How to Get Away With Anti-Semitism

S E E D E D   C O N T E N T

Out of 8 billion people on the planet, there are only 16 million Jews—but far, far more anti-Semites. I sometimes joke that if I had fewer scruples, I wouldn’t report on anti-Jewish prejudice; I’d contract myself out to the more numerous and better-resourced bigots, and help them get away with it. Because in more than a decade covering anti-Semitism, I have become a reluctant expert in all the ways that anti-Jewish activists obfuscate their hate.

People must learn to recognize and reject these tactics, because too many communities have developed ways to excuse or otherwise ignore anti-Semitism. Today, such prejudice is growing in high and low places because powerful people around the world are running the same playbook to launder their hate into the public sphere.

Here’s how they do it:

1. They become too big to fail.   Over the past six months, Elon Musk has publicly   affirmed   the deadliest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in recent American history,   claimed   that Jews and Jewish organizations cause anti-Semitism, and   echoed   extremist conspiracy theories about the Jewish financier George Soros.   As a result, the billionaire has lost a few advertisers on his social-media platform, and even got   rapped   by the White House. But as   The   New York Times   reported , even as the U.S. government criticized Musk, it continued to buy things from him.

In fact, in recent months, Musk has raked in Pentagon cash, including more than $1 billion in exchange for launching spy satellites and other intelligence assets into orbit through his lucrative space-exploration venture, SpaceX. In September, days after Musk attacked the Anti-Defamation League and   suggested   that Jews cause anti-Semitism, he   met   with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss artificial intelligence. The magnate subsequently   signed   a deal worth up to $70 million to provide the U.S. government with a secure satellite communications system. “Rarely has the U.S. government so depended on the technology provided by a single technologist,” the   Times   wrote. Meanwhile, diverse actors ranging from the   ADL   to   Representative Ilhan Omar   keep advertising on Musk’s social-media site, his rich friends   continue   to defend him, and, last week, he was   featured   at a   Times   event.

Musk has similarly been wooed by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government, who—like Ukraine’s leadership—want to stay on the entrepreneur’s good side so that he doesn’t use technology like his   Starlink satellite internet   to   harm   their war efforts. Precisely because Musk plays a leading role in so many industries that are essential to humanity’s future—electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, space technology—no country can quit him, not even one as powerful as the United States or as Jewish as Israel. Likewise, no matter how many dinners Donald Trump   has with anti-Semites   such as Ye (formerly Kanye West) and Holocaust deniers such as Nick Fuentes, he will not be penalized for it by Republicans, because he is too essential to their party to be discarded.

This characteristic is what separates the big-league bigots who get away with it from those who don’t. Ye’s mistake was that he invested his talents in producing music and sneakers rather than something more indispensable to human flourishing, such as precision-guided ballistic missiles.

2. They don’t say the quiet part out loud.   Those who want to fulminate about the Jews but lack the singular clout of Elon Musk still have plenty of options. They just need to be slightly more subtle about their prejudice. Take Tucker Carlson, once the most-watched man on cable news, who used his show to popularize a sanitized version of the same “Great Replacement” theory that Musk recently endorsed, which posits that Jewish elites are plotting to supplant the white race through the mass immigration of brown people. This white-supremacist fantasy   motivated   the 2018 massacre of worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, among other   recent attacks . How did Carlson get such an unhinged idea on television? He   repeated   the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory—“They’re trying to change the population of the United States, and they hate it when you say that because it’s true, but that’s exactly what they’re doing”—but   left out   the word   Jews   and let the audience fill in the blank.

This time-honored technique provides even the most pointed prejudice with plausible deniability. In particular, whenever you see politicians or celebrities darkly ruminating about an amorphous “they” covertly controlling events, chances are good that you are seeing this strategy in action. Consider Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has led Turkey, a member of NATO, since 2003. In 2014, he began darkly referring to a “mastermind” behind the country’s ills:

Don’t be misled. Don’t think that these operations are against my persona, our government, our party. Friends, these operations are rather directed against Turkey itself—its unity, its peace, its economy, its independence. And as I have said before, behind all these steps there is a mastermind. People ask me, “Who is this mastermind?” Well, you have to figure that out. And actually, you know what it is.

Erdoğan was not talking about the Amish. His allies subsequently produced a movie titled  The Mastermind , which aired on pro-government TV stations and helpfully  opened  with an image of a Star of David. “At every stage,” the Turkish commentator Mustafa Akyol  wrote  at the time, “the film reminds us how the Judaic ‘mastermind’ has oppressed humanity for thousands of years.” As Erdoğan has consolidated his essentially unchecked power, he has become  more forthright  in his anti-Semitism, and faced no international consequences.

3. They replace   Jew   with   Zionist .   In 1934, Representative Louis McFadden of Pennsylvania took to the floor of Congress to complain about Jewish control of the American financial system. “Is it not true,” he   bemoaned , “that, in the United States today, the gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the gold?” Today, this sort of rhetoric is frowned upon in polite society, but aspiring anti-Semites have a work-around: substituting each instance of   Jews   with   Zionists   or   Israelis . Then:   The Jews control the world.   Now:   The Zionists control the world.

With this simple switch, prejudice magically becomes mere criticism of Israel. Social-media companies  won’t moderate it , and many activists will defend it. People can even make their anti-Semitic argument live on CNN, as Pakistan’s foreign minister  did  in 2021, when he claimed that Israel controls the media. In this manner, an ancient conspiracy theory is updated to appeal to partisans in the 21st century, many of whom will insist that they don’t have an anti-Semitic bone in their body. Of course, Zionism warrants critique like any other political ideology, but conspiracism is not criticism. This is what Martin Luther King Jr. was referring to when he  said , “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.”

One person who has mastered this maneuver is the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, the man   responsible   for the most anti-Jewish violence in the world today. In 2021, he   posted   on social media: “The Zionists have always been a plague, even before establishing the fraudulent Zionist regime. Even then, Zionist capitalists were a plague for the whole world. Now they’re a plague especially for the world of Islam.”

In case the references to rapacious capitalists and comparisons of people to disease didn’t give it away, Khamenei was also not talking about the Amish. He was taking garden-variety anti-Semitism, replacing the word   Jews   with   Zionists , and relying on his audience being too dense or partisan to care. Similarly, when the Republican politician Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia   posted   a video on her Facebook page declaring that “Zionist supremacists” were “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands,” she was drawing from the same poisoned well. Coded language has always served to smuggle bigotry into the public discourse, and anti-Semitism is no exception.

4. They say they were just “supporting Palestine.”   Earlier this month, the actor Susan Sarandon was dropped by her talent agency. It was a mostly symbolic gesture, because the celebrated performer continues to get work and others will be happy to represent her. But almost immediately,   viral   posts   on social media viewed more than 50 million times claimed that she had been punished for her pro-Palestinian advocacy. This popular narrative had only one small flaw: It was false.

As  Deadline   reported , the words that got Sarandon in trouble were not about Palestinians or Israelis. At a rally in New York, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, the actor referred to rising anti-Semitism in America and  declared , “There are a lot of people that are afraid, afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.” In reality, since the FBI began  tracking  hate crimes, Jews have been  subjected  to more anti-religious attacks than all other groups combined, despite constituting just 2 percent of the American population. This includes the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, multiple  synagogue   shootings  in California, and a Texas congregation being  taken hostage  in 2022. Erasing anti-Semitism and attempting to pit American Jews and Muslims against each other in some sort of debased oppression Olympics is not “support for Palestine.” It’s ignorance at best and malice at worst, which is why  Deadline  accurately headlined its story “UTA Drops Susan Sarandon as Client Following Recent Antisemitic Remarks She Made at a Rally in New York.”

On social media, none of this mattered. Sarandon was misleadingly cast as a martyr for the Palestinian cause and celebrated by a diverse array of notables, including the journalist  Glenn Greenwald , the presidential candidate  Cornel West , several prominent  progressive   activists , and even the  head  of a human-rights group. None of these people linked to or acknowledged the actual substance of Sarandon’s remarks, even when confronted by commenters who raised them. None has corrected their claims.

Sarandon   apologized   on Friday, two weeks after her original statement. But the sleight of hand others used to defend her—in which apologetics for anti-Jewish violence are disingenuously recast as Palestinian advocacy—is endemic to our current discourse. Last month, an activist   told   a public-radio journalist that he’d been receiving “50 hate calls an hour” over a pro-Palestinian speech he delivered at an October 8 rally. But what he actually did was explicitly cheer the murder of civilians and declare, “I salute Hamas—a job well done.” This fact appeared nowhere in the published story, which said only that he “spoke in support of Palestine.”

Pro-Palestinian activism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which is why it’s important that when people say bigoted things about Jews or support violence against them, their words should not be conflated with Palestinian advocacy. But unfortunately, too many anti-Semites   wrap themselves   in the Palestinian cause, and too many partisans are happy to let them do so. This does not help any Palestinians, as it tends to tar their cause with prejudice, but it does insulate a fair number of anti-Semites from the consequences of their words or actions. That’s why in recent weeks, many bigots have attempted to use the Palestinian plight as their alibi,   vandalizing   Jewish   institutions   around the world,   including   synagogues   and   kosher   restaurants , with “Free Palestine” and related slogans.

Every community has biases—toward the rich and powerful, toward ideological allies—that leads it to excuse bad behavior it would otherwise repudiate. But such excuses for prejudice work only because we allow them to. Covert anti-Semitism tends to turn into overt anti-Semitism. Until we start seriously confronting the former, we can expect more of the latter.