testing, hymenoplasty and exorcisms.

Wow, that's some company.

And what evidence do they bring to say that circumcisions are horrible?

According to the Office for National Statistics, since 2001 there have been seven deaths of boys under 18 where circumcision was a factor.

Seven deaths in 25 years is seven deaths too many. But without knowing the denominator, or comparing it to other procedures, how can we know how dangerous the practice really is?

We cannot, which is why The Guardian doesn't bother to ask basic question.

Like how many total circumcisions have been done in the UK in the same 25 years?

How does the death rate compare with that of other largely optional procedures that are regarded as generally safe?

Luckily, we have the answers to both.

In the UK, there are about 30,000 non-therapeutic circumcisions, which means over the 25 years, there was a rough fatality rate of about 1 in 100,000+ procedures.

Let's compare to tonsillectomies. In England, in hospitals, the mortality rate for tonsillectomies for children between 2008-2019 was 1 in 27,000, or roughly four times the death rate of circumcisions.

Not only that, but 7 out of 8 pediatric tonsillectomies were not medically necessary.

Did anyone call tonsillectomies "child abuse"? Of course not. They did what one would expect - the doctors studied the information and are now a lot more careful about the circumstances for when to recommend the procedure, and they learn how to do it safer.

Certainly circumcisions should be done by professionals, in an antiseptic environment, and ideally with easy access to medical personnel if there is a problem. That is what a responsible report would say. But a blanket labeling of the procedure as potential child abuse is not a sober description of facts, but a bigoted reaction - whether antisemitic, anti-Islamic or both. if some groups routinely do the procedure in unsafe circumstances, call that out, not the entire procedure.

The same people who claim to care so much about child abuse and bodily autonomy don't say a word about the number of children and babies who get infections from ear piercing (and it is not a small number, although rarely fatal.)

Bigotry is no less ugly when it masquerades behind caring about children. Arguably, it is worse.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)

The historic link between the West Midlands Police and the classic blood libel

In October 2025, West Midlands Police and the local Safety Advisory Group (SAG) in Birmingham announced a ban on supporters of Israeli football club Maccabi Tel Aviv attending a UEFA Europa League match at Aston Villa’s Villa Park on November 6, citing public safety and risk of disorder as the basis for the exclusion. The police initially justified the ban by pointing to intelligence of potential violence and “significant hooliganism” involving Maccabi fans, as well as concerns that segments of the local community might attack visiting supporters. It was based on false evidence that was manufactured after the fact.

I wondered about historic patterns where Jews were banned from public spaces ostensibly for public safety reasons. One striking example appears in Las Siete Partidas, the Castilian legal code compiled in the mid-13th century, which later became foundational law across Spanish territories, including colonial jurisdictions such as Spanish Florida and Louisiana.

Las Siete Partidas demands that Jews stay out of public spaces on Good Friday, because the Jews are suspected of attacking Christian children on that day:

Because we have heard it said that in some places Jews celebrated, and still celebrate Good Friday, which commemorates the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by way of contempt: stealing children and fastening them to crosses, and making images of wax and crucifying them, when they cannot obtain children; we order that, hereafter, if in any part of our dominions anything like this is done, and can be proved, all persons who were present when the act was committed shall be seized, arrested and brought before the king; and after the king ascertains that they are guilty, he shall cause them to be put to death in a disgraceful manner, no matter how many there may be.

If the Jews are attacked, it is their own fault and they are not entitled to legal protection:

We also forbid any Jew to dare to leave his house or his quarter on Good Friday, but they must all remain shut up until Saturday morning; and if they violate this regulation, we decree that they shall not be entitled to reparation for any injury or dishonor inflicted upon them by Christians.

Violence against Jews is thus pre-emptively excused, on the grounds that Jewish visibility itself constitutes provocation and Jews are the aggressors.

The parallel to the West Midlands case is difficult to ignore. British police justified the exclusion of Maccabi Tel Aviv supporters in part by invoking false accounts of events in Amsterdam in November 2024, that antisemites reported as Jewish-initiated attacks. In reality, subsequent investigations showed that Jewish and Israeli fans were targeted in premeditated, coordinated attacks organized via messaging platforms, explicitly calling for assaults on Jews.

In both cases, false antisemitic narratives were not merely tolerated but operationalized. Authorities accepted fabricated accusations at face value, treated Jewish presence as inherently dangerous, and justified exclusion as a neutral act of public safety. Violence driven by antisemitism was transformed into proof of Jewish culpability.

Also in both cases, authorities acknowledged that Jews would likely be attacked - but rather than treating the attackers as the problem, they treated Jewish presence as the threat. In medieval Spain, one reason Jews were banned from public view was because Christians might assault them. In modern Britain, Jews were barred from a football match because locals might attack them. In both instances, antisemitism was normalized as an immutable background condition, and Jews were burdened with the consequences.

This is the continuity that matters. The reasoning behind Las Siete Partidas and the decision by West Midlands Police is not simply similar; it is structurally identical. In both cases, antisemitic rumor becomes state evidence, anticipated antisemitic violence becomes a reason to restrict Jews rather than restrain attackers, and Jewish exclusion is presented as administrative necessity rather than moral failure. The logic is medieval, even when the language is modern.

Buy EoZ's books on Amazon!

"He's an Anti-Zionist Too!" cartoon book (December 2024)

PROTOCOLS: Exposing Modern Antisemitism (February 2022)