This May, white nationalists found cause to rejoice. The culprit behind many of the bomb threats plaguing JCCs and Jewish schools around the country — a young American-Israeli man living in Ashkelon, in the south of Israel — was arrested. The teenager, apparently utilizing sophisticated identity-masking methods, was responsible for a yet-unknown but apparently large proportion of the bomb threats terrorizing toddlers, schoolchildren, and Jews at prayer, according to Israeli police.

For white nationalists like David Duke, the suspect’s religion was proof of a theory they had championed: that Jews, in a coordinated plot, had created the attacks to “get sympathy to push their ethnic agenda.” A popular meme, “Hey rabbi…watcha doin’?,” resurfaced: It depicts a hook-nosed Jewish stereotype spray-painting a swastika onto the wall of a synagogue. Reactions to the unlikely arrest further proved the durability, in a conspiratorial age, of the oldest conspiracy theory of all: anti-Semitism.

Defenders of Donald Trump viewed the arrest as a vindication of the president, whose few months in office have coincided with a striking rise in hate crimes. In a press briefing last week, Sean Spicer used the JCC bomb threat arrest to dismiss a question about an unrelated offense, urging the public not to “jump to conclusions” about the perpetrators of hate crimes — and stating that “the president was right.”

When asked in February about the steadily climbing number of anti-Semitic incidents during his time in office, including the bomb threats, President Trump had reportedly suggested that the Jewish community at large was behind the incidents.

10 Questions For My Anti-Semitic Trolls

“Sometimes it’s the reverse, to make people — or to make others — look bad,” Trump said, according to Pennsylvania Attorney General Josh Shapiro, who was present at a meeting between Trump and state attorneys general.

It was this insinuation that Spicer claimed the arrest of a 19-year-old in Ashkelon had vindicated. But in his conversation with the attorneys general, Trump did not cite evidence from a months-long joint investigation between the F.B.I. and Israeli authorities that led to Ashkelon’s arrest. Nor would it be right to draw conclusions about the political motivations of a single, warped individual whose lawyer has stated that a brain tumor may have contributed to his alarming behavior. Moreover, most of the 330 incidents of anti-Semitic hate crime ProPublica has documented since January have been impossible to conduct remotely, such as the swastikas daubed on sidewalks and synagogues. The NYPD cites a 94% increase in anti-Semitic hate crime compared to this time last year; meanwhile, several high-profile incidents of cemetery vandalism — resulting in the toppling of hundreds of Jewish gravestones in Philadelphia and St. Louis — as yet have no confirmed culprits.

The NYPD cites a 94% increase in anti-Semitic hate crime compared to this time last year.
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What is certain, however, is that Trump’s answer on anti-Semitism — positing, without citing evidence, a political plot — encapsulates his tendency to think conspiratorially. It’s a tendency he’s shown for years, before and throughout his presidential campaign and ascent to power, from birtherism to phantom wiretaps. But it manifests most clearly in the way he clings to falsehood, no matter how many times he is presented with fact. Trump has been a guest on InfoWars, Alex Jones’ notorious conspiracy-peddling radio show; he prefers the expostulations of 9/11 truther and ousted Fox News contributor Andrew Napolitano to those of his own Department of Justice. In the President’s mind, Ted Cruz’s dad helped kill JFK, Barack Obama literally founded ISIS, and the Jews, as a whole, are threatening their own kindergartens. (The tenacity of these beliefs was put on astonishing display in a recent interview with Time magazine.)

The mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking and the rise in overt hostility towards Jews are intimately connected. As Alana Newhouse put it in Tablet Magazine, anti-Semitism is not a social prejudice against Jews. It has very little to do, Newhouse writes, with any individual’s distaste for perceived Jewish traits, or even antipathy towards specific Jews. Anti-Semitism in its classic sense is the belief that there is a malevolent entity behind the curtain, pulling the strings, and that that entity is a Jew.

The mainstreaming of conspiratorial thinking and the rise in overt hostility towards Jews are intimately connected.
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“Racism is a prejudice, but it’s not rooted in conspiracy theory, as anti-Semitism is,” Deborah Lipstadt, a prominent scholar of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, told me in an interview last September. Anti-Semitism is present, too, in nearly every conspiracy-theory community; Lipstadt noted, for example, the outsize presence of the Mossad in “alternate” theories of 9/11. Even people from deeply marginal movements, like those who embrace Flat Earth Theory — the belief, as the name suggests, that the earth is really flat and NASA is a sinister fraud — frequently blame the Jews for their role in the “cover-up” of earth’s flatness. As one poster on the Flat Earth Society message board put it, space missions are “all lies…as you’d expect from a media/government/academia totally controlled by jews[sic].”

Trump’s campaign — and presidency — have played repeatedly into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. One infamous tweet juxtaposed Hillary Clinton, a Jewish star, and piles of cash. And a late-stage campaign ad depicted American Jews like Janet Yellen and George Soros as a narrator solemnly intoned about “trillions of dollars” in the hands of “global special interests.” Behind the anti-Semitic dog whistles lurked a braying pack of alt-right hounds who did not hesitate to savage Jewish critics and their supporters alike.

Trump’s campaign — and presidency — have played repeatedly into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.
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The notion that some malevolence lurks in Jewish singularity, that a refusal to assimilate is a cover for darker impulses, is an ancient one. In the Medieval era, Jews were said to have poisoned wells, to bake the blood of Christian children into matzahs. With the advent of industrialization, theories of Jewish malevolence grew broader and darker: 19th-century nationalists depicted Jews as inherently disloyal to their countries, their purported loyalty to the nebulous entity of “world Jewry” supplanting their loyalty to their own homelands. In the last century, Nazi cartoons depicted the Jew as an octopus encircling the globe, slimy tentacles smothering every continent. A 1940 Nazi film sought to cast this characterization as a timeless truth: It was called “The Eternal Jew.”

Last year, the term “fake news” came into prominence to describe a rash of false accounts, of dubious and possibly Russian origin, promulgated in the lead-up to the Presidential election. Since then, the term has boomeranged against its makers — and is frequently to be heard from a President openly hostile to the media. For Jews, however, the original “fake news” (also, incidentally, of Russian origin), dates back more than a century, to the 1903 publication of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the principal modern text of anti-Semitic conspiracy — and an object lesson in how difficult it is to debunk appealing falsehoods.

The Protocols purported to be a record of a meeting between Jewish leaders, and was initially presented as the minutes of the first World Zionist Congress in Basel, in 1897. The text listed arenas of the modern world over which Jews sought to establish control — from banks to the press to modern states themselves, and their wars; the Elders’ plan would culminate in a totalistic Jewish domination of the world. After its original appearance in the Russian newspaper Znamya in 1903, it was translated into German and widely disseminated in 1920; it was presented to American audiences as The International Jew the same year. What is remarkable — and sadly illustrative — about the text was that its debunking was nearly simultaneous with its promulgation. In 1920 the Protocols were revealed to be a clumsy fake, largely plagiarized from a 19th-century French work of political satire, Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The Times of London ran a 1921 exposé; in 1924, a German-language debunking was published by journalist Benjamin Segel.

And yet Hitler used it extensively in his campaign to illustrate Jewish malevolence; so, too, did Henry Ford and Father Charles Coughlin, in the United States. Forty-three years after the New York Herald first published its takedown of the Protocols, “The History of a Lie,” the Senate Judiciary Committee felt compelled to publish its own report, calling the work “A Fabricated ‘Historic’ Document” in 1964. But the work continues to be published all over the world, and is readily available online, to astound first-time readers who may feel as if the curtain is finally being lifted — the dark plot undergirding their unhappiness at last unveiled. The continual success of the Protocols is a stark illustration of the swift spread of alluring untruths, and the ways in which debunking fake news cannot curb its continual appeal.

Fake news — like conspiracy theories — can be immune to fact-based reproach. They resonate with devotees precisely because they contradict the consensus view of reality with which they are unhappy, and purport to vanquish defenders of the status quo.

Anti-Semitism is non-partisan. It exists both on the right and on the left (though leftist anti-Semites often sub in “Zionists” for “Jews”) lurking on the fringes, wherever counter-narratives to established truth are offered to eager listeners. (I am not conflating anti-Zionism, or harsh criticism of the Israeli government, with anti-Semitism; rather, I refer to those on the far left who are eager to explain how Zionists rig elections worldwide, and how global capitalism is shaped by Jewish greed and Rothschild gold.) In times that feel profoundly unstable, and in which the nature of reality is drawn into question by the executive branch of the American government itself, alternative explanations, with their sinister Soroses, are more appealing than ever.

For American Jews, many of whom have felt profound comfort and inclusion in the past half-century — and who have, in turn, shaped American culture in profound ways — the events of the past few months have been deeply unsettling. Warning knells sounded throughout a conspiracy-laced campaign, as Jewish journalists covering Trump faced unprecedented volumes of anti-Semitic abuse. But the two-fronted attack on preschools and cemeteries, children and the dead, coupled with swastika graffiti cropping up on street corners and synagogues, have left a sense of profound unease in their wake. (“Are Jews White?” asked a December headline in the Atlantic, a potent summation of these fears.)

In times that feel profoundly unstable, alternative explanations, with their sinister Soroses, are more appealing than ever.
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A popular European story in the 15th century told the tale of the “Wandering Jew,” an immortal Jerusalem shoemaker cursed to wander from place to place for eternity. The term became a metonym for the Jewish people themselves— illustrative of both their immortality and the impermanence of their residence in any one country. While this was — and continues to be — cast as a malevolent Jewish trait, the central irony is that that impermanence is caused by the rise of prejudice against a minority that has retained its separateness, and its traditions, for millennia. The postwar embrace of Jews in America felt giddy, complete, perhaps eternal. And yet thousands of Jews facing hate crimes across the country have been driven to question that permanence this year.

In an era in which reality itself is in dispute, can America’s Jews dodge the rise of the most enduring conspiracy theory of all?

“The media are acting grossly irresponsible [sic] to incriminate Britain First in this heinous crime. We wouldn’t do something like that, we have protests, we stand in elections . . . That’s the political activity we carry out. Yes, we take direct action sometimes, we invade Halal slaughterhouses because we disagree with Halal slaughter, but this is an outrage.”

By Emma Yeomans

EDITOR’S NOTE: In a referendum today, The United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union, undermining 43 years of regional cooperation. What’s ensued is effectively chaos — global markets lost $2 trillion in value and British Prime Minister David Cameron announced his resignation. The move has been resoundingly condemned by the likes of Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and has caused caused shock and confusion stateside, as the U.S. readies for its own presidential elections in November.

Most fearfully, it has legitimized the toxic rhetoric of U.K. Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who has repeatedly linked the refugee crisis to an “E.U. failing,” called June 23 the country’s “independence day,” and said on live TV today that the leave campaign won “without a single bullet being fired.”

His words highlight the shocking outcome’s connection to xenophobia and growing white supremacy within the UK, dangerous ideologies that have been propelled in no small part by a group called Britain First. When MP Jo Cox was recently murdered by a far-right supporter who yelled “Britain First” as he killed her, the group landed in the news; today, their influence feels even more devastatingly potent.

In 2011, a political party called Britain First was founded in Belfast, Northern Ireland. The group got off to a rocky start, with leadership squabbles, name changes, and clashes with other parties, including the notorious British National Party (BNP). But for all their troubles, they got one thing right: their social media strategy.

They quickly gained popularity on Facebook, mixing viral shareable images with far-right “memes.” They attracted criticism for their Islamophobic and xenophobic messages, but were largely ignored outside of Facebook. The likes went up, their reach increased.

When they began “Christian patrols” — marching around areas with large Muslim populations and attempting to invade mosques — the outrage at their activities grew.

But so, too, did their online following.

Today they have 1.4 million Facebook likes, and their posts regularly attract thousands of shares. They advocate leaving the European Union, stopping immigration, abolishing the Human Rights Act, and a complete ban on Islam. Their followers can join activist training camps, where they learn knife-fighting and survival skills. The group is extreme, yet in terms of Facebook reach, they are the most popular party in the country — with more likes than the ruling Conservative and opposition Labour parties combined.

Then last week, a Member of Parliament, Jo Cox, was shot and stabbed in her constituency. Her attacker, a far-right supporter with links to neo-Nazi groups, reportedly yelled “Britain First” as he killed her.

As disbelief turns to grief among her local community and Westminster colleagues, and the country comes to terms with the first murder of an MP in 26 years, Britain First and other far-right groups find themselves in the spotlight. Fifty-two-year-old Thomas Mair was arrested and charged with her murder; in court he gave his name as “Death to traitors, freedom for Britain.”

Britain First has denied any link to the attack and, in a statement issued shortly before Cox passed away in hospital, leader Paul Golding said:

He also denied that Mair was linked to Britain First, adding: “We’re in the middle of a referendum campaign. Was he referring to a slogan? I’ve heard loads of people say that we must put Britain first, that’s just the language being utilized during this campaign.”

In that last respect, he is right. Britain’s debate about whether or not to remain a member of the European Union has been marred by nationalist and anti-refugee rhetoric.

Hope Not Hate is the UK’s largest anti-racism advocacy group, working within marginalized or divided communities to build safe spaces and encourage voter registration. They monitor the far-right and have revealed and recorded Britain First’s growth. The referendum campaign, they say, has taken Britain down a “darker, more divisive path.”

Said a Hope Not Hate representative:

“These are trying times when certain segments of our society — in Europe, and in the USA — are fearful, angry, resentful of what they feel are elite and out-of-touch politicians. It’s true that established politicians for too-long ignored the white working class, ignored areas experiencing de-industrialization, ignored the tensions emerging. Right-wing and far-right populist parties have been rising across the continent based on this message and that, by closing borders and turning back the clock, we can somehow return to a mythical ‘good old days.’

“Here in the UK, the UK Independence Party (UKIP) has been using increasingly far-right imagery and rhetoric as it campaigns to leave the EU, creating posters showing Syrian refugees and claiming we’re at ‘Breaking Point.’ Some of this imagery is not far removed from 1930s Nazi propaganda, although UKIP is not a ‘Nazi party,’ nor are its voters necessarily all racist.”

The poster in question, revealed last week, shows a long line of refugees at the border of Croatia and Slovakia. They appear weary, hurt, desperate. It has been condemned by both sides, but still demonstrates just how common anti-immigration, anti-refugee, anti-Islam rhetoric has become.

Rhetoric and images that once belonged to the far-right are becoming increasingly normalized in British politics. As the refugee crisis in the Mediterranean has unfolded, right-wing newspapers initially reacted with horror at the potential influx of people. One now-infamous article called people fleeing conflict “a plague of feral humans,” turning British towns into “festering sores plagued by swarms of migrants.” Even Prime Minister David Cameron described those crossing the Mediterranean as a “swarm.”

Fiyaz Mughal is director of Tell MAMA, short for Measuring Anti Muslim Attacks. They record Islamophobic hate crimes and provide support to victims, and have witnessed the adoption of anti-Muslim rhetoric into mainstream politics.

He explained:

“Memes and graphics that far right groups circulate have some common themes. They promote dehumanization and a ‘them and us’ view when highlighting Muslims in the graphics. For example, graphics might play on fears that Muslims will assault young girls and bring up the grooming scandals in Rotherham [where a gang of men groomed and assaulted more than 1400 girls]. They also draft up graphics suggesting that the culture of Britain will change and highlight Niqab-wearing women who are in the very tiny minority within British Muslim women.

The aim is to play on fears and insecurities, as though Britain, its culture and its people are under threat. Add to this the political validation of some of these messages through other groups like UKIP, who are not a far right group, and you have legitimization of such toxic material.”

These are not empty slogans. London Metropolitan Police records show that hate crimes against Muslims have nearly doubled in the last two years, a trend backed up by Tell MAMA. Among recent reports submitted to them are vandalism of mosques, women having their scarves yanked off, and violent assaults, including an elderly man beaten unconscious in the street.

Hope Not Hate has records of Islamophobic violence in far-right groups dating back to the ’90s. While many organized far-right groups, such as the British National Party and English Defense League, have collapsed, violent and extreme fringe groups have taken their place. Hope Not Hate explained:

“Britain First, which is led by ex-BNP people and claims to represent a Christian faith, spends most of its time harassing Muslims, then carefully films reactions in order to present Muslims in the worst possible light. Then you have the Infidels movements, specifically the North West Infidels, which is a violent splinter group from the EDL’s breakup and has been involved in targeting pro-immigration activists and anti-racism campaigners.

“While these groups have very few members, the power of social media extends their reach. And there will always be someone that they hope will take up their message of hate and extend it to its logical extreme.”

However, Hope Not Hate has observed another trend. Polling data shows that young people are more positive about inclusivity and diversity than any previous generation. The result, they say, is that British society is “polarizing around different identity tribes” — some positive about the country, some negative, and many vacillating between the two. “The old two-party system can no longer adapt to those changing identities,” they said, “so we’re entering a turbulent period where demagogues and populists from all sides may seek to exploit these tensions.”

A generation of tolerance and inclusivity: It’s a ray of hope for those marginalized and hurt in the fight over the nature of British identity, and a dream that will provide comfort in the wake of violence. But as the war of words rages on, advocacy groups like Hope Not Hate and Tell MAMA certainly have their work cut out for them.

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Lead image: flickr/wisegie