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As antisemitism spikes across Europe, more fingers are pointing at Russia
(JTA) — When Stars of David began appearing on Jewish homes and institutions in Paris’ 10th arrondissement late last month, as well as on a Jewish woman’s home in Berlin, many were quick to bring up comparisons to the Nazi era.
But French authorities pointed to a surprising culprit: Russia.
According to French authorities, the pictures of the Stars of David first began to spread via a Russian-run news site called Recent Reliable News (RRN) before being found by others online. Shortly after the incident went viral, VIGINUM, France’s intelligence unit devoted to tracking foreign digital interference, recorded more than 1,000 bots making over 2,500 posts related to the incident on X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter.
RRN, seemingly a news aggregator, was revealed in June to be part of a network of web domains used by Russian hackers for a disinformation operation targeted at Western Europe known as “Doppelganger.” RRN and sites like it were used to mimic major news outlets and even government sites, sharing information with a clearly pro-Russia slant.
“VIGINUM has a high degree of confidence that these bots are affiliated to the RRN network, given that one of their main activities consists in redirecting people to RRN websites,” France’s foreign ministry said in a press release earlier this month. “France strongly condemns the involvement of the Russian network Recent Reliable News (RRN/Doppelgänger) in the artificial spreading and initial distribution on social media of photos of graffiti representing Stars of David in the 10th arrondissement of Paris.”
As antisemitism has spiked in Europe in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war, multiple investigations have pointed to Russian involvement in stoking an already tense situation. While motives remain unclear, experts have noted that fomenting already brewing divisions and chaos in the West has been a tradition of Russia’s security services since the Cold War.
French investigators noted that their probe is ongoing, and they still have yet to confirm if the vandalism was the work of Russian state-backed actors. But they revealed that two suspects arrested in connection with the graffiti were Moldovan nationals who allegedly painted the stars on the orders of an unknown individual whom they communicated with by phone in Russian. (While Moldova’s national language is Romanian, like many other former Soviet republics, Russian has remained a first language for many of its citizens.)
As more details about the vandalism emerged, more questions were raised. For one, not all of the stars were sprayed on Jewish buildings. Second, the style of the stars — from an elegant stencil, in a deep blue color reminiscent of the Israeli flag — seemed out of place for an antisemitic incident.
While the details remain murky, Nina Jankowicz, the U.S vice president of the Centre for Information Resilience and an expert on disinformation, said the episode tracks with Russia’s modus operandi.
“This definitely seems like it could fit the bill of the types of provocation that Russia has been known to be behind in the past,” Jankowicz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “Russia uses these pre-existing fissures in society to drive further polarization or drive issues that are hot button issues in society, generally, without regard for, for the context.”
Such moves have been part and parcel of Russia’s foreign policy for decades and a key feature of its so-called “hybrid war” since its invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
“Driving polarization in Western societies is really an easy way to have wins for Russia,” Jankowicz said.
That hasn’t been restricted to amplifying divisive topics in the digital sphere. During the 2016 U.S. elections, dueling protests unfolded on the streets of Houston, Texas, both for and against a local Islamic center. What neither side fully knew at the time was that both protests were spawned by Facebook groups made by operatives in Moscow.
“I think we’d like to think that at this point, Russia is just doing stuff on the internet and then poisoning dissidents every so often. But these sorts of on the ground operations — which sometimes aren’t carried out in the most perfect way — are 100% the sort of thing that they’ve done in the past, and that they continue to do even after the U.S. election in 2016,” Jankowicz said.
Jankowicz noted that Russia is an equal opportunity inciter, switching from causes on the right to left at will, and the country is no stranger to using antisemitism as a weapon. In fact, it’s a trick cribbed straight from the Soviet Union playbook.
“During the Soviet period, especially in places like Germany, Russia, would very deliberately deface memorials and use antisemitic attacks, as late as the 80s, in order to stoke the specter of antisemitism,” she said.
In the late 1980s, before German reunification, Rainer Sonntag, the leader of West Germany’s most influential Neo-Nazi group, was doing double duty as a spy for both the East German Stasi and Soviet KGB. During the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, the Stasi forged hundreds of letters of support from “veterans of the Waffen-SS” in an attempt to embarrass West Germany.
“They have been on both sides of issues like civil and human rights issues related to the Black population in the United States, LGBT rights, and all sorts of things. So it’s not beyond them to play both sides,” Jankowicz said.
Russia has leveled the same charges at the West, most commonly at Ukraine and the United States. Last month, Moscow claimed U.S.-backed forces instigated the mob which stormed Makhachkala airport looking for Jews in Dagestan, Russia
“The events in Makhachkala last night were inspired also through social networks, not least from the territory of Ukraine, by the hands of agents of Western special services,” Russian President Vladimir Putin said at the time.
“This is something we’ve noted previously in a variety of online influence campaigns – more of a ‘muddying of the waters’ than a clear ‘trying to do X’ type operation,” said Justin Crow, a researcher at the University of Sussex who focuses on Russia and open source intelligence. “Almost always around highly sensitive contemporaneous cultural issues – i.e. exploiting circumstantial events to sow discord, without that discord needing to be specifically targeted at one group or another.”
Russia isn’t the only country deploying the strategy and involving Jewish institutions. Two weeks ago, a fire was set outside of a synagogue in Armenia’s capital, Yerevan. The building was only lightly damaged, but Armenian authorities were quick to open an investigation, claiming that the arson was committed by a foreign national who was only in the country for a few hours.
Like the situation in France, news of the attack was most widely spread by media connected to an opposing nation: Azerbaijan, which has been at war with Armenia over the disputed region known as Nagorno-Karabakh to Azeris and Artsakh to Armenians.
Azerbaijani media has reported that the attack, as well as a vandalism of the same synagogue in early October — just before the start of the Israel-Hamas war on Oct. 7 — had been claimed by ASALA, an Armenian Marxist-Leninist group that had fought with Turkey in the 1970s and 80s but has largely been considered inactive since 1991.
“We didn’t know what had happened yet, and Azerbaijani channels were already circulating photos of the building,” said Rima Varzhapetyan, the head of Armenia’s Jewish community, according to the Times of Israel. “Obviously, there are some forces that work not against us Jews, but against Armenia. This is outrageous.”
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South African Jews Slam President for Failing to Condemn Hamas Murder of Bibas Children
Israelis sit together as they light candles and hold posters with the images Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas and her two children, Kfir and Ariel Bibas, seized during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, on the day the bodies of deceased hostages, identified at the time by Palestinian terror groups as Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children, were handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Itay Cohen
South Africa’s Jewish community has called on President Cyril Ramaphosa to condemn the murder of Israeli children Ariel and Kfir Bibas, their mother, and another elderly hostage kidnapped by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists, lambasting his silence during a recent address to a major international gathering on the same day that the hostages’ bodies were paraded in Gaza.
In a statement shared with The Algemeiner on Monday, the South African Jewish Board of Deputies (SAJBD) — the umbrella group of the country’s Jewish community — slammed Ramaphosa for failing to condemn Hamas’s brutality or even acknowledge the hostage victims in his speech last week to senior diplomats from leading rich and developing countries.
During his remarks at the Group of 20 (G20) foreign ministers’ meeting in Johannesburg, Ramaphosa “only mentioned the suffering of the Palestinians” without noting the Israeli hostages who were killed while in captivity in Gaza, according to SAJBD.
“South Africa welcomes the ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas as a crucial first step toward ending the severe humanitarian crisis faced by Palestinians in Gaza,” Ramaphosa said at the gathering.
In response, SAJBD’s president, Zev Krengel, and national chairperson, Prof. Karen Milner, penned an open letter to Ramaphosa in which they denounced his remarks as “reprehensible,” criticizing the South African leader for his failure to call out Hamas for its atrocities and questioning his government’s credibility to lead international forums such as the G20.
“On the same day that these comments were made, Hamas paraded four coffins of Israeli civilian hostages in a macabre ceremony that violated basic human rights principles and every standard of basic human decency,” they wrote.
Last week, the bodies of 84-year-old Oded Lifshitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two sons, Ariel and Kfir — the youngest hostages abducted by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists on Oct. 7, 2023 — were returned to Israel as part of the Gaza ceasefire and hostage-release deal.
Before the handover, Hamas had staged what it called a victory celebration in Khan Yunis, in southern Gaza. The Palestinian terrorist group placed the coffins of the four hostages on a makeshift stage in an abandoned cemetery, turning their deaths into a theatrical condemnation of Israel and its leadership.
Lining the back of the stage was a massive poster of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu shown as a vampire dripping with blood, with the four slain hostages in front of him alongside the sentence: “The war criminal Netanyahu and his Nazi army killed them with missiles from Israeli warplanes.” Around the stage, mock missiles bore messages shifting the blame onto Israel and the United States. One read: “They were killed by USA bombs.”
Thousands of onlookers had gathered, including many children and babies, cheering as masked Hamas terrorists brandished weapons. Music blared from loudspeakers, punctuated by chants of victory.
“It is reprehensible that on the very day that these depraved acts that so shocked the world, once again exposing the brutality of Hamas, you chose to omit any mention of this in your comments regarding Palestine in your speech at the G20,” the SAJBD letter read, accusing Ramaphosa and his government of failing to take any action to help secure the hostages’ release, despite their ties with Hamas.
In December, South Africa hosted two Hamas officials who attended a government-sponsored conference in solidarity with the Palestinians. One of the officials had been sanctioned by the US government for his role with the terrorist organization.
Krengel and Milner argued that instead of working toward peace, South Africa’s ruling African National Congress (ANC) has lost its “moral compass” and further polarized opinions toward the Gaza conflict.
“Your complete lack of any form of sympathy for this elderly man, these babies and their mother, and your failure to call out Hamas for this atrocity shows how far your government has deviated from the moral compass we were recognized as having in 1994,” the SAJBD wrote. “When the brutal murder of babies is ignored, we know that we are no longer a beacon of human rights.”
Ariel was 4 years old and Kfir was 10 months old at their time of death in November 2023, according to the Israel Defense Forces. They were held hostage in Gaza for 503 days.
IDF spokesperson Rear Adm. Daniel Hagari said on Friday morning that based on forensics finding from the identification process, examination of Kfir and Ariel’s bodies showed Hamas terrorists killed the young brothers “with their bare hands.”
Meanwhile, tensions between Israel and Hamas escalated after an Israeli forensic examination revealed that the body of the boys’ mother was not returned. The Israeli military said the received body “is not that of Shiri Bibas, and no match was found for any other hostage. This is an anonymous, unidentified body.” Hamas returned her actual body later in the week, following outcry from Israeli leaders.
“We feel ashamed as South Africans that our leadership has failed the Bibas babies and other hostages whose return could have ended the war to the benefit of both the Gazan and Israeli people,” the SAJBD letter read. “We wonder if South Africa has lost its credibility to lead such an important organization as the G20 during these critical times.”
Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists started the war in Gaza when they murdered 1,200 people and kidnapped 251 hostages during their invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Israel responded with a military campaign aimed at freeing the hostages and dismantling Hamas’s military and governing capabilities in neighboring Gaza.
Fighting stopped last month, when both sides agreed to an ongoing ceasefire brokered by Egypt and Qatar, with US support. Talks have begun to extend and expand the ceasefire, which so far has included limited hostage releases in exchange for releasing many times more Palestinian prisoners, including terrorists serving life sentences.
About 60 hostages remain in Gaza, roughly half of whom are believed to be dead.
Since Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre and the onset of the Gaza war, South Africa has been of the harshest critics of Israel on the world stage.
For the past year, the South African government has been pursuing its case at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
Ramaphosa led the crowd at an election rally in a chant of “From the river to the sea, Palestine shall be free” — a popular slogan among anti-Israel activists that has been widely interpreted as a genocidal call for the destruction of the Jewish state, which is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
The post South African Jews Slam President for Failing to Condemn Hamas Murder of Bibas Children first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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Israel’s Top Diplomat Urges Lebanese People to Break Free From ‘Iranian Occupation’
Funeral ceremony for former Hezbollah leaders Hassan Nasrallah and Hashem Safieddine, outskirts of Beirut, Feb. 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar has called on the Lebanese people to break free from “the Iranian occupation,” pushing Israel’s northern neighbor to weaken the political and military influence of the Iran-backed terrorist organization Hezbollah.
“The images from Nasrallah’s ‘funeral’ now precisely reflect the historic crossroads where Lebanon stands: The continuation of the Iranian occupation in Lebanon, through Hezbollah — or liberation from Iran and Hezbollah and freedom to Lebanon,” Sa’ar wrote in a post on X, referring to long-time Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed in an Israeli military strike in September. His funeral was held in Lebanon on Sunday.
“The choice is in the hands of Lebanon and the Lebanese people,” Sa’ar added.
The Israeli diplomat’s comments came as Lebanese President Joseph Aoun told a visiting Iranian delegation on Sunday that the country was “tired” of external conflicts playing out on its territory, asserting that Lebanon is not a battleground for others and hinting at a possible break from Iranian influence.
“Lebanon has grown tired of the wars of others on its land,” Aoun told the Iranian officials, according to a statement released by the newly appointed president’s office. “Countries should not interfere in the internal affairs of other countries.”
The images from Nasrallah’s “funeral” now precisely reflect the historic crossroads where Lebanon stands:
The continuation of the Iranian occupation in Lebanon, through Hezbollah – or liberation from Iran and Hezbollah and freedom to Lebanon.
The choice is in the hands of… pic.twitter.com/6aDBZCsfYV— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) February 23, 2025
Iranian officials met Aoun during their visit to Beirut for the funeral of Nasrallah, former leader of Iran-backed Hezbollah, which fought a year-long conflict with Israel in parallel with the Gaza war that ended in a November ceasefire. Nearly five months after his death in an Israeli airstrike, Hezbollah buried Nasrallah in a mass funeral meant to showcase political strength despite the group’s weakened state following the war.
The Israel Defense Forces (IDF) killed Nasrallah on Sept. 27 last year in an airstrike as he met commanders in a bunker in Beirut’s southern suburbs, delivering a major setback to the Islamist group amid an Israeli offensive. The campaign went on to decimate much of Hezbollah’s leadership and military capabilities through air and ground attacks.
Hezbollah’s losses from the war with Israel were further compounded by the fall of its ally, Bashar al-Assad, in Syria, which had long served as a vital supply route for Iranian weapons to Hezbollah in Lebanon under Assad’s rule.
During Sunday’s high-level meeting, Aoun said Lebanon wanted “the best relations with Tehran, for the benefit of both countries and people.” According to Aoun’s statement, Iran’s parliamentary speaker Mohammed Bagher Ghalibaf extended President Masoud Pezeshkian’s invitation for Aoun to visit Iran.
In a televised address at Nasrallah’s funeral in a Beirut stadium, current Hezbollah chief Naim Qassem declared his refusal to let “tyrant America” control Lebanon.
The United States helped broker the Hezbollah-Israel ceasefire after almost a year of fighting. The conflict, which Hezbollah launched in support of its Palestinian ally Hamas during the early days of the Gaza war in October 2023, resulted in thousands of deaths in Lebanon and widespread destruction across the country’s south.
Under the ceasefire agreement, Israel was given 60 days to withdraw from southern Lebanon, allowing the Lebanese army and UN forces to take over security as Hezbollah disarms and moves away from Israel’s northern border.
Though Israel has largely withdrawn from the south, its troops continue to hold five hilltop positions in the area, as Israeli leaders seek to reassure northern residents that they can return home safely.
Tens of thousands of residents in northern Israel were forced to evacuate their homes last year and in late 2023 amid unrelenting attacks from Hezbollah, which expressed solidarity with Hamas amid the Gaza war.
The meeting between Iranian officials and Aoun took place even though regular flights between the two countries had been suspended.
On Feb. 13, Lebanon banned flights to and from Iran after Israel accused Tehran of using civilian planes to smuggle cash to Beirut to Hezbollah and warned of possible military action against such flights. In response, Iran barred Lebanese planes from repatriating dozens of Lebanese nationals stranded in the country, stating it would not allow Lebanese flights to land until its own flights could resume in Beirut.
The post Israel’s Top Diplomat Urges Lebanese People to Break Free From ‘Iranian Occupation’ first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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X, Meta Approved Antisemitic and Anti-Muslim Ads Targeting German Voters Before Election, Study Finds
Elon Musk, chief executive officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of X/Twitter, gestures as he attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, France, June 16, 2023. Photo: REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes
The nonprofit group Ekō has released research showing that the social media platforms X and Meta approved advertising featuring hate speech against Jews and Muslims that was geared toward users in Germany in the lead-up to the country’s federal elections on Sunday.
The organization submitted 10 German-language ads intended to reach German voters before the election. Meta approved half of the proposed ads while X allowed all 10. Ekō canceled all approved ads before they could appear on the sites.
The five approved for publication on Meta referred to Muslim immigrants as a “virus,” “vermin,” “rodents,” or “rapists” and advocated for them to be sterilized, burnt, or gassed. Another Meta-approved ad called for arson attacks against synagogues in order to “stop the globalist Jewish rat agenda.”
“Our findings suggest that Meta’s AI-driven ad moderation systems remain fundamentally broken, despite the Digital Services Act (DSA) now being in full effect,” an unnamed spokesperson for Ekō told TechCrunch. They added that “rather than strengthening its ad review process or hate speech policies, Meta appears to be backtracking across the board.”
Meta spokeswoman Lara Hesse provided a statement to TechCrunch in response to Ekō’s findings, noting that “these ads violate our policies. None of them were published and our systems detected and disabled the advertiser’s page before we became aware of this research.”
The statement argued that “our ads review process has several layers of analysis and detection, both before and after an ad goes live. We’ve taken extensive steps in alignment with the DSA and continue to invest significant resources to protect elections.”
Ekō’s report said that all of the ads “broke Meta and X’s own policies, and several may have also breached German national laws. Meta rejected five ads on the basis that they may qualify as social issue, electoral or politics ads, but they were not rejected on the basis of hate speech or inciting violence.”
In addition to green-lighting the five ads allowed by Meta, X approved and scheduled five more, according to the study. These labeled immigrants as rodents and said that Muslims were “flooding” Germany in order “to steal our democracy.” Another ad used an antisemitic slur and accused Jews of lying about climate change to sabotage European industry. This ad also included an AI-generated image which featured sinister men at a table surrounded by gold bars with a Star of David behind them.
Researchers used OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stable Diffusion to create the AI imagery included with each ad. One image featured immigrants crowded into a gas chamber while another showed a synagogue on fire.
One X-approved ad specifically targeted the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), accusing the center-left party of wanting to allow 60 million Muslim immigrants into the country. One more ad allowed by X urged for the killing of Muslim rapists and claimed that leftists sought “open borders.” While Meta took as much as 12 hours to approve the submitted ads, X scheduled the ads instantly.
The Sunday election saw an 83.5 percent voter turnout, the highest level seen since Germany reunified in 1990. The center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its sister party Christian Social Union (CSU) won with 28.6 percent of the vote. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) came in second with 20.8 percent. X owner Elon Musk had previously endorsed the populist-nationalist, anti-immigrant party, saying in a livestream on his platform that “only AfD can save Germany, end of story, and people really need to get behind AfD, and otherwise things are going to get very, very much worse in Germany.” SPD came in third with 16.4 percent of the vote, followed by the Green Party with 11.6 percent.
“Our findings, alongside mounting evidence from other civil society groups, show that Big Tech will not clean up its platforms voluntarily,” the Ekō spokesperson said. “Meta and X continue to allow illegal hate speech, incitement to violence, and election disinformation to spread at scale, despite their legal obligations under the DSA.”
The report from Ekō stated that “at the core of the problem is these platforms’ toxic business model – one dependent on digital advertising revenue and fueled by engagement, no matter the cost.” The report explained that the websites’ systems “are built to maximize attention and revenue, creating little incentive to curb hate speech, disinformation, or incitement of violence.”
According to research released last month by the Anti-Defamation League, 6.2 million people in Germany “harbor elevated levels of antisemitic attitudes,” totaling 9 percent of the population and positioning the European nation with one of the lowest levels of antisemitism globally.
The post X, Meta Approved Antisemitic and Anti-Muslim Ads Targeting German Voters Before Election, Study Finds first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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