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Antisemitic trope

False claims about Jews and Judaism

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Since the 2nd century, malicious allegations of Jewish guilt have become a recurring motif in antisemitic tropes, which take the form of libels, stereotypes or conspiracy theories. They typically present Jews as cruel, powerful or controlling, some of which also feature the denial or trivialization of historical atrocities against Jews. Antisemitic tropes mainly evolved in monotheistic societies, whose religions were derived from Judaism, many of which were traceable to Christianity's early days. These tropes were mirrored by 7th-century Quranic claims that Jews were "visited with wrath from God" due to their supposed practice of usury and disbelief in his revelations. In medieval Europe, antisemitic tropes were expanded in scope to justify mass persecutions and expulsions of Jews. Particularly, Jews were repeatedly massacred over accusations of causing epidemics and "ritually consuming" Christian babies' blood.

In the 19th century, lies about Jews plotting "world domination" by "controlling" mass media and global banking spread, which mutated into modern tropes about them being behind liberalism, capitalism and eventually a major libel that Jews "invented and promoted communism". These tropes fatefully formed Adolf Hitler's worldview, contributing to World War II and the Holocaust, which killed six million Jews and millions of others. Since the 20th century, the use of antisemitic tropes has been documented among various groups, including some that self-identify as "anti-Zionists".

Most contemporary tropes feature the denial or trivialization of anti-Jewish atrocities, especially the denial or trivialization of the Holocaust, or of the Jewish exodus from Muslim countries. Holocaust denial and antisemitic tropes are inextricable, typical of which is the libel that the Holocaust was "fabricated" or "exaggerated" to "advance" Jews' or Israel's interests.

Political tropes

World domination

The publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 is usually considered the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature. The trope embodied by the book is manifested in both writings and imagery, where Jews are accused of plotting world domination nefariously. Typical examples include Nazi-originated cartoons depicting Jews as a giant octopus reaching across the globe. A 2001 Egyptian reprint of Henry Ford's antisemitic text The International Jew had the same octopus imagery on the front cover.

Among the earliest refutations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery were a series of articles printed in The Times in 1921, which revealed the forgery's content to have been plagiarized from the unrelated satire The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. The Russian imperial state popularized the forgery to discredit the Bolsheviks by accusing Jews of organizing the Russian revolution. The forgery scapegoated Jews as the leading subversive force to try to dispel mass revolt and keep the empire united.

Later, the trope spread westward when the Great Depression and Nazism's rise catalyzed its dissemination. A Polish equivalent goes by Judeopolonia, which posited an imaginary Jewish domination of Poland. Contemporarily, the trope often goes by Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG), which accuses the Jews of "controlling Western governments" for selfish ends, like benefitting Israel. The ZOG is widely peddled by antisemites, such as the Neo-Nazis, white nationalists, Islamists and black supremacists.

Malcolm X, a well known Black American activist, believed in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he introduced to the Nation of Islam (NOI) for circulation among their Black American audience. In 2003, the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed drew a standing ovation at an OIC conference after alleging:

Today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them [...] They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong [...] they have gained control of the most powerful countries.

The New Black Panther Party (NBPP), a black separatist group, has actively peddled the myth. Prior to a 2006 Democratic primary runoff in the U.S. state of Georgia, the NBPP alleged

So-called Jews in Israel in what's really Palestine...some player haters, some Zionists, some so-called Jews who the Book of Revelations [...] calls the Synagogue of Satan.

When the NBPP-backed candidate Cynthia McKinney lost to her rival Hank Johnson, NBPP's members alleged "Jewish electoral domination".

In April 2017, Politico magazine published an article alleging "links" between the then–U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian dictator Vladimir Putin and Jewish religious group Chabad. Jonathan Greenblatt (CEO) of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) condemned the article as "evok[ing] age-old myths about Jews". In December 2023, Australian Green MP Jenny Leong, echoed Mahathir Mohammed's 2003 speech at a Palestine Justice Movement forum:

the Jewish lobby and the Zionist lobby are infiltrating into every single aspect of what is ethnic community groups [...] they rock up to every community event because their tentacles reach into the areas that try and influence power.

Leong apologized after being condemned. Whereas, the "Jewish power" myth is often veiled as the "criticism" of "Jewish plutocrats" allegedly behind political changes. For instance, QAnon conspiracy theorists believe in the existence of a "satanic cabal" of global elites (globalists) "drinking children's blood" to achieve "world domination". Two-time heavyweight world champion Tyson Fury also believes in a "Zionist plot" to "lower" public moral standard via the media and finance. As per Argentine-Israeli educator Gustavo Perednik, antisemites often pass off their aggressive instinct as a "struggle" of "the oppressed" against the "powerful" to maximize its appeal to left-wing audience.

Controlling the media

Another common antisemitic trope is that "the Jews control the media and Hollywood". In Eastern Europe, the Czech politician Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, believed that Jews "controlled the press", despite his previous objection to antisemitism during the Hilsner affair. In Western Europe, Arthur Griffith, the founder of the Sinn Féin party decisive to Ireland's independence, was subscribed to the "Jewish media control" trope. Griffith alleged that Dublin newspapers were

almost all Jew rags [...] Fifty other rags like those which have nothing behind them but the forty or fifty thousand Jewish usurers and pick-pockets in each country and which no decent Christian ever reads except holding his nose as a precaution against nausea.

Griffith's antisemitism is still present in the party. For instance, lower house parliamentarian Réada Cronin alleged in 2020 that Jews were "responsible for European wars" and "Adolf Hitler was a pawn of the [Jewish] Rothschilds [...may] not have been too far wrong". In the United States, J.J. Goldberg, The Forward's editorial director, published a study of such trope in 1997. He concluded that despite Jews being "disproportionately represented" in the media, that those Jews are the most assimilated and therefore do not make a high priority of Jewish concerns. His example being the perceived negative treatment of Israel in the American media.

Variants on this theme focus on Hollywood, the press and the music industry.

White genocide conspiracy theory

Since 2015 when the European migrant crisis happened, the White genocide conspiracy theory has gained traction among white nationalists. Jews are often accused of facilitating unrestricted non-white immigration to alter the fabric of White-majority societies. Such libel is often peddled in conjunction with older myths, like the "Jewish power", to raise its plausibility among the targeted audience. Much of such sentiment stems from an extinction anxiety about the majority White population becoming outnumbered by the non-white population, who are often assumed as "foreign" and "incompatible" with the mainstream. Elon Musk, the current owner of X (formerly Twitter), has endorsed the theory in a tweet.

In the US, there have been several terrorist attacks associated with the belief in the theory, the most recent of which include the 2017 Unite the Right rally, where dozens of casualties occurred in a car ramming attack, and the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, where 11 were killed and 7 injured. The SPLC noted,

The "great replacement" theory is inherently white supremacist. It depends on stoking fears that a non-white population, which the theory's proponents characterize as "inferior," will displace a white majority. It is also antisemitic. Some proponents of the "great replacement" do not explicitly attribute the plot to Jews. Instead, they blame powerful Jewish individuals such as financier and philanthropist George Soros or use coded antisemitic language to identify shadowy "elites" or "globalists."

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