

Viral: Antisemitism In Four Mutations
Episode 1 | 1h 21m 26sVideo has Closed Captions
Hear firsthand accounts of the recent rise in antisemitism in the U.S. and Europe.
Explore the recent rise in antisemitism, which is increasing in ways not seen since the 1930s, in the U.S. and Europe, and hear firsthand accounts from victims, witnesses and others who have experienced it.

Viral: Antisemitism In Four Mutations
Episode 1 | 1h 21m 26sVideo has Closed Captions
Explore the recent rise in antisemitism, which is increasing in ways not seen since the 1930s, in the U.S. and Europe, and hear firsthand accounts from victims, witnesses and others who have experienced it.
How to Watch Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations
Viral: Antisemitism in Four Mutations is available to stream on pbs.org and the free PBS App, available on iPhone, Apple TV, Android TV, Android smartphones, Amazon Fire TV, Amazon Fire Tablet, Roku, Samsung Smart TV, and Vizio.
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Learn Moreabout PBS online sponsorship-It started long ago with a lie about the Jew.
The lie said the Jew was evil, conspiring, the enemy of God.
The lie evolved and spread like a virus... and still does.
Many don't know they're infected.
Others don't care.
Some define themselves by it.
The virus has endured for so long and spread so far because of its power to adapt and deceive.
Of its thousands of mutations, this is the story of four.
♪♪ -34-24.
5898 Wilkins Avenue.
The complainant says they have an active shooter in the building.
A second call says they are being attacked.
Tree of Life Synagogue.
3480.
You copy?
-Three one five, hold the perimeter.
We're under fire.
We're under fire.
He's got an automatic weapon.
He's firing out of the front of the synagogue.
-7-1!
7-1!
Contact, contact!
Shots fired!
Shots fired!
[ Radio beeps ] [ Indistinct shouting ] 7-1.
Shots fired.
Gimme additional resources.
Additional resources.
Third floor.
[ Radio feedback whines ] -7-1, clear the air.
We have a surrender in progress.
Suspect's crawling out.
-Yes, the suspect keeps telling about killing Jews.
Uh, he doesn't want any of them to live.
[ Radio beeps ] -Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
We sat next to each other.
We were head-to-head on the floor.
I knew she was gone.
It was perfectly quiet in there.
I knew everybody was -- that was in there was shot to death.
♪♪ -I mean, I didn't know what was happening.
I didn't know whether we were being attacked by, you know, some kind of army or, you know... terrorists, you know?
-I was hit here and here, and my radial nerve was severed.
The shrapnel went in and severed my nerve and my wrist.
I have no -- I can't lift my wrist up or my fingers.
-I was really concerned about the safety of the people in the room with me, and I ushered them out to a big storage closet.
One of the members was -- kept opening the door.
He was hard of hearing.
I don't think he exactly knew what was happening, and the result was that the man who was looking outside... was attacked and killed, and the three of us were spared.
-On October 27, 2018, a single gunman entered the Pittsburgh synagogue and opened fire during morning prayers.
The 46-year-old shooter had a history of posting his far-right views on social media.
He said Jews were the children of Satan, and he blamed a Jewish organization for bringing immigrants to the US.
In all, he murdered 11 Jews.
-I walked with the FBI through the crime scene.
♪♪ I mean, when I see the husband and wife next to each other... ♪♪ ...to me, it was the most haunting vision... of that night.
-I think it was inevitable that something like this was going to happen in a synagogue.
Um... ♪♪ Many, I think, are surprised that it took so long before there was a shooting in a synagogue, and at the same time, I came to the realization that for all these years that I, as a Jew, felt comfortable living in the United States, knowing that, at least from my perspective, there's been a Jewish golden age.
Once again the stark reality that, to many, we are still "other," and we will always be "other" and never be welcome here.
-Living in America, it was not hard to see that, in the last few years, anti-Semitism had been getting worse.
It was not only the US.
In England, a major political party was being accused of anti-Semitism almost daily.
-[Chanting] Enough is enough!
-In Hungary, the government was waging a huge anti-Semitic propaganda campaign, and France was in the midst of a wave of violent attacks against Jews.
It was the most anti-Semitism I had seen in my two-decade career as a journalist.
This is a bullet hole going...out.
But why now in so many places around the world and in so many ways?
♪♪ To understand something so big, you have to start small.
I began what would become a multicountry journey with a visit to North Carolina to meet state House candidate Russ Walker.
-Russ Walker.
How are you, sir?
-Andrew.
Nice to meet you.
-Hey.
How y'all doing?
-I'm good.
How are you?
-I've never run for office before.
I figured if I went to football games or fairs, I could take this sign.
This is succinctly what I believe in.
♪♪ Hey.
I'm Russ Walker.
I'm running for state House.
-Okay.
-Give you a card?
Thank you.
-Are you a Christian?
Let me ask you that.
-I hope so.
-Okay.
-Was Christ a Christian?
-Yes, sir.
-I've been a chemical engineer all my life.
I worked in the petroleum business overseas and here.
I went to Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey.
When I left New Jersey in 1964, I never looked back.
I never liked -- Growing up as a kid, I never liked living there.
[ Dog barking ] This'll be a surprise, huh?
Hey.
My name's Russ Walker.
I'm running for the state House.
-Mm-hmm.
-I don't know if you know who I am.
And I just wanted to introduce myself.
-Let me ask you a question.
Why do you not tell people your campaign?
You just hand them your card.
If they don't go to your website, then they don't get your message.
-Well, they get enough of it from this card.
They get enough -- -Let me see what the card says.
It says... -You haven't read my card?
Yes, I have.
And I'm reading it on camera.
"Russell Walker for House District 48.
Garland Pierce in office 14 years.
Time for a change.
End the war on drugs, no income tax on wages, homestead exemption, repeal the food tax, criminal-justice reform, fair trials, stop no-knock searches and police murders."
You sound like a Democrat.
-That's right.
The two counties in my district, Scotland and Hoke, have never in their 100-and-something-year history ever voted for a Republican.
Now you have the paradox of a Republican running on what you call are Democratic themes to some degree.
-And you won the primary.
Yeah, I won the primary.
-With how much of the vote?
-Two to one.
All these news media, they didn't know how to answer it.
The Southern mentality is one which -- I've studied it for most of my life.
I still don't totally understand it, but I know how to jam 'em badly.
I had this sign made.
It cost me $15.
You know, you can make a handmade sign.
It's a handmade sign.
These signs are well-made, I think, and that's -- that's just the way I do things.
One side says, "What's wrong with being a racist?"
That's a -- You got to realize, I've used this stuff on hundreds of people on the Internet and other people.
They have no answers.
-What does the other side say?
That "God is a racist."
-Right.
-Explain that to me.
-Well, God made the races.
If he didn't make the races, who made them?
-Yeah, but racist usually means that you discriminate -- You, you know, hold them in different regard, which you clearly do.
-I do, and so does God.
-God likes, for example, whites more than blacks?
-Yes.
Christ said he came only for the lost sheep of the House of Israel.
That's another story.
We can go to bigotry and everything else if you want to.
-But wait.
But God -- So God prefers whites over Jews?
-Yes.
Yes.
-Whites over Muslims?
-Yes.
Yes.
-How about blacks over Muslims?
-I have no idea.
They're all the same.
-So, imagine -- pre-Civil Rights, you believe in white superiority.
The laws are based off of this.
Culture is based off of this.
Segregation was based off the idea that whites were superior and deserved their own space because this was their country.
The end of segregation argues something substantially different.
It shifts the idea of white people being fully actualized citizens to anyone in this country being able to be fully actualized citizens.
Now, imagine you are someone who believes you're superior, and now you've just lost to these folks who you saw were inferior.
You can't accept that, and so you begin to look for other answers, and the other answers that were created was the idea that it couldn't have been black folks at all.
They weren't smart enough.
They weren't creative.
It had to be a secret force, and that secret force becomes the Jew.
-The Jew was created to destroy the white Christian nations.
Power in the House.
Do you think the whites of this country demanded the Civil Rights laws?
Do you think they demanded integration of the schools?
Do you think that they wanted the current immigration of society of mostly black, brown, black, whatever you call them, into this society?
The white society in this country is being destroyed.
♪♪ -A quick history of Jews being blamed for things.
Since Biblical times, Jews have been blamed for the death of Jesus.
In some countries, they still are.
[ Indistinct shouting ] My hippie Uncle Mike was accused of killing Christ in 1972.
"I had nothing to do with it, man.
I was in Florida," he said.
In the Middle Ages, Jews were blamed for the Black Plague.
Jews were accused of kidnapping and killing Christian children.
Jews were and still are accused of creating capitalism, running the banks, and running the media.
♪♪ In the 1800s, some people wrote a book that said that Jews were trying to control the world... and Henry Ford helped distribute half a million copies in the US.
Hitler blamed the Jews for the problems of Germany, and through the centuries, untold numbers of Jews have been punished and killed for these and thousands of other made-up allegations.
-Anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory.
It's a conspiracy theory, the notion that there is this group out there, these forces out there that are more powerful than you.
They may be smaller in number than you, but they exert an unbelievable amount of power.
-It begins with the idea that the Jews are evil, that they are children of Satan... -Christ told the Jews their father was Satan.
What do you say about that?
John 8:44.
-These Jewish false prophets, anti-Christian, anti-God.
You know, they're willing to put Jesus to death again.
-...that they are motivated by a desire to destroy what is good in society.
-You heard this comedian, Sarah Silverman?
Listen.
She is a witch.
She is a Jezebel.
She is a God-hating whore of Zionism.
I hope that God breaks her teeth out and she dies.
-Jews.
-When I recruited people into hate groups, I'm going to look for white kids who have something going wrong in their life.
I'm going to dial in on that, and then I'm going to find a way to blame that on Jews.
If I'm talking to a 16-year-old kid who is frustrated because he doesn't have a girlfriend, I'll say, "The reason why girls don't like you is because the Jews put all these black basketball players on billboards and all over the TV and all over the Internet and all over magazines, and they make white women think that these black savages are the ideal man, and that's why they're not attracted to you.
So it's not your fault you don't have a girlfriend.
It's the Jews' fault."
-This is Rodef Shalom.
This is one of our largest synagogues here in Pittsburgh.
It's an unbelievable, beautiful building.
Rodef Shalom is where we had several of our funerals for our 11 victims at the Tree of Life shooting.
In fact, we did -- last week, we did active-shooter training for our preschool that's located right in the building.
We spent time with the staff and then, uh, worked with the teachers, went through each classroom and just kind of educated the teachers on how to feel safe in that classroom.
The biggest problem we're faced with is, we know people are out there self-radicalizing that want to hurt us.
However, the Internet is vast.
There is so much posting and so much underground.
There's no way to identify each and every person who wants to bring harm to us.
-This massive ecostructure of hating Jews has been built up over hundreds of years and has now gone viral on the Internet.
-Something I've written about is the way misinformation can sort of mislead completely otherwise innocent people to believe horrible things about minorities, including Jews, which is how people come to believe things like the Rothschilds, the Jewish banking dynasty control the weather and cause global warming, which is something that a Washington, D.C., lawmaker said.
Right?
He read it on the Internet.
-Y'all better pay attention to this climate control, man.
It's climate manipulation, and D.C. keep talking about, "We a resilient city," and that's a model based off the Rothschilds controlling the climate to create natural disasters.
They can pay for it and own the cities, man.
Be careful.
-If you Google things about the Rothschilds on YouTube, you will find loads of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorizing, and if you start watching it, YouTube's algorithm will start suggesting you watch more of it.
-The Rothschilds, they have great power.
They own -- They own the media.
-People who watch this video can go on the Internet to look it up.
From what I understand, they basically control the world through money.
-The Rothschilds own 83 percent of the world's wealth.
-The globalist bankers.
The Rothschilds.
Ugh!
-The Rothschild family is known for its incest.
-When I was involved in those things, it was all pre-Internet.
One of our pastimes back in the day was distributing a racist newspaper.
We'd sit there all night with thousands of them, rolling them into tubes and putting rubber bands on them until we had huge piles of these rolled newspapers ready to distribute.
Doing that, we distributed thousands upon thousands upon thousands of these newspapers, but that literally took, like, years to do.
-From my Internet, one month had hit 50,000 hits.
That's a lot of humpin' hits, man, I'll tell you something.
And not everyone agrees with me, of course, but certain ideas proliferated.
Last month, I got 3,000 hits.
-During the 2016 campaign, the ADL did a study of anti-Semitic abuse sent towards Jewish journalists in particular, and they ranked the top 10 Jewish journalists who received the most anti-Semitism abuse, and I came in number two, so if you're watching this documentary, you're getting shortchanged -- I guess they couldn't afford number one.
But for me, that's a good thing because it's important to have goals, and there's always 2020.
-Experts say quantifying anti-Semitism across the Internet is very difficult, but most agree it has increased enormously.
-Based on the volume and the anti-Semitic nonsense that, you know, comes across your desk, do you feel like it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when?
-I think it's a matter of when maybe not in Pittsburgh but across the country, and that's why we prepare every day.
We prepare our organizations at the highest level all the time.
What's our goal?
Our goal -- Pardon me?
-Living.
-Living, right?
We talk about surviving for three to five minutes during an active shooter before first responders getting there.
-Let's begin with the fact that... there has been for a very long time a small core of extremely racist white nationalists, some of them identifying as neo-Nazis, so the question is, when does it start to bleed into a larger population?
-We're going to talk about movement.
Move, move, move in the worst-case scenario, if somebody's shooting at us.
-There's still a lot of stagnation, economic stagnation in the American system.
In addition to the economic stagnation, there was a sense of personal disempowerment, frustration, not so much poverty as powerlessness, looking in the mirror every day and thinking, "There is nothing I can do to make tomorrow better than today."
And so people become vulnerable.
-We have to dispense with the idea of the white nationalist has the skinhead, wearing the swastika.
We also have to dispense with the idea that everyone who is sympathetic or holds the core values of white nationalism is, like, an active white-nationalist organizer.
-So, I think the whites are slowly getting sick of all the equal opportunity, which is this rank discrimination.
-Russell Walker lost the general election, yet despite all the coverage about his racism and anti-Semitism, he still captured some 37 percent of the vote.
[ Cheers and applause ] -Donald Trump and the rise of kind of this nationalism, the "Make America Great Again," "America First" movement around Donald Trump was really important because the alt-right was kind of laboring off in the distance without a whole lot of encouragement, and they saw in the rise of American nationalism and in the rise of Donald Trump a kindred spirit.
-Donald Trump never talked about tax.
Or at least during the campaign.
He never talked about tax cuts.
He never talked about all these -- You know, he was not -- All this just kind of conservative garbage that we've been hearing for years.
He talked about immigration first and foremost.
He was a nationalist.
He used phrases like "America First."
Donald Trump is not alt-right.
Donald Trump is not an identitarian.
But we were connected with Donald Trump on this kind of psychic level where Donald Trump was a nationalist.
He was the first true, authentic nationalist in my lifetime.
-Trump realized it in America, that the old Republican formulas weren't working anymore -- free markets, free trade, spread democracy abroad, the old Reagan formula.
No, no.
"Make America Great Again."
The most important word in that slogan is "again" because it is a hearkening back to some imagined halcyon days.
"You know, the Mexicans are taking your jobs.
The Chinese people are taking your factories.
The Muslims are threatening your lives.
I'm going to beat them all up.
We'll be great again."
-Since his election, Donald Trump has at times been accused of encouraging anti-Semitism by either failing to condemn it... -You also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
-...by retweeting anti-Semitic imagery like a picture of Hillary Clinton and a Star of David surrounded by money, reviving the anti-Semitic trope that Jews have double loyalties... -And I think any Jewish people that vote for a Democrat, I think it shows either a total lack of knowledge or great disloyalty.
-I will be exactly clear on what that was -- anti-Semitism.
-...or using anti-Semitic dog whistles like the word "globalist"... -They're called globalists.
They like -- They like the globe.
-...a term understood to refer to capitalist Jews and now used with alarming frequency in right-wing discourse.
-They're corporatist, globalist media.
-Standing up to the prowar special interests and globalist power brokers.
-This is Gary Cohn's last meeting.
He may be a globalist, but I still like him.
[ Laughter ] -While reports show that roughly 10 to 12 percent of Americans hold anti-Semitic views, the concern, experts say, is that an increasing number of people feel emboldened to speak out and in some cases to act.
-Federal authorities have arrested a 27-year-old accused white supremacist who they say planned to bomb a synagogue in Colorado over the weekend.
-It starts with comments.
It starts with words.
And then it escalates.
-In any group like that promoting any sort of racism, any sort of religious bigotry, any sort of paranoia, if you do it long enough, you'll pick up eventually somebody crazy enough to do what was done in Pittsburgh.
-We conducted training at the Tree of Life on September 5th, and it was just like every other training session.
We talked about that remote possibility, what happens.
When an armed gunman comes in and starts shooting, what do we do?
We talked about whether -- Who has a cellphone?
The rabbi himself -- "I don't typically carry a cellphone."
He did after that training.
And so did the training help?
♪♪ We had 11 dead... shot and killed... massacred in our sanctuary... in our building, in a house of worship, in a synagogue.
♪♪ The only thing I can take away from that, whether it helped or not, is we did have people get out.
Rabbi Myers fortunately did have a cellphone.
He was able to call 911.
He was able to stay on the phone with them.
♪♪ He got other people in the front row out, and they lived, and I see them all the time.
And when I see them, I'm incredibly happy... because they're alive.
-It's been well-said that in a healthy society that has problems people ask, "What did we do to cause this?"
In an unhealthy society that has problems, they say, "Who did this to us?"
And the Jews are always a candidate.
♪♪ -Six to eight gunshots heard behind the synagogue, and people heard running from the building.
16903 Espola Road across Chabad Way.
-It's a synagogue location.
Between six to twenty shots heard.
[ Radio beeps ] -Around the world, there is a legend of a Jewish bogeyman with immense power and wealth.
No one knows how this myth began, but according to believers, he conspires behind the scenes to control the world, and apparently he's been very busy.
Some believe he controls the Pope and the Vatican.
Some say he pulls the strings of politicians.
Others say he controls players in the NFL.
Some say he was a Nazi collaborator even though he was only 9 at the start of the war.
Some genuinely believe he's part lizard.
Rudy Giuliani retweeted he was the Antichrist.
-The question is, do we have a shadow government, and if we do, who are those intelligent minority that is guiding us through, and where are they guiding us to?
If you skip past all of the puppets and the strings, if you stop looking at the puppets themselves, you have to see who's behind the puppets.
Who is choosing the puppets and the players?
Who's the puppet master?
George Soros.
-Nowhere has the American businessman George Soros been seen as a bigger bogeyman than in his native Hungary.
There, the far-right populist Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has claimed through a massive propaganda campaign that Soros seeks to destroy the nation by all but forcing Hungary to accept untold thousands of Muslim refugees.
-[ Speaking native language ] -So the Hungarian government's propaganda campaign has kind of focused in on one very clear message -- that the importation of Muslims into Europe, specifically into Hungary, poses an existential threat to all that is considered to be Hungarian.
-Muslims are elevated to the, "Oh, what a different culture, and they are going to inundate Europe, and they're going to Muslimize us all."
-Islam is a different culture.
It's a different entity.
It cannot be compromised.
It cannot be brought together with the Christianity the European continent is having as the foundations of its culture.
They are not comparable.
-How better to mobilize even deeper fears than to tap into the centuries-old anti-Semitic traditions in many of these countries and say, "Not only are the Muslims coming in who you're prejudiced against, but you know what?
All of this is masterminded by some Jewish billionaire in New York who's actually sending those Muslims into your country."
-[ Speaking native language ] -On one of our trips to Hungary for this film, the government had just completed the largest of its anti-Soros campaigns.
-So, the intensity of the Soros campaign was just...superhuman.
♪♪ If you were driving down the highways or in the city, every minute, you saw a huge Soros campaign sign, like, one of those posters.
It was just on the back of the newspapers.
It was -- It was surreal.
Surreal.
-The actual George Soros is an 89-year-old Jewish billionaire who was born in Hungary, hid during the Holocaust, and later moved to America.
-I lived in Hungary in the 1990s for four years.
Soros was nothing but a good presence.
He was someone who had fought communism.
He was someone who got materials to dissidents.
He invested a lot in building up civil society.
He was incredibly selfless in what he gave to that country, so that's why it's kind of surprising that one of the things that Viktor Orbán has done is to turn George Soros into, you know, the demon number one in Hungary.
-The fact that Soros has spent through his foundation something like $32 billion over 30 years -- Mainly, the thrust is open democracies, pluralistic society, Western freedoms, and you take that little piece of information, and suddenly he is the puppet master bringing millions of immigrants, and they're coming to these countries as invaders to take over.
This is craziness.
This is classic demagoguery.
This is how demagogues take power.
[ Speaking native language ] -So, Hungary is a small country of 10 million people on the Eastern side of Europe.
It was behind the Iron Curtain during the Soviet period, and then in 1989, it became a constitutional democracy, and then in 2010, it became something else.
-In 2010, Viktor Orbán and his party known as Fidesz came to power on a wave of nationalism.
They promised to end corruption, improve the struggling economy, and restore Hungary to a former glory.
To this day, his party and coalition hold a strong majority in the Parliament.
-Over the last 10 years, Viktor Orbán has put his allies into the courts in the country.
He has forced the sale of a lot of newspapers and television stations into the hands of his friends and business partners.
He has taken over the country's electoral commission, and so as a result, Hungary is now a kind of Frankenstate.
It looks like a democracy, but in reality, it is all controlled by Viktor Orbán, by his political party, Fidesz, and by his political allies.
♪♪ -Well, Viktor Orbán is a very interesting case because he realized that if he could stop people from thinking and get people into blaming, he would have a base that wouldn't care what else he did, and so he got himself a devil.
And he -- Soros was his devil.
-Andrew Goldberg.
It's so nice to meet you.
-To this room?
Oh, this is beautiful.
Look at this.
-Mm-hmm.
Yeah, yeah.
-That's the castle.
-Oh, wow.
Okay.
Oh, wow.
Wow.
Well, that's terrific -- a terrific view.
You can just sit out here and look at the boats go by.
[ Indistinct conversation ] -What's this?
-What does it ask you?
Can you set it down here?
-I remember there was a question, and it was phrased in a way that every person in their right mind would give the answer that they wanted.
-Of course you answer "no," but, of course, who -- I mean, that was never a threat.
-And how many people in this country believe this?
I understand.
I can have this?
[ Speaking native language ] You're not going to send it back.
Thank you.
You're not going to.
-[ Chuckles ] [ Speaking native language ] -Thank you.
Thank you.
[ Speaking native language ] -Aww.
It's a wonderful gift.
-Mr. Orbán based his entire re-election campaign on falsely accusing me of planning to flood Europe, Hungary included, with Muslim refugees.
-George Soros is not in government here.
George Soros is not in government in Brussels.
He's not in government in the United States.
You know, it's the Hungarian government who calls the shots in Hungary.
-These are campaigns aimed at people who already contain -- you know, already have in their heads a kind of image of Jewish conspiracies in the past.
Jews are international bankers and international financiers, and they're coming to take everything from you.
All of those were tropes already out there, and so what Orbán did was to assume that everybody knew those tropes and to just put forward a photograph of Soros that, by the way, makes him look maximally Jewish.
-Like the traditional, you know, big nose, smile.
-And Soros is laughing.
It's the picture of the laughing Jew.
And in Hungarian, it says, "Don't let Soros get the last laugh," right, assuming that he is there plotting to destroy Hungary.
-[ Speaking native language ] -Orbán does not want to be accused of anti-Semitism.
Whenever he's accused of being an anti-Semite, he pulls out what looks like the cast of "Fiddler on the Roof," and then he wants to pose with them, and, you know, he even wears the hat, you know, and he says, "I'm not anti-Semitic.
Look.
Here are all my friends."
♪♪ -Mm-hmm.
♪♪ ♪♪ -If you are driven by your hatreds of other people because of their faith or their race or their sexual identity or you name it, then you're a walking target for every scoundrel that wants to use your anxiety and anger to get power, and most of the people who inflame all this know better, and they do it because it works.
-It's going to be very consistent.
We always mean what we say, and we always say what we mean, and on that, we are not -- we are not compromising.
-[ Speaking native language ] -Experts say that anti-Semitism does not care who it infects, that it spreads so insidiously, it can actually sicken the very people who believe they stand against it.
It was this that brought me to England, and as it turned out, I had family who'd been there for generations I had never even met.
♪♪ -Hello, good sir!
-Hi.
How are you doing?
-I come bearing gifts.
-Oh, you didn't need -- Hi.
[ Laughs ] -It's so nice to meet you.
-And you.
-How are you?
-It's nice to see you.
-God, you really are a Kritz.
-Am I?
-Hi.
Nice to meet you.
-Yeah, you are.
-How are you?
I come bearing gifts.
-I hope none of your crew are afraid of dogs.
-No, no.
They told me this was posh.
I don't know what that is, but... -It's very posh.
-It's very posh.
-Amazing -- It's uber posh.
-Are you all right with the dog?
-Of course.
We like dogs.
-He's got a cone of shame on him.
-My grandfather from... my bubbe who was a Kritz, as you know, the baby of the family.
-So she would've been -- She was your grandmother.
-She's my grandmother.
-So she would've been my great-grandmother's sister.
No, my great-grandfather's sister.
-I give up on it.
-So there were 13 brothers and sisters.
-Got it.
Now, Elia, who was my grandfather -- Uh, yeah, my grandfather who died, kicked under the heart by a horse.
He was a balagola.
He had a horse and cart, so he was making his way in the world.
He used to supply the supermarkets and so on.
And he died the next morning.
And Alec was born, Eliahu, named after his father because Ashkenazis... -Only after the dead.
-...can only name after a dead person.
-The same thing happened on my father's side.
My grandfather's name was Moishe, and he was named after his father who, according to family legend, was eaten by wolves.
Which one is coffee?
-That's tea.
Tea is in the bulbous cup.
-Had your father told you, you know, "Be careful growing up, or those anti-Semites are going to...?"
-He didn't have to.
Because he saw the torment.
He saw the fights.
He saw the problems that I had.
He never had to tell me to be careful.
Also, I watched him when he got to the age of 56, I think it was, reach his glass ceiling in a massive public company, and I saw my beloved father that was my hero in every respect sitting by the window with the tears running down his face because he knew he'd come to the glass ceiling and he wasn't going to go any further.
-Because he was Jewish.
-Because he was Jewish.
In those days, there wasn't a future for it.
Sadly, I see it happening all over again.
-I was 19 when I received my first piece of hate mail.
It described me as a dirty Zionist pig.
And here starts my 18-year experience of contending with anti-Semitism.
Madam Deputy Speaker, I make no apology for holding my own party to a higher standard.
[ Chatter ] Antiracism is one of our central values, and there was a time not long ago when the left actively confronted anti-Semitism, but there are people who have accused me of having two masters, that have said that I am Tel Aviv's servant, that have called me a paid-up Israeli operative, who have said essentially anti-Semitism of the worst kind suggesting that I'm a traitor to our country.
They've called me Judas, a Zion Nazi, an absolute parasite, telling me to get out of this country and to go back to Israel.
And it pains me to say this, Madam Deputy Speaker, proudly as the Chair of the Jewish Labour Movement in 2018, within the Labour Party, anti-Semitism is now more commonplace, it is more conspicuous, and it is more corrosive.
-In the UK, one of the two main political parties is Labour.
Labour is known as the party of the left, those for the working class, helping the less fortunate, and fighting bigotry.
You could loosely compare them to the Democratic Party in the US.
While Labour is currently not the party in power, they still carry tremendous influence in the UK.
-My dad always said, you know, "I'm a working man, and we vote Labour in this house."
Labour used to be a nice-sounding word.
"Labour."
It was warm and round.
"Labour."
Now I hear the word "Labour," and I-I shrink from it.
-Pressure has been increasing on the Labour Party and its leader, Jeremy Corbyn, after claims of anti-Semitism within the party.
It's not the first time these accusations have been made.
-Police have begun a criminal investigation into allegations of anti-Semitic hate crime within the Labour Party.
-It used to be that, as Jews, if you had a problem with racism, the political party that you ask for help is the Labour Party.
They're not helping anymore.
They are the problem.
-Over 200 cases so far?
-Yes.
-Over 200 cases of anti-Semitism in a democratic party in Western Europe.
-We started in 2014 as a campaign against anti-Semitic crime, and that was being committed by the far-right neo-Nazis and Islamic extremists.
We were not expecting a political anti-Semitic firestorm like we have now, and the first time that our political and government investigations unit came to me to say, "We need to talk about Jeremy Corbyn," my response was, "Who's Jeremy Corbyn?"
-I'm delighted to declare Jeremy Corbyn elected as leader of the Labour Party.
[ Cheers and applause ] Please... -The Labour Party has always had a far-left fringe, and every time there's an internal leadership election within the party, someone from that fringe always stands, and they're normally a no-hope candidate, but on this one occasion, things have changed.
-The kind of aftermath of the 2008 financial crash created a lot of people in this country and other countries who are sympathetic to extreme left-wing politics who think the capitalist system isn't working for them and that it's got to be changed or replaced.
-For a large part of the left, they've traditionally seen American and European policy as bad.
-You know, they see it as bad because it supports capitalism, bad because it supports tough security measures, bad post-9/11 because the War on Terror and all of that.
-A visit to the former mayor of London, an old-school Labour member, connected a few of the dots for me.
[ Click ] -Hi, there.
-Hey.
-Cheers.
-Andrew.
Nice to meet you.
Hey, doggy.
What's the doggy's name?
-Coco.
-Coco?
-Yeah.
I wanted to call her Fidel, but I was overruled.
-You wanted to call her Fidel?
-Yeah.
-Like Castro?
-Yeah.
-Are you a fan of Castro?
-Oh, yeah.
Now we're going to go down to the parks at the end here.
-Why did you -- Why are you a fan of Fidel Castro?
-Because he overthrew a right-wing dictatorship and created much better conditions for his people, and he stood up to 60 years of illegal sanctions by American capitalism.
-It comes together really around dislike of Western policy, belief that Western foreign policy is the source of the wrongs in the world, not the solution to them, and that common point -- Then, also, it reflects back on this Israel question, as well, because Israel is seen as an ally of the West.
-Why... [ Indistinct shouting, whistle blowing ] ...does the US keep on pouring money into Israel to allow them to continue that occupation?
-Corbyn's always been deeply hostile to Israel.
He has always believed that Israel is at the heart of much of what's bad with the world -- colonialism and repression in the Middle East and war and terrorism and international capitalism.
-We will not allow our governments to go on with this cozy relationship, this cozy lawbreaking relationship with this rogue state!
-So, for example, it's 2012.
He has an interview on Press TV, which is a TV channel of the Iranian state, in which they're talking about jihadi attacks in Egypt, and Jeremy Corbin comes on, and he says, quote... -I suspect the hand of Israel in this whole process.
-He described Hamas and Hezbollah as his friends.
-Tomorrow evening, it would be my pleasure and my honor to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking.
I've also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak, as well.
-Hamas is a terrorist organization both in this country and in the United States with a record of terror attacks against Israelis, not just soldiers but civilians.
The founding charge of Hamas demands the destruction, the complete destruction of Israel.
Most British Jews, I think, agree that it's fine to attack the policies of the Israeli government.
They agree that it's fine to attack the occupation.
What upsets them, what worries them is the attack on the very existence of Israel, and I don't think people understand quite how important the existence of Israel is to most British Jews' sense of themselves.
-I think the problem with the hard left is they simply can't distinguish between being a Jew, between being a supporter of the existence of the State of Israel, and I am both a Jew and a supporter, a Zionist in the sense that I believe in the existence of the State of Israel.
And then it gets muddled up further with...
I believe, a thinking that, how can they be racist?
Because I'm white.
You can't have racism against white people.
And that's muddled, as well, with a hatred of capitalism, and, you know, Jews may be overrepresented in the financial-services industry, you know, may be rather better off than other minority groups.
So we're capitalists.
That's bad.
♪♪ And then finally we have the pro-Israeli Jews in America who have a very strong lobby in American politics, and that's bad, and they hate America.
♪♪ So that mix of hating capitalism, hating America, being white together with muddling -- being a Jew, a Zionist -- creates a sort of culture of anti-Semitism.
-What it is, is saying, "Israelis are Nazis.
Israelis were behind the 9/11 attacks."
That's what people are saying within the Labour Party, and that has nothing to do with the sensible debate or critique of Israel.
What that is saying is, Jews are this malevolent force that wants to destroy Western society, that wants to destroy the underdog in the Middle East, that wants to destroy -- You name it, they want it.
-It's difficult sometimes to disentangle the old form of anti-Semitism, which was, you know, the classic hatred of Jewish people, you know, banning them from the golf clubs and et cetera and, you know, the Jewish conspiracy around finance and all this... and this new form that focuses specifically on the State of Israel, but, you know, to a certain level, they run into each other.
♪♪ And what's, to me, very striking about this new form of anti-Semitism is how it very quickly leads to the consequence of the old form, as well.
-"You are a spy.
You are evil, satanic.
Leave.
#Labour.
#Corbyn."
-They call me "Jewish bitch."
They call me, um, uh, a Zionist cow.
-"Not a real Jew.
A child bully.
Conspiracy theorist."
-They hope that I'm going to be killed by Hamas.
-"Hang yourself, you vile, treacherous, Zionist Tory filth.
You are a cancer of humanity."
-And you can check the profiles of people to see who they are, where it's coming from, and the large overwhelming majority of these people have the Labour red rose and "#JC4PM," Jeremy Corbyn for PM.
-What is wrong with Jeremy Corbyn that he can't get a grip of this issue which has been now going for two years?
Why -- Why has his party -- Why has your party become synonymous with anti-Semitism?
-Undisputed numbers are hard to find, but hundreds if not more than 1,000 alleged anti-Semitic incidents by Labour members and leaders have been reported.
-So, for example, we see Naz Shah, a member of Parliament, has posted on social media various comments, for example, saying that Israel needs to be transported.
All of the Jewish Israelis need to be transported to the United States.
Pretty much the next day after the Naz Shah incident, we have Ken Livingstone going on the radio.
-Let's remember when Hitler won his election in 1932, his policy then was that Jews should be moved to Israel.
He was supporting Zionism before he went mad and ended up killing six million Jews.
-This is a man who's a former mayor of London who felt it necessary on too many occasions to talk about Hitler and the Jews.
-And what it takes in order for action to happen is that a non-Jewish Labour member of Parliament who spent his whole life fighting against the far right ends up confronting Ken Livingstone in a stairwell in a building in Westminster.
-You know nothing about what Hitler did in 1932!
Dachau concentration camp in his first 50 days, the race purity laws in his first 100 days, and you dare say -- you dare say that Hitler supported Zionism.
You're off you're -- You've lost it, mate!
You need help!
-This is how conspiracy theories work.
They take a nugget of something.
They take a nugget of information, and they twist it, and they paint a completely different story around it, and as soon as he said that, overnight, there were thousands of people Googling, "Did Hitler support Zionism?
Was Hitler a Zionist?
Did the Jews, you know, work with the Nazis?"
-It's a calculated lie.
[ Chatter ] A calculated lie by conspiracy theorists, conspiracy theorists, normally neo-Nazis, and you're backing conspiracy theorists.
-If we don't draw a red line in the sand when it comes to anti-Semitism, Muslims will be next, gays will be next, and everyone else who's deemed a minority.
Poles and Romanians will be next.
-By late 2019, Luciana Berger and numerous others had resigned from the Labour Party, citing anti-Semitism as the reason.
-I cannot remain in a party that I have today come to the sickening conclusion is institutionally anti-Semitic.
-There is no problem driving everybody crazy about Jews in this country.
There's a problem driving Jews crazy about the Labour Party's attitude to Jews, and outside that, nobody cares very much.
-In May of 2019, I asked a senior Labour member how he felt the party was handling the anti-Semitism allegations.
-I don't think we've been quick enough in identifying it.
I don't think we've been quick enough in dealing with it.
And I don't think we've been ruthless enough in dealing with it, but we're learning lessons fast.
-What we saw in Britain is that this problem has its origins on university campuses, at fringe political meetings, and gradually it starts to build and build and build until you get to the point where there's actually a large movement of people who believe in this worldview.
I see some of those same ingredients happening in the United States.
-Israel is a settler colonial project that does not have the right to exist.
The Zionist State of Israel in and of itself is a crime against humanity.
[ Applause ] -What really disturbs me about the anti-Semitism of the left is that it uses historic tropes about Jews' dual loyalty, about Jews sticking together, about Jews' inability to integrate into these other spaces, and it uses those tropes to exclude the Jews.
-Just a few of the countless examples include women kicked out of a Chicago event known as the Dyke March because organizers reportedly felt their rainbow flag looked like the Israeli flag... a UCLA student questioned about her so-called dual loyalties with Israel... ...and a mandatory lecture at the University of Michigan where an activist showed students anti-Semitic slides.
-It wasn't just the Adolf Hitler image in this lecture series that struck me, but there was another image of pigs wearing money backpacks, and they're drinking from money water bottles, and it says, "Zionism -- the puppet state of imperialism."
Here you have an image that looks like it could come from the alt-right, but it's coming from the left.
-While precisely measuring anti-Semitism on the left is difficult, most experts agree it is growing.
♪♪ -I'm always wary of people saying, "It's fringe, it's not really a problem," because things that are fringe have ways of becoming problems.
-Some of this leftist, um, position comes from ignorance.
Some of it comes from long-standing political positions that people have and they'll probably carry on having, but a lot of it is just because people are getting one side of the story around Israel.
They're not seeing a more balanced picture, and that's then leading them to think, "Well, if this Israeli state calls itself a Jewish state, well, maybe the Jewish community as a whole is collectively responsible for this."
-Is this like an English garden?
-[ Chuckles ] It's like an an English garden.
-I guess it is an English garden, right, technically.
-There you are, little man.
So, Evie sits here in the morning to have her coffee.
She takes Freddie out, and he does what he needs to do.
And in the summer, we... Well, you can't see it, but we have a table and chairs, and we sit there and have our evening and a bottle of wine.
And can I introduce you to Corbyn?
-Corbyn.
-Corbyn is our scarecrow that frightens off the birds and Jews.
I'd been a member of the Labour Party.
I joined Eltham Young Socialists when I was 16 or 17.
I went on every anti-Apartheid march.
I went on every CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, march.
I was...well to the left.
I have known Jeremy Corbyn and his background for years and years, so when that guy was elected leader of the Labour Party, I tore up my Labour Party card.
I ceased all my donations.
And just about everybody I know -- and I know an awful lot of Jewish liberals, if you understand that expression -- has done the same thing.
I can't believe that Jewish MPs are being humiliated, are being threatened.
I can't believe that social media is so unpleasant and violent.
It breaks my heart.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -[ Speaking French ] -On January 9, 2015, Jean-Luc Slakmon and 14 others were taken hostage when a terrorist attacked a kosher supermarket in Paris.
-[ Speaking French ] -The 32-year-old terrorist had pledged allegiance to ISIS after adopting radical Islam in prison.
-He not fully integrated in society, criminal.
He's got all of these grievances, all of these issues, and he's looking for solutions.
Charismatic recruiters meet him, help him find not only a cure for the problems in some occasions but also hope.
They teach him -- TV, sermons, social media -- whole bunch of different ways that there are certain enemies that are stopping him and his group from actually gaining traction and controlling and ruling over the world as God intended them to do.
And guess what.
One of the biggest ones is the Jew.
-The attacker killed four people, all Jews -- Yohan Cohen, a student and store clerk... Yoav Hattab, a student and son of a rabbi in Tunisia... Francois-Michel Saada, a retiree with a family... and Philippe Braham, a 45-year-old husband and father.
-[ Speaking French ] [ Chuckles ] [ Laughs ] ♪♪ [ Indistinct shouting ] -[ Reporter speaking French ] [ Gunfire ] [ Indistinct shouting ] -[ Speaking French ] [ Sobs ] ♪♪ -France has some of the most extreme and violent anti-Semitism in the world.
In some years, more than 800 anti-Semitic incidents have been reported.
-The numbers that we have, we have to multiply them by four at least, and then we get some real numbers.
75 percent of the anti-Semitic incidents do not get reported.
-With increased conflict in the Middle East and the run-up to the Iraq War, the early 2000s saw a significant increase in anti-Semitic acts in France.
In 2003, the violence escalated with the killing of 23-year-old Sebastian Selam.
-He was killed by his childhood friend who was Muslim.
His childhood friend just stabbed him in the chest, in the eyes, and in the throat.
It was, of course, completely anti-Semitic.
The murderer came out of the parking lot yelling -- with his hand full of blood, yelling, "I killed my Jew.
I'll go to Heaven."
A few years later, in 2006, there was a very famous murder, the murder of Ilan Halimi.
Ilan Halimi was a Jew.
He was abducted, tortured for three weeks, and killed under the assumption that, being a Jew, his family had money and would pay a ransom for his liberation.
The family had no money, and besides, the money was just a pretext for the hate.
-And we have breaking news here.
Four people reportedly killed in a shooting outside a Jewish school in Toulouse, France.
French media is reporting three of those killed are children.
-The terrorist who attacked the Jewish school in Toulouse was a 23-year-old self-described jihadist.
He shot a father and two children, then chased down a young girl and shot her in the head.
He was later killed by authorities.
His brother, Abdelkader Merah, was arrested as an accomplice and is currently in prison.
A third brother, who was not involved in any way with the murders, has since committed much of his life to fighting anti-Semitism.
-Do you think Abdelkader has any bad feelings about the killing of these children?
-[ Speaking French ] -In the years that followed the Toulouse school shooting, the incidents in France got worse.
In 2017, Sarah Halimi was thrown to her death from her third-floor window by a man who reportedly shouted verses from the Quran and called her Satan.
Then 2018 saw the killing of Mireille Knoll.
-Mireille Knoll was 85, in a wheelchair, suffering from Parkinson's.
She'd survived the Holocaust... but not an attack last Friday in her Paris council flat, stabbed 11 times and burnt to death because she was Jewish.
-There is no doubt about the fact that French Jews are afraid.
There is not one event, one party, one wedding, one bar mitzvah, one anything, one social event I go to and where people don't talk about the fact, "Do you think we should be leaving?"
-Anti-Semitism is on the rise in France, prompting some Jews to consider moving to Israel.
-Yeah.
100 million times.
100 million times.
-So, France is a country of 65 million inhabitants, more or less, of which a half million are Jews and 4 to 6 million are Muslims.
Most of those Muslims are totally integrated to French society.
-Some of them, probably a third, they are failing.
Their integration is a nightmare.
But for vast majority, they are succeeding, and nobody talks about the success.
So the landscape is very contrasted.
-France is also a country that was once an empire whose colonies were Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia.
-In the '50s and '60s, most of France's colonial experiment in Africa came to an end.
Hundreds of thousands of people of Muslim origin from these countries moved to France, which they saw as their former oppressor, seeking work.
-[ Speaking French ] -There was a lot of barriers to be -- you know, to cross in order for those kids to assimilate.
They had to fight their parents' traditions.
They had to fight religion.
They had to fight racism.
-So, the only thing that we do know today, sort of formally, is that we've done surveys, and this is very recent.
So, on stereotypes like Jews and finance, Jews and media, Zionist conspiracy, Jews used the Holocaust in their own adva-- all of these kind of stereotypes.
-The studies show that a third of the Muslims can be counted as anti-Semitic compared with 5 to 10 percent for the rest of the French population.
So great difference.
-The most important thing is a conspiracy theory.
This is more -- It's the most important thing.
With a conspiracy theory, you interpret the world, and at the very heart of the conspiracy theory, you have the Jews.
They are designing the world.
They are conspiring against us.
-That's the problem of feeling victimized by the society, and in this victimization, they believe that Jews are playing a major role.
-Around one million people, there's a lot of young people, probably 40 percent of the young French Muslims under 25.
We call them secessionists.
What does it mean?
It means that religion is much more important for them than national values, and inside this category, we will have jihadists.
The intelligence service, the intelligence community, they have the file with around 10,000 names, so, you know, 10,000 names radicalized or with the potentiality to be radicalized.
-A former colleague of mine used to be senior recruiter for a major worldwide Islamist organization.
He tells a story about when he was on a train one time, and he was sat next to a woman who was Muslim.
She was wearing the hijab, so he identified her as Muslim.
She had a young child with her.
She was reading a free newspaper.
The headline was something about a celebrity who had been a pedophile.
He quickly, at that moment in time, analyzed that she must have a psychological worry for her child, and he engaged in a conversation with her about, "Look at the role models in the Western society.
Look.
They're all pedophiles.
Look at the immoral, corrupt Western capitalist, blah, blah, blah society, and you're never going to have safety and security for your child unless you join the global Muslim... the Islamist..." And that was a perceived grievance that she didn't even have.
So he recruited her, he's left, and she's still in the organization.
♪♪ -[ Speaking French ] ♪♪ -So.
[ Chuckles ] A very, very good question.
Israel is seen as a country that has taken over a -- the third-most holiest place, land in the Muslim worlds, if you like.
And they believe that Israel is occupying, they believe Israel is, um, discriminating against Muslims and Palestinians.
-They do not have any kind of direct connection to the Palestinians, you know?
They are from North Africa.
They are not from the Middle East.
Problem is that the media, Internet and, I mean, TV show that they are, you know, struggling and so on, and for them, it is another proof that the West, you know, hates Muslims because the West is totally on the side of Israel.
-There is not a lot of differentiation between the Jews and the Israelis or "the Jew" in the mind-set of an anti-Semite.
They see Jews as the representative of the Jew, any Jew.
-[ Speaking native language ] -This is the narrative that is building across the world right now amongst people that it is their politically Islamic duty -- more than that, on a human-being level because the Jews are the oppressors.
-- to actually dislike -- Actually, they say... [Speaks Arabic] "Fight them if you can.
If you can't fight them, debate them.
If you can't debate them, then at least hate them in your heart for the sake of God."
-[ All shouting in native language ] -France is probably where it all started.
It's where -- France, to some extent, is a laboratory.
It's the biggest Jewish community of Europe.
It's the biggest Muslim community of Europe.
So it's here that it was first appeared, and it was the most visible, but it's clearly spread across Europe.
-We have some breaking news right now here on CNN happening overseas right now.
Police in Sweden are on scene of a possible attack on a synagogue.
-A deadly shooting at a Danish synagogue, a brazen assault on a French cemetery.
-We want to update you on the shooting at the Jewish Museum in Brussels, Belgium.
Officials say three people were killed.
Another one was seriously injured.
-I think it's going to get worse before it gets better.
-[ Speaking French ] ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ -One, two.
-So Much Film!