From Auschwitz to TikTok, antisemitism keeps rebranding.

Every year, the world mourns the Holocaust, only to turn around and justify new forms of antisemitism. If we can’t recognise its latest disguise, what exactly are we remembering?

The Auschwitz Nazi concentration camp in Poland (photo: Fadjar Djulizar/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay written by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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International Holocaust Remembrance Day came and went last month, bringing the usual wave of social media virtue signalling.

“Never again,” people posted — before blaming Jews for global unrest by lunchtime.

But let’s talk about antisemitism when it’s truly unpopular to do so — when even a simple post invites a flood of “Free Palestine” comments, accusations of “Zionist baby killers,” and cries of “apartheid.”

After all, a core strategy of Palestinian PR is to hijack, appropriate, and insert itself into every other cause. And nothing screams “progressive” quite like erasing historical context while regurgitating slogans learned from internet memes.

So here’s some context for anyone justifying today’s global surge of antisemitism by blaming the Israeli government, or engaging in Holocaust inversion by equating Jews to Nazis — you’re not just wrong, you’re historically illiterate.

Antisemitism didn’t begin 80 years ago. It’s been around for over 2,000 years. That’s right. Longer than Christianity, Islam, capitalism, communism, most languages (including English), and definitely longer than the “Woke” social justice movements that claim to cure all the world’s ills.

If antisemitism was a brand, it would be exclusive, limited edition, and somehow — despite everything — still “cool.” It resurfaces with the same talking points every few generations. Yet while every other bigotry gets booed off stage, Jew-hatred keeps getting rebooted like a Hollywood franchise nobody asked for.

Historically, rising antisemitism is society’s way of announcing, “Hey, we’re about to collapse spectacularly!” The pattern is almost comforting in its predictability: Hatred of Jews surges, everything goes to hell, and a few decades later, people look back in horror and say, “How did we let this happen?” (Narrator: They ignored all the warning signs, again.)

Every civilisation that embraced Jew-hatred imploded shortly afterwards — sometimes in blood, sometimes in economic ruin, sometimes in sheer global embarrassment. And yet, somehow, each new wave of bigots convinces themselves that this time, it’ll work out differently. Spoiler alert: It won’t.

These days, antisemitism has had a sleek rebranding. Instead of frothing-at-the-mouth rants about “Jews poisoning wells,” we get college-educated “activists” confidently explaining that they don’t hate Jews, they’re just “anti-Zionist.” Which is like saying you don’t hate French people, you just think France shouldn’t exist.

“Anti-Zionists” don’t hate Jews; they just embrace the idea that Jews, alone, should be denied a homeland, despite a 3,000-year presence in the land. The irony is lost on the average “anti-Zionist” that Zionism began with the Return to Zion in 539 BCE — long before Jews even set foot in Europe. But hey, why let history get in the way when you can just redefine “Zionism” to mean whatever suits the outrage of the day?

Zionism is many things according to “anti-Zionists,” but it doesn’t get to be defined by Jews or Zionists themselves. Think of “anti-Zionism” as “antisemitism lite” — low-calorie, less baggage, but just as toxic. Because here’s the reality: It’s like calling an elephant a “large rodent.” The animal is still there; you’re just lying about what it is.

“Anti-Zionism” attracts “progressives” who think the label makes them sound radical, when really, it’s just Stalin-era propaganda repackaged for the digital age. Stalin, by the way, was preparing his own purge of Soviet Jewry in the 1950s, but first he needed a little cover.

Enter the “good Jew” propaganda campaign.

Stalin figured, why not get a bunch of “anti-Zionist” Jews to condemn their Zionist counterparts in an open letter? All the while he was planning to send all Jews to Siberian gulags. Fast forward to today, and it didn’t matter one bit that the Melbourne synagogue burned down was an “anti-Zionist” one, because Jew-hatred doesn’t care about politics, it just loves to hate.

Let’s get one thing straight: Critiquing Israel’s policies is as valid as critiquing those of any country. Yet singling out Jews worldwide for the actions of a state? That’s not political activism; that’s old-school, straight-up hatred.

But hey, why not take centuries of historical oppression and slap a “human rights” label on it? Who cares if it makes no sense when you think about it for more than five seconds? It’s fashionable, effortlessly virtuous, and comes pre-packaged with catchy slogans and merch to boot.

But here’s the thing: If your tolerance for Jews only extends to the “right kind” of Jew, then you’re not tolerant at all. You're just playing a game. If someone needs to prove they’re worthy of your basic human decency, you’re not an ally — you’re tokenising them for your own ideological benefit.

If people actually cared about antisemitism, they wouldn’t just platform Jews who agree with them. That’s like pretending you’re an animal rights activist because you feed your dog once a day. It’s lazy and performative, and it’s not helping anyone. Antisemitism isn’t a justifiable response to wrongdoing; it’s an age-old, baseless hatred that has led to the deaths of innocent people for millennia.

Every antisemitic accusation in history — Jews poisoning wells, spreading disease, causing famines of epic proportions, even killing babies (a persistent one, that one) — boils down to justifying Jew-hatred. But modern “intellectuals” and internet sleuths believe they’ve cracked the case: Jews control finance, orchestrate global conspiracies, and run Hollywood. (If only they could control the “Free Palestine” bots, but alas.)

Social media, the great amplifier of nonsense, has turned ancient slander into bite-sized propaganda. Nothing like a 30-second TikTok video by some guy named “WokeWarrior420” to unravel centuries of historical fact. And sure, critical thinking would be great, but it’s so much easier to blame a secret cabal of Jews than to accept that the world is just messy.

Now, let’s talk Israel — because, of course, we must. Israel didn’t come into being because of some nefarious “Zionist plot” or “imperial powers.” It exists because the world completely failed the Jewish People. Even as recently as 80 years ago, the Allies couldn’t be bothered to bomb the train tracks leading to Auschwitz, and the Red Cross called the Nazi camps “humane.”

Meanwhile, the Vatican was busy helping Nazi officers escape. Europeans were telling Jews to “go back to Palestine” while the British blocked Jewish immigration to British-era Palestine.

The so-called imperial powers and the freshly minted United Nations knew that the moment Israel declared independence, it would face a war of annihilation from the surrounding Arab armies. Jewish refugees — many fresh from the Holocaust or expelled from North Africa and the Middle East — were fighting for survival.

And yet, the world watched, shrugged, and did nothing. But, against all odds, the tiny state endured, armed with little more than outdated Czech weapons and sheer determination. Now, the same crowds that spent centuries insisting Jews didn’t belong in Europe, want them to “go back” there. Makes perfect sense.

History is a fickle thing when it’s rewritten to fit modern narratives. Jews have had an unbroken presence in Israel for several thousand years, long before the Arab conquest in the 7th century. Up until the 1930s, “Palestinian” was a label mostly used for Jews in the region.

Both Jews and Arabs migrated to Mandatory Palestine in parallel, yet somehow, only one group gets slapped with the “coloniser” tag. Meanwhile, the 1,400-year Arab colonisation under Islamic conquest? It gets magically erased from the conversation — because self-awareness is overrated.

Speaking of forgotten history, nearly a million Jews were expelled from Muslim-majority countries in the 20th century, where they had lived for over two millennia, predating Islam. Funny that no one seems to care about their “right of return.” Even funnier? Nearly half of Israel’s Jews are Middle Eastern or North African, yet Western activists call them “white colonialists.” Bravo, anti-racists.

Here’s the truth: Jew-hatred long predates both the Holocaust and modern Israel. Israel was born from centuries of persecution — not the other way around. Jews were hated for not having a country, then hated for having one. They were excluded for being non-European, then condemned as European “colonisers”. They were vilified as communists, then as capitalists. Condemned as isolationists, then as globalists. The pattern? The problem was never what Jews did; it was simply that they existed.

So instead of a token Holocaust memorial post, we’d do better to acknowledge that the Holocaust didn’t start with gas chambers; it started with hateful rhetoric, dehumanisation, and unchecked street violence — exactly what we see today. I could rattle off a list of conflicts, famines, and genocides happening in the Middle East and North Africa that are magnitudes deadlier than Gaza.

The key point?

Sudanese, Chinese, and Syrian civilians aren’t attacked for their nationality or religion. Their homes, churches, and mosques aren’t burned down over their governments’ actions. But when it happens to Jews, it’s brushed off as “justifiable outrage” because someone mentioned Israel. That, folks, is antisemitism in a cheap disguise.

The longest-running antisemitic disinformation campaign? A Soviet-Iranian masterclass in digital deception — AI-generated lies, recycled war footage, and propaganda funnelled through social media to demonise Israel and weaken the West. Not to be outdone, Qatar and Turkey have been playing the long game, executing a decades-old strategy to infiltrate and unravel Western stability.

And let’s be clear: This isn’t just about Gaza or Israel — it’s the opening act of something far worse. Because if history has proven anything, it’s that antisemitism never stays in its lane. It starts with Jews, but it never ends there.

So here’s the million-dollar question: If we don’t push back against antisemitism now — at its worst in 80 years — then when? If history follows its usual script, in 50 years people will shake their heads and ask, “Why didn’t anyone stop this?” And the answer will be: because they were too busy looking the other way, making memes, or worse — cheering on mobs targeting Jews while calling it “human rights” and “decolonisation.”

We can let this ugly cycle continue, waiting for another tragedy, another round of public mourning, another set of empty promises to “never forget.” Or, and hear me out, we can actually learn from history and break the pattern before it spirals into disaster.

That means recognising antisemitism — whether it comes from the far-Right, the far-Left, or your cousin’s Facebook feed. Because, by the time people finally recognise the problem, it’s usually too late.

And, honestly, do we need yet another reminder?

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