The red carpet in service of jihad

There is an old saying: "The anti-Semite doesn't accuse the Jew of stealing because he thinks he stole something. He does it because he enjoys watching the Jew turn out his pockets to prove his innocence." These past few weeks we have seen the anti-Jewish furor grow as Israel advances on the last strongholds of Hamas in Gaza. Thousands of actors and filmmakers, including Olivia Colman, Mark Ruffalo, Javier Bardem, Emma Stone and Tilda Swinton signed a boycott of Israeli film production companies that have nothing to do with the government, moreover, they are mostly against Netanyahu and his administration. Then, the actress Hannah Einbinder at the Emmy Awards 2025, received an award and took the stage to shout "Free Palestine" and say that her "duty as a Jew" was to "distinguish the Jews from the State of Israel," Hannah Einbinder also railed against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

Hamas praised Einbinder's speech. Quds News Network, a Hamas media outlet, published the video of Hannah attacking Israel, but most notably censored the actress's shoulder and cleavage portion. After the embarrassment, those in charge of the tweet deleted the post, but that image went viral on the network. By the way, the Palestinians who felt so disgusted by Hannah's exposed skin point us to the boundary of society between the left and the Islamists. It also tells us who rules that society and what the fate of the actress would be if it were up to them.

The narrative that anti-Israel rhetoric is separate from anti-Semitism collapses when we see Jews attacked on the streets of New York, stabbed in Europe, and shot in synagogues by people who believe the same libels spread by actors with total frivolity on the red carpet. When you point to Israel, the tiny Jewish state, home to half of the Jewish world, millions of people are targeted by murderers. Celebrities fuel the criminal hatred of terrorists.

While nearly half a hundred hostages remain in the hands of Hamas in the tunnels of Gaza, it is shocking that the responsibility Hannah feels as a Jew is to separate herself from the fate of other Jews, specifically, the Israelis, who are half of the world's Jews - what a Judas! Einbinder, of course, joined the thousands of Hollywood members of the boycott, vowing not to work with Israeli film institutions.

As if to crown her picture of extra-large Judeophobia, Hannah wore over her ball gown the red hand pin also worn by Ruth Negga, Chris Perfetti, Aimee Lou Wood, and Megan Stalter. The red pin celebrates the lynching and subsequent dismemberment of two Israelis at the hands of Palestinians. The so-called "Ramallah lynching" was the murder of two Israelis by a mob of Palestinians in October 2000. They were two soldiers, Vadim Nurzhitz and Yossi Avrahami, who entered the city of Ramallah by mistake, unarmed, and were taken to a police station by the Palestinian Authority. There, a crowd of Palestinians entered the police station and together with the policemen began to beat them to death. At that moment, Aziz Salha, in the middle of a blood orgy, leaned out of the window to show his hands bathed in Jewish blood and cheer the crowd. Those murderous hands, bathed in Jewish blood, are the ones depicted on the pin that Hollywood actors proudly display.

When one state is singled out, demonized and judged by standards that apply to no other, we have entered the realm of pathology. Some truly telling cases, for example, the countries that intend to boycott the Eurovision Song Contest if Israel participates. Or the Hollywood stars, who announce that their virtue will not allow them to work with Israeli companies. The case of the Spanish government is textbook Judeophobia. The president of the Spanish government casually comments that "unfortunately" his country has no nuclear weapons to stop Israel and insinuates that he would stop participating in the World Cup if the small Jewish state is in the same competition, and after inciting pro-Hamas activists, he suspended the cycling tournament in Madrid because Israelis were participating. The Netherlands is sinking into parliamentary chaos over Gaza. Seven Israeli chess players entered in a Spanish tournament withdrew from the event because they were informed they could not compete under their national flag.

None of this is coincidental, all of this reflects deep histories of terrorism, anti-Semitism and post-colonial guilt now exploited by Hamas propaganda and redirected against the Jewish state. Alongside the anti-Semitism of the elites and many citizens of the free West, there is a legal war on the global stage: the International Court of Justice, the International Criminal Court and countless UN "commissions of inquiry" have become an arena of persecution. False accusations of genocide are hurled against Israel, even as Hamas openly declares its intention to exterminate Jews "from the river to the sea."

At this moment and without any modesty, several NGOs are tracking Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers and Israeli officials abroad on social networks to harass them, prevent them from visiting other countries and get someone to ruin their lives. None of this is solidarity with Gaza. It is persecution against Jews. When Israeli athletes are shunned, when Jewish students are harassed on campus, when synagogues in London and kosher restaurants are vandalized in Paris, Berlin and New York, it's not about Gaza. It's about Jews.

A Gallup poll conducted earlier this year found that support for Israel among Democrats has plummeted. The transformation of the Democratic party into an Islamic-left grouping jeopardizes the Israeli strategic landscape. Hamas, Qatar, Iran and Russia attack American public opinion with brutal intensity. Every staged video, no matter how blatant the falsification of images and data, becomes a viral tool that goes straight to the deranged minds of young people raised on more than a decade of wokism. Every manipulated statistic from the United Nations goes to Western college campuses and leftist party caucuses. Now, through legal warfare, media manipulation and the proliferation of social networks, they have normalized anti-Semitism as "progressive." That narrative not only delegitimizes Israel, but endangers Jewish communities around the world.

The truth is that Israel has committed very little legal wrongdoing in Gaza, even if this is not what is published by the establishment media who appear to be mouthpieces for the terrorist organization and who often take their narrative at face value on the front pages, then hopefully put the denials at the bottom so that no one reads them. The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) has taken unprecedented measures to protect civilians: warning leaflets, phone calls, text messages, humanitarian corridors and pauses in the fighting. There is no precedent in modern warfare for this level of effort, especially in a combat environment like Gaza, where civilians are human shields and Hamas aims to maximize the death toll. Neither in Iraq, nor in Afghanistan, nor in Syria, nor in Ukraine has there been such care and standards; and yet Israel is the one accused of genocide.

The double standard is pathetic and Hamas has learned to use it to its advantage. Its strategy is not military, as it knows it cannot defeat Israel head-on. Its approach is based on Palestinian victimhood as a weapon, flooding the media with false images and distorting reality to the point of portraying Israel as the aggressor and Hamas as the victim. Every week it invents a libel that becomes viral media content. Hamas has turned death into publicity, and the world absorbs it completely.

Demonization always precedes violence. Look at the case of the United States, where political violence is becoming normalized. Lies always lead to persecution, and when Israel loses bipartisan support in the United States, when anti-Semitism becomes embedded in global institutions, when Jewish life becomes fragile again in Europe and America, the consequences will be no less. We are living through the greatest propaganda attack in modern history. The Hamas massacre of October 7 was not only intended to kill Israelis, but to unleash a narrative war that would isolate Israel, fracture its alliances and exacerbate anti-Semitism around the world. That is the world Hamas desires.

Those who engage in global anti-Semitic persecution today remind us of Leni Riefenstahl, the most emblematic case of an artist who fervently embraced the anti-Jewish cause and then attempted to launder her historical image through outright lies.

Riefenstahl began to become famous with her film The Blue Light (1931) for which she received international recognition, being listed among the best foreign films by the National Board of Film Critics of New York and winning the silver medal at the Venice Film Festival in 1932. However, her ambition drove her straight into the arms of Nazism. In 1932, she personally requested an audience with Hitler, who promised her, "Once we come to power, you have to make my films." From that moment on, she became a regular guest at meetings of the Nazi leadership, fully integrating herself into the inner circle of genocidal power.

As is the case these days, at that time the world had left the Jewish people on their own and the entertainment industry rewarded Nazi propaganda. Riefenstahl won the 1935 National Film Award, the prize for best foreign documentary in Venice, and the Grand Prix at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. Thanks to the complicity of the art world, her works masterfully served the propaganda purposes of the Reich.

Riefenstahl's hypocrisy manifested itself grotesquely during Kristallnacht. When she arrived in New York with her film Olympia and learned of the pogrom of November 9-10, 1938 - when dozens of synagogues were burned, thousands of Jewish businesses destroyed, hundreds of citizens murdered, and thirty thousand Jews arrested and sent to concentration camps - she not only failed to condemn the events, but publicly defended Hitler to American journalists.

In April 1942, Riefenstahl began filming Lowlands, using Roma prisoners from the Maxglan-Leopoldskron labor camp as extras, forcing them to work in brutal conditions. All of these extras were subsequently sent to Auschwitz, where most died in the gas chambers. Years later, Riefenstahl would blatantly lie: "We were reunited with all the Gypsies who worked in the Lowlands. Nothing happened to anyone." But in 1985, documentary filmmaker Nina Gladitz exposed Riefenstahl's lies, based on the testimony of survivors. Riefenstahl sued Gladitz, but the Karlsruhe Higher Regional Court ruled in Gladitz's favor, establishing that Riefenstahl knew full well that the extras came from concentration camps.

Riefenstahl did not accompany Hitler in his downfall, and in April 1945 she fled Berlin as the Red Army besieged the capital. Between 1945 and 1948, interrogated in Dachau about her links to the Third Reich and confronted with the terrible images of the concentration camps, she denied all knowledge. Riefenstahl's story serves as a warning: those who today participate in anti-Semitic persecution will also try, in the future, to deny their involvement and wash away their historical responsibility. But Leni went down in history as a disgusting human being, and she went down in history as a Nazi collaborationist, not as an artist.

When all this horror passes, all those who signed up for Judeophobic boycotts, all those who shouted on stage slogans seeking the extermination of Israel, all those who rode the wave of attacking Jews around the world, will say that they were deceived, that they were only seeking peace, "that they did not know." At that point, it will be essential not to let them get away with it, ever again.