The resurgence of right-wing antisemitism

For a more definitive illustration, we need only look to the US, where a full-blown civil war has erupted inside the MAGA world. And at the centre of the rupture is a toxic, long-festering force – antisemitism.

The fracture erupted when right-wing broadcaster Tucker Carlson hosted white nationalist and Holocaust-denier Nick Fuentes. Carlson’s decision to give an unabashed, full-on antisemite a platform detonated a bitter internal feud across the MAGA world, deepening divisions over Israel and widening the gulf between the GOP mainstream and a younger, more aggressive faction increasingly receptive to Fuentes’ overt racism and white nationalism.

During the interview, Carlson attacked Republicans, including former president George W Bush, Senator Ted Cruz, and US ambassador to Israel, Mike Huckabee, calling them “Christian Zionists” who have been “seized by this brain virus.” 

Fuentes, who was once ostracised by the mainstream right for praising Hitler and claiming Jews ran the country, insisted that “organised Jewry” wields disproportionate influence and professed his admiration for Stalin.

Tensions escalated when Donald Trump weighed in. Rather than distancing himself from Fuentes or criticising the decision to host him, Trump defended the former Fox News host, noting Carlson had “said good things about me over the years” and adding that “people have to decide” whether hosting Fuentes was appropriate. Fuentes thanked the President on X.

Even GOP’s most powerful institutions felt compelled to respond. The Heritage Foundation, the architect of Project 2025 and an organisation with longstanding close ties to the Conservative Party in Britain, declined to repudiate the interview. Instead, its president Kevin Roberts described Carlson as “a close friend.”

But some on the right pushed back. Senator Ted Cruz warned: “If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very, very cool and their mission is to combat and defeat ‘global Jewry’, and you say nothing, then you are a coward, and you are complicit in that evil.”

He added that he had seen more antisemitism on the right in the past six months than in his entire life, calling it a “poison” in a party facing an “existential crisis.”

The question is why is antisemitism resurging on the US right, and whether that trend is now echoing, or even feeding, movements in Europe and the UK?

Supercharged by social media

Since the start of the latest Israel-Hamas conflict, antisemitic incidents in the US have soared. The Anti-Defamation League recorded a 361% increase in the three months following 7 October, and one-third of American Jews report having been targeted at least once in the past year, online or offline.

Clearly much of this has to do with the Israeli government’s conduct in Gaza but there is also really disturbing evidence that this is getting caught up with traditional antisemitism. Younger Americans show a higher acceptance of antisemitic tropes than older generations, according to ADL data. This trend is not without a cause. Major online personalities, including Carlson, Joe Rogan and Kanye West, have all given platforms to Holocaust deniers or promoted antisemitic narratives to their millions of followers, with Rogan and West’s fanbases being predominantly young.

Jewish groups are quite capable of seeing that support for Israel can co-exist with antisemitism, especially in a mind as confused as Donald Trump’s.  Jewish US senators have accused Donald Trump of weaponising antisemitism for political gain, citing his threats to defund universities over pro-Palestinian protests. Nevertheless, as Mark Oppenheimer of Washington University observes: “It’s increasingly acceptable to talk about Jews in broadly stereotypical terms, as Joe Rogan does, as Kanye West does, as Trump has.”

What this all illustrates is that ultimately racism knows no boundaries. It might shift around in accordance with political events, but what remains constant is the belief that white society is threatened by alien forces, be they Jewish, Islamic or in yesteryear, the Irish, or Catholicism, or somebody. Islamophobia doesn’t sit in opposition to antisemitism – they are all part of the same package.

Echoes in Europe

In France, the Le Pen family remains the clearest example of a party wrestling with its own antisemitic lineage.  Jean-Marie Le Pen was repeatedly convicted for antisemitism, Holocaust denial and racial hatred. His daughter, Marine, who took over in 2011, sought to “detoxify” the party, expelling antisemitic figures, including her father, and rebranded the party as National Rally (NR) in 2018. She attempted to make the party more palatable to broader sections of the electorate by shifting its focus from antisemitic narratives to warnings about “radical Islam” and threats to French secularism – a narrative that resonated more broadly in a post-9/11 and post-terror attack climate. 

Yet she has faced legal scrutiny herself, including a 2015 trial for comparing Muslims praying in the street to the Nazi occupation. And although she joined a 2023 march against antisemitism in Paris, other parties refused to walk alongside a party founded by antisemites. Her condemnation of Hamas’s 7 October attack as a “pogrom” and her support for Israel’s goal of destroying Hamas were widely read as part of a broader political repositioning.

Yet many remain unconvinced.

“For me, Le Pen’s participation in this demonstration is strategically motivated,” said Valerie Dubslaff from the University of Rennes. “I don’t believe that the party has fundamentally changed. The proximity to Israel and the fight of antisemitism are serving to show a clear message: ‘Our main enemy remains Islam.’”

France’s National Rally is not alone in attempting to rebrand nationalist movements through a “de-demonisation” project. Germany’s AfD ousted a lead candidate over Nazi-apologist remarks, and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni has worked to distance her government from nostalgia for Mussolini among her party’s ranks.

And then there’s Nigel Farage and Reform UK.

Against this backdrop, Farage’s trajectory looks less isolated and more like part of a broader international pattern.

Reform UK, like UKIP before it, has repeatedly had to defend itself against allegations of racism, extremism and conspiracy theories among candidates. During the 2024 election, activists were filmed making racist and homophobic remarks, while numerous candidates were exposed for praising Britain’s reluctance to fight Hitler or promoting 9/11 conspiracies.

Earlier this month, Reform was condemned for sharing an antisemitic AI-generated image of Green Party leader Zack Polanski. The image, shared by the party’s Brighton and Hove branch for Halloween, distorted Polanski’s features using the same antisemitic stereotypes once pushed by Nazi propaganda.

In recent weeks, the Guardian has reported allegations from former school contemporaries describing offensive behaviour in Farage’s youth, including antisemitic taunts, claims he firmly denies. Among them, Bafta-winning director Peter Ettedgui recalls Farage approaching him at Dulwich College to growl “Hitler was right,” or “Gas them,” sometimes adding a hiss to mimic gas chambers.

The media and the mirage of ‘respectability’

Parts of the British media, like the warring MAGA media in the US, are not immune to racist tropes or antisemitic contradictions. Today, the Daily Mail presents itself as a guardian against antisemitism, warning of the “savage malignancy of antisemitism” sweeping the globe after October 7. Yet this is the same newspaper that once ran “Hurrah for the Blackshirts”, praising Mosley’s fascists and the British Union of Fascists (BUF). Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail and author of the article, praised Mosley and the Blackshirts seeing them as the correct party to “take over responsibility for [British] national affairs.”

The Mail may have long abandoned explicit support for fascism, but accusations of racism persist, notably Islamophobia. A 2018-2020 report by the Muslim Council of Britain’s Centre for Media Monitoring (CfMM) found that 59 percent of all articles analysed associated Muslims with negative behaviour.

The European Commission against Racism and Intolerance (ECRI) has singled out the Daily Mail and the Sun for using “offensive, discriminatory and provocative terminology” in their reporting on Muslims, warning that such coverage fuels prejudice and shows a “reckless disregard” for their safety.

This is how prejudice mutates rather than disappears. As a paper by the Islamic Human Rights Commission argues, Islamophobia became “the new antisemitism,” not because antisemitism vanished, but because hostility simply shifted targets. “With the emergence of Israel as a western client state, the age-old prejudice against Jews was replaced by a corresponding hatred of Arabs that has fed the rampant Islamophobia we see today,” writes Robert Inlakesh.

In the US especially, attitudes towards Israel have become hopelessly entangled with attitudes toward Jews, so entangled that many appear genuinely unaware that it is possible, indeed essential, to do two things at once: abhor antisemitism and condemn the devastation in Gaza.

Yet recent events demonstrate that antisemitism never truly disappeared. It merely waited for favourable conditions. With the rise of online radicalisation, and right growing increasingly fractured, those conditions have now arrived.

Gabrielle Pickard-Whitehead is author of Right-Wing Watch