‘How Powerful Racist Parties Are Weaponising Political Antisemitism’

Search ‘antisemitism’ in this week’s news and you’ll find yourself in a matrix of allegations and counter-allegations that signal something everywhere and nowhere at all: from a Manchester manhunt following a violent attack, to false accusations against a respected academic.

Antisemitism shouldn’t be a contested issue. It’s racist hate and it’s on the rise, logged at varying steepness by police, Jewish charities and anti-hate groups.

Absolutely, antisemitism infects the Islamist militia now parading Israeli hostages, darkening the pained ideology of rejecting decades of oppression. But theirs is not the psychology characterising the antisemites at large in our mostly secular society.

The key cause of rising antisemitism in the West today is its political weaponisation by powerful racist parties, whose ascendence ultimately normalises the hate they claim to combat. On the one hand, the far right; on the other, Banjamin Netanyahu’s tinge of extremist Zionism.

“When antisemitism is weaponised, the idea of antisemitism loses its meaning,” said Andrew Feinstein on today’s episode of Media Storm. “There’s no need to try and make complex what is a very simple concept: antisemitism is a hatred of Jews as Jews.”

Feinstein — a second-generation Holocaust survivor who fought Apartheid alongside Mandela, tabled South Africa’s first motion on the Holocaust, and lectured at Auschwitz on genocide prevention — is no stranger to antisemitism.

Not a week goes by where someone doesn’t either call me a self-hating antisemitic Jew or describe my mother, because she survived the Holocaust hidden in a coal cellar for three years, as a ‘Kapo’, which is a Nazi collaborator

Andrew Feinstein, second-generation Holocaust survivor

Among his attackers are not just those who damn his Jewishness, but rabbis who condemn his criticisms of Israel.

There is no stronger evidence of the corruption of the term ‘antisemitism’ today, than the fact it forms the rhetorical glue in a strategic alliance between Netanyahu’s government and such deeply antisemitic far-right parties as Modi’s, Orban’s, Meloni’s, the AfD, and the Proud Boys–backed Trump.

The ideological factor that unites Netanyahu and historical fascists is not caring for Jewish lives, but using genocidal means to pursue their respective goals.

In other words, they are united by the shared need for a noble flag behind which to hide ignoble acts. But antisemitism is no one’s flag. Using it as such is an incredibly dangerous thing to do, as the current spike in antisemitic hate crimes testifies.

“Anti Zionism and antisemitism: they are one,” insists Netanyahu, the Israeli ruler to have singularly presided over the most Palestinian deaths and displacements in history. “This is the first and most essential point.”

Therein lies the problem—Alex Kane, senior reporter at Jewish Currents, explained on Media Storm. “It is often the case that when Israeli military operations occur, incidents of antisemitism spike, because people, in doing so, are conflating Zionism with Judaism.” Antizionist and antisemitic incidents are logged as one, just as antizionist criticisms are directed prejudicially against innocent Jewish individuals.

Perhaps the most confusing part is that Anti-Zionism originated as a Jewish political movement, developed by intellectuals around the same time as Zionism to reject its logic that the creation of a Jewish state is the only way to protect Jewish people.

The Anti-Zionist Jewish movement feared, by contrast, this could undermine Jewish people’s safety by making them more of a target.

Anti-Zionist views are held not just by millions of Jewish people worldwide, but thousands within Israel, who reject the idea of a Jewish state on the basis it would be inherently undemocratic and apartheid, in disenfranchising the millions of Palestinians and non-Jews with whom they share borders.

“Conflating Anti-Zionism with antisemitism is therefore not just an absurdity,” said Andrew Feinstein, “but very, very dangerous for Jewish people.”

Much of our media has facilitated this false equivalence. From regurgitating Suella Braverman’s description of pro-ceasefire marches as “hate marches” and London as a “no-go zone” for Jews whenever marches were planned—despite Jewish organisers being amongst the planners.

This fact was also abjectly ignored by news outlets who either did not bother, or did not care, to fact-check the apparent absence of Jewish attendees (it wasn’t difficult to find the groups of Holocaust survivors taking centre stage).

Feinstein appeared on the stage at these marches and found them to be “the opposite of hate marches”. He blames this characterisation on “the hate that is consuming the people who enunciate these hateful ideas”.

You see, today’s political binary finds its most unequivocal support for the government of Israel, here in Europe, on the far-right: among politicians and parties who have espoused some of the most racist views, and who descend from the most fascist lineages.

From Marine Le Pen in France — heiress of a political party founded by a father convicted for calling Holocaust gas chambers “merely a detail” in the war — to Giorgia Meloni in Italy, once part of a neo-fascist youth movement.

While tempting to celebrate moves by increasingly mainstream parties to distance themselves from antisemitic histories, we cannot ignore the fact that their apparent embrace of Jewish protection has been used to push thinly veiled hate for others.

We wrote in November about street violence in Amsterdam, following Maccabi Tel Aviv’s football match against Ajax. Heads of the far-right Dutch Party for Freedom (PVV) instantly reiterated Netanyahu’s comparisons of events to the Holocaust, in which 75% of Dutch Jews perished.

Who, then, did they blame for the violence?  Amsterdam’s “multicultural scum,” of course! Leader of the PVV Geert Wilders used the incident to threaten stripping Dutch Moroccans of citizenship.

This manipulative strategy is mirrored by Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD party, who repeatedly condemn the “imported antisemitism” of Muslim migrants while ignoring the fact that the vast majority of antisemitic crimes recorded by Germany’s Interior Ministry are committed by far-right extremists aligned politically with their party.

“Antisemitism is being weaponised for a far-right political agenda,” Feinstein said, adding that, “in doing so, it has turned the world upside down.”

The state of Israel today is prepared to label Jews who are not uncritical of the State of Israel ‘antisemites’, while counting amongst its closest allies…[some of] the most powerful antisemites

Andrew Feinstein, second-generation Holocaust survivor

Again, it’s easy to find media complicity in downplaying the antisemitism of the wealthy and powerful. Stark recent examples include Elon Musk’s hotly contested salute, and Kanye West’s Superbowl ad.

At an event following Trump’s swearing in as US President, Musk twice made a gesture that appeared to be the Heil Hitler salute, banned for its Nazi links in Germany. Not only did he never reject or deny supporting Nazism in the aftermath, he appeared two days later as the keynote speaker for the AfD.

The Apartheid-born South African also endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory on X after Hamas’ 7 October attack, retweeting it as “the actual truth”. He later sought to make amends by claiming X could have saved Jews from the Holocaust. Yet instead of taking the salute as an invitation to investigate Musk’s neo-Nazi links, the media descended into debate about whether or not the salute was offensive in the first place.

And after Kanye West aired an ad across Fox TV that directed people to a site selling a Swastika t-shirt, Fox’s CEO emailed staff to claim the ad was “completely outside of our station’s control”. And yet, West has repeatedly, publicly, proclaimed himself to be a Nazi.

Weeks before the ad, he went on a multi-day antisemitic rant on X, writing “I love Hitler” and (tellingly), “Elon stole my Nazi swag”. West has 31 million social media followers, Musk has 200 million on X alone.

“This is where we go from the territory of being angry, to being deeply, deeply concerned,” Feinstein reflected. “The impact of this is terrifying because impressionable people will see this and think ‘it’s actually okay for me to behave like a Nazi’.

“I fear that unless we do not do something about it, people are going to die as a consequence.”

Feinstein quotes his “old boss” Nelson Mandela in a plea to all enemies of racism to unite. “You are either against each and every form of racism, or you’re part of the racism problem.”

Media Storm’s episode, ‘Antisemitism: Israel, Anti-Zionism, and the politics of hate’ is out now.