By Gustavo de Arístegui, as published by La Razón.
December 21, 2025 

The historian Robert Wistrich called antisemitism “the longest-lasting hatred .” We watch with profound alarm as the seams of Western civilization unravel before the resurgence of a hydra that many believed, if not dead, at least mortally wounded after 1945. Antisemitism has roared again, and this is not a historical accident; it is the reappearance of an ancient poison that was never fully eradicated. It was contained, shamed, and disguised, but not defeated.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes, Mark Twain warned . Today, that rhyme is a macabre dissonance that resonates with increasing force from Ivy League universities to Sydney beaches. When societies lose their moral compass, politics becomes brutalized, and social media turns lies into dogma, hatred once again marches with a firm step. We’re not talking about an ideological polemic or an abstract “climate”; we’re talking about a fragile, tiny minority— barely 16.5 million human beings on the entire planet . When this mechanism of pointing fingers becomes normalized, history ceases to be a lesson and becomes a warning once more.

The origins: a prejudice that did not die out

Antisemitism didn’t originate with the internet or the contemporary crises in the Middle East. Its roots run deep: the Jew as the perpetual “other,” the ever-present scapegoat. Throughout the centuries, this prejudice has changed its disguise to suit various interests: from “Christ-killers” to “enemy of the race”; from medieval blood libel to 19th-century financial conspiracy theories; from the “cosmopolitan” despised by nationalists to the “nationalist” hated by internationalists. This contradiction doesn’t weaken it; it fuels it. It is an “elastic” hatred.

Post-war Europe believed that Auschwitz had inoculated humanity forever. However, what occurred was a moral and legal containment, not a definitive eradication. The horror of the Shoah erected a legal and consensus-based barrier, but prejudice remained lurking, latent. It is morally inconceivable and unacceptable that such a small community should concentrate such a disproportionate share of intense hatred; a structural pattern that cannot be explained by circumstance, but rather by a persistent social pathology.

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The resurgence of “primary” antisemitism: the end of dissimulation

For decades, explicit antisemitism was hidden . Racists were forced to disguise themselves, to hide to avoid disgrace and shame. Today, that restraint has been broken. Not because hatred is new, but because the technological and political landscape has mutated: virality rewards outbursts, and algorithms reward outrage and radical, angry rhetoric.

Primary antisemitism doesn’t require grand theories; it manifests itself in gestures, jokes, automatic suspicion, and the insinuation that “they must have done something.” It is the normalization of dehumanization. When jokes are tolerated, threats follow; when threats are tolerated, aggression follows; and when aggression becomes normalized, attacks and murders multiply, and barbarity takes root among us once again. The “cascade of hatred” is not a literary device, but a political mechanism of social erosion that unmasks the bestial obscurantism.

The resurgence of the far right: Unapologetic neo-Nazism

The antisemitic far right has not disappeared; it has mutated. Sometimes it disguises itself as “identitarianism” (just look at the extreme nationalisms in Europe and Spain…); other times, as classic supremacism. The pattern remains unchanged: the demonization of the Jew as the hidden corruptor or the puppet master of globalization. This current feeds today on economic anxiety and authoritarian nostalgia, but also on an aesthetic of hatred transformed into a spectacle and a driving force for deeply troubled and expanding social sectors.

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Australia, a country that considered itself protected by its robust civic culture and strong, vibrant democracy, has suffered a brutal shock. The neo-Nazi rally outside the New South Wales Parliament in Sydney—with uniformed individuals and repugnant anti-Semitic slogans—was not only a national scandal but a global warning. Liberal democracy cannot be naive: defending freedoms does not mean allowing the enemies of freedom to hold sway. Neo-Nazism has emerged from the dark web to occupy spaces in the public sphere. How could we have allowed such an abomination to be reborn?

The furious and irrational anti-Semitism of the extreme left

Here we must be surgically precise in our analysis. Political criticism of the actions of any government—including the Israeli government—is a democratic right, and it is exercised by hundreds of thousands of Israelis when they deem it appropriate and necessary. What is illegitimate and extraordinarily dangerous, and what has spread alarmingly, is the deceitful leap from criticism of specific policies to the permanent demonization of the State of Israel.

From there, the attack escalates to the very essence of the State of Israel and its right to exist in peace and security . From there, it progresses to the denigration of its entire people. The anti-Semite moves from hatred of all citizens of Israel to abhorrence of all “Jews” in the world. A repugnant absurdity that throws wide open the gates of the hell of concentrated hatred and the desire for the annihilation of all Jews on the planet.

On university campuses and in certain Western cultural spaces, we have witnessed a disturbing fusion of radical anti-Zionism and traditional Judeophobia, even to the point of romanticizing terrorist organizations. Most serious is the attitude of certain sectors of the once sensible and moderate social democracy who, whether out of electoral calculation or moral laziness, flirt with this rhetoric, believing they are appeasing the radicals. They are not appeasing them; they are legitimizing them and eroding the moral compass of the West.

“Hidden” antisemitism: the danger of the shameful when it “comes out of the closet”

There is an antisemitism that doesn’t shout slogans but acts like acid on institutions. Its weapons are insinuation and selective exclusion. It manifests itself in double standards, suspicion of “dual loyalties,” and moral condemnation. This “armchair” antisemitism is especially repulsive because it turns every Jew—be they a doctor in Madrid, a student in New York, or a merchant in Buenos Aires—into a “hidden and disloyal agent” of shadowy, faceless conspirators. For the primary antisemite, the Jew is not a fellow citizen, but an enemy in disguise, a permanent suspect under morbid scrutiny.

Radical Islamism and Jihadism: The Ideology of Barbarism

The antisemitism of radical Islam is not a stance; it is a ruthless doctrine. The offspring of radical Islam, jihadist terrorism , is a dogma of total hatred that dehumanizes Jews to legitimize their indiscriminate murder. Its recruitment and indoctrination methods are sophisticated and malevolently effective: emotional propaganda, identity-based victimhood, and a conspiratorial worldview.

Radicalization no longer requires physical Madrassas; it happens on mobile phones, in short videos on social media, and on the dark web. From there, it progresses toward two operational models: structured cells and “inspired actors” (lone wolves). The instilled message is that the Jew is “the absolute enemy of the faith.” The Bondi bombing in Sydney illustrates this chain : ideology, motivation, and massacre. It is not a territorial conflict; it is an “extermination under the guise of theology” whose main objective is to strike the global Jewish community wherever it is most vulnerable.

Lukewarm governments and the error of diagnosis

We have arrived at one of the great contemporary shames. Many Western governments have been unable to maintain the necessary firmness and moral compass. The State of Israel is a vibrant democracy that may be subject to criticism; its governments are temporary and fallible; but its citizens and the global Jewish community are not collectively guilty, as the abomination that is antisemitism would have us believe.

When a government uses excessive and immorally bombastic language against Israel— without applying the same rigor to regimes that practice state terrorism —it creates a double standard that erodes the moral barrier against antisemitism. This rhetoric fuels social hatred. By selectively and disproportionately targeting Israel, governments are, in practice, seriously jeopardizing the security of their own Jewish citizens.

The Bondi tragedy: an unjustifiable systemic failure

On December 14, 2025, the Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach turned into a nightmare. A mass attack left 15 dead and dozens wounded . There had been a climate of prior threats and an increase in incidents that were not taken seriously by the authorities.

The initial reaction of Anthony Albanese ‘s government was lukewarm and, worse, misdiagnosed. By attempting to shift the focus to gun control—an administrative and bureaucratic debate—it sought to obscure the ideological root of the crime: jihadist antisemitism. Politics cannot afford to apply administrative solutions to problems that are ethical and national security in nature. If the hatred that motivates the shooting is not correctly identified, the diagnosis will be incomplete, the response insufficient, and the moral damage to society, we hope, will not be irreparable.

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Conclusion: the imperative of moral clarity

Antisemitism is not a “Jewish problem”; it is a civilizational barometer that indicates when a society has begun to decay from within. Tolerating it means accepting the most lethal logic in history: the search for a collective scapegoat. It is an immoral act and an act of execrable collective cowardice. As Elie Wiesel pointed out, “The opposite of love is not hate, it is indifference.” Today we face the most infectious form of Judeophobia.

If we allow antisemitism to become normalized and the Holocaust to be trivialized or exploited, humanity will be insistently calling for the gates of hell—the hell of hatred and horror—to be thrown wide open, and the worst of crimes, genocide, will once again take root among us. Defending the Jewish community is, ultimately, defending reason and the freedom of all.