Imagine you’re a tourist in Vietnam, enjoying a bowl of noodles in the hostel’s little restaurant. A couple of tables across from you is a Chinese couple, travellers like you. You realise they’re Chinese only when two women nearby, having spotted a tattoo on the woman’s arm, demand to know where they’re from. The tone of the women is sharp, then hostile, then hectoring. From the accent, you guess they’re British. As the embarrassed Chinese couple get up to leave mid-meal, the women throw taunts and accusations of depravity and murder at them, making the couple complicit in China’s “genocide” of Uyghur Muslims. The other travellers sit rooted to their chairs, hoping the scene will quickly pass.
It’s hard to imagine this happening anywhere, let alone in a little corner of Southeast Asia – two British women haranguing a Chinese couple for their apparent crimes against the Uyghur Muslims. What a strange and unlikely scene this would be.
But of course, the couple weren’t Chinese, they were Israeli – identified by an Israel-shaped tattoo – and the cause wasn’t the Uyghur Muslims but Palestine. Suddenly, even a thousand miles away in an unlikely locale, none of this seems far-fetched but all too familiar, so inured have we become to the eruptions of Jew hatred.
“We’re just the goyim, aren’t we?” says one of the women. There it is. She knows the vocabulary well; she’s rehearsed these lines for just such an occasion. “Say you’re against Netanyahu!” insists one of the women. “What about Ben Gvir?” says the other. They can’t believe their luck, and on holiday no less – an Israeli couple on whom they can perform all the antisemitic tropes: “You’re monsters. You’re savages… A hundred and ten countries you’ve been thrown out”. Nobody steps in, nobody urges restraint. The Israeli couple make their way out of the restaurant at last. “Look at them…rats running away… Go on rats. Murderers. Murderers. Savages. Monsters. Genocidal”.
We know this is how it happened because one of the women recorded it on her mobile phone and later uploaded it to social media.1 That says something in itself. Because you can’t imagine this happening following any other kind of racism. Not towards a Chinese couple or an Indian one. If it had been a black couple, the incident would likely never have taken place – even a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist would pause, and if he uploaded any incident of the sort, it would be in private to a group of fellow racists. The costs are too high.
Antisemitism is different. One of these women uploaded the video to social media for all to see. I’m quite sure she did so with pride. Because far from being racist, they likely viewed this as a moral achievement – one that took courage and conviction. If they had any regrets, it was probably that they didn’t get around to chanting “from the river to the sea,” although I doubt they could have put a name to either. Geography is an irrelevant detail when the borders that matter are the ones that divide good from evil, the oppressor from the oppressed. This is what hatred feels like when it feels like virtue.
“This is what hatred feels like when it feels like virtue.”
They didn’t arrive at these beliefs independently, of course. The world’s oldest hatred filtered through numberless versions over countless centuries in which societies have formed certain ideals and defined them in opposition to what they consider “Jewish”. As Dara Horn puts it, referencing David Nirenberg’s research:2
“If piety was a given society’s ideal, Jews were impious blasphemers; if secularism was the ideal, Jews were backward pietists. If capitalism was evil, Jews were capitalists; if communism was evil, Jews were communists. If nationalism was glorified, Jews were rootless cosmopolitans; if nationalism was vilified, Jews were chauvinistic nationalists. ‘Anti-Judaism’ thus becomes a righteous fight to promote justice. This dynamic forces Jews into the defensive mode of constantly proving they are not evil, and even simply that they have a right to exist.”
The trope is infinitely adaptable; only the hatred stays constant. And in that consciousness, like malware passed from one age to another, lies the permission to hate: antisemitism recast as a righteous act of resistance against evil.
The Soviets – who could master propaganda in a way they could never muster a successful society – did more than anyone in recent history to rebrand Zionism as “racism” and “colonialism”, exporting this messaging to the developing world and ultimately to the DEI industry in the United States and from there into nearly every university department in the West.3 Qatar and Al Jazeera have since done more than anyone to propagate and finance the operation.4
The scene in the restaurant is the end product of all this. Here are two women who have downloaded the full ideological toolkit from a progressive class whose "polite" dinner-party antisemitism repackages the world's oldest hatred in the oppressor/oppressed framework, making righteous hatred feel legitimate in the 21st century. But it's the Islamists that provide the raw power and endless newsfeed of suffering, some of it real, some of it fabricated. And it's the Islamists who take it to the streets, calling violence "resistance" and murder "justice".
Glastonbury Festival put it to music in 2025 while the BBC filmed it for the nation. “Death, death to the IDF” chanted punk-rap duo Bob Vylan while a thousand middle-class festivalgoers joined in like a gruesome karaoke in the fields of Somerset – a ritual of moral self-congratulation with Palestinian suffering providing the emotional kick. The BBC saw no reason to edit it out because they didn’t hear a racist chant but urgent clarity expressed by like-minded people, high on a feeling of righteousness.
Bob Vylan issued a statement shortly after. “We are not for the death of Jews, Arabs or any other race or group of people,” they wrote on Instagram, now carefully substituting “dismantling” for “death” – a word that presumably tested better with the lawyers. “We are for the dismantling of a violent military machine.”5 Perhaps those women in the restaurant, who called the Israeli couple rats, were also just dismantling a violent military machine. Or maybe they no longer know the difference because the issues are already complex enough, and sometimes “monsters” does the job.
The Glastonbury death chants were sinister, evoking something dystopian, something alien to the society we thought we knew. In Orwell’s 1984, the state organises a daily ritual called the Two Minutes Hate. Party members come together before a screen, faces contorted with rage, screaming at a singular enemy in an ecstasy of denunciation. Winston Smith, who privately resists everything the Party stands for, joins in at first out of pretence – but then finds himself overtaken by the same urge, which is contagious, delirious, and purifying.
What must it be like to be a Jew in the West today? To have been told from the earliest age that your history is the darkest of all histories, that the evils of the past are stepping boldly once more into the present. To see politicians adopt their practised solemnity at the latest atrocity and the media rolling out exhausted clichés. “An attack on one is an attack on all of us,” they say. “Hate has no place in Britain”. “This is not who we are as a country”.
But hate evidently does have a place in Britain, and this is who we are as a country, at least in parts of it. The clichés and platitudes can no longer hide the fact.
On a pro-Palestinian march through London not too long ago, a kippah-wearing man came face to face with a British police officer. “You are quite openly Jewish,” scolded the latter, as if to preempt any blame for the antisemitic violence that might follow.6
At some point in his life, that man in the kippah would have read Anne Frank’s diary, probably as a child at school, as so many of us did. He might have wondered as a boy what it takes for a civilised society to force its Jewish population into hiding, then hunt them down and finally kill them. Perhaps he closed the book, saddened but convinced that those evils, decades in the past, were safely locked away and unrepeatable. After all, civilised society had agreed: never again.
Today, walking through Golders Green in London or any neighbourhood in the West, he will ponder whether to wear his kippah. Others might hide their tattoos. All of them will wonder at the cost of being “openly Jewish”, for themselves and for their children.
Thanks for reading. The Gadfly recently became a Substack bestseller. My sincere thanks to everyone who supports this work, to those who make the comments section worth reading, and to everyone who argues with it in good faith. If you’re thinking of subscribing or upgrading, you can do so here.
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British tourists hurl antisemitic abuse at Israeli couple in Vietnam: “Rats running away,” The Times of Israel, April 2025. The video was recorded and uploaded to social media by the women themselves.
Dara Horn, “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies,” The Atlantic, February 15, 2024. Horn draws on David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (W. W. Norton, 2013).
Horn traces the documented paper trail of the KGB’s rebranding of Zionism as “racism” and “colonialism,” beginning in the mid-twentieth century and exported through Soviet client states into Western progressive circles. See Horn, “Why the Most Educated People in America Fall for Anti-Semitic Lies,” The Atlantic, February 15, 2024.
Qatar is the single largest foreign donor to American universities, with research by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP) documenting a direct correlation between Qatari funding and increased antisemitism on campuses. Al Jazeera, Qatar’s state-funded media network, reaches over 400 million viewers globally. See ISGAP, “Follow the Money: Qatar and the Muslim Brotherhood Funding of Higher Education in the United States,” isgap.org
Bob Vylan, statement on Instagram, July 1, 2025, following widespread criticism of their “Death, death to the IDF” chant during their set at the 2025 Glastonbury Festival. The BBC subsequently apologised for broadcasting the set, calling it “utterly unacceptable.” The US State Department revoked the band’s visas.
Thanks for reading. I feel outraged at what's happening to Jews in the UK and elsewhere, although I try to control my fury here. I cannot know what it's like to be at the receiving end of hatred just for being Jewish in your own country, but you have my complete solidarity – and there are many millions of others who feel the same.
This piece will remain free to read forever. I hope, despite the depressing subject matter, it gives a little insight into what's going on, although my Jewish friends here will correct me if I've missed something important.
Comments will remain open to all for a while. Good-faith argument welcome. The other stuff will be swiftly dealt with. I will reply to comments in the coming days.
Update: free (Palestine) comments now closed.
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Islamists are experts in DARVO- accuse others of what you are doing yourself, they’ve been doing it for a long time. And as ever, the useful idiots swallow all the lies and the propaganda marching happily with people who’ll execute them given half a chance, as they did in Iran in 1979. The stupidity of westerners siding with a totalitarian ideology which wishes to destroy democracy and western culture against people who are generally law abiding, who contribute to society, never ceases to amaze me. I used to have faith in humans to be sensible, fair and moral. This era has made me question that faith many times over.
Thanks Frederick, excellent piece despite the depressing content.