RSS
Put your hand up if you still think Elon Musk did a Nazi salute a week ago in Washington
My late poodle used to do this thing with her arms. I say arms, knowing that dogs don’t have arms, just front legs, and I say she, knowing that grammatically, a dog is more of an it. But for the purposes of this story, she had arms. And she would sometimes lift one of them up in this rigid way, with a determined expression on her face. Yes, this fluffy little dog appeared to be heil-ing Hitler.
It was incongruous and therefore funny, in the way of 1967 Mel Brooks comedy The Producers or the iconic Fawlty Towers episode, “The Germans.” There is at this point a long tradition of humour—Jewish and mainstream, professional comedians and everyday chit-chat—about Nazism, and at Nazis’ expense. I think of ‘Allo ‘Allo!, of the “Soup Nazi” from Seinfeld, and of the Waiting for God episode where a stern young German woman comes to work at a retirement home (“I vaz not born during zee war” –“That’s what they all say.”). Also of the phenomenon of the “kitler,” the cats whose colour pattern gives the impression of a Hitler mustache. Do you know where I learned of the “kitler”? On the free trip I took from Birthright. There are cats roaming around in Israel and some of them missed the memo regarding who won the war. It’s hard to hold this against them.
So there’s postwar comedy mocking Nazism. There’s also a now-extensive recent history of people comparing their enemies with Nazis and using Nazi imagery to make their point. Much like the humour mocking Nazis, this usage of swastikas and what have you is not pro-Nazi. The protester with the placard equating an Israeli flag with one of Nazi Germany is doing something abhorrent, but the thing they are doing is not praising Nazism.
Everyone—well, ish—agrees that Nazis were bad, which is why everyone’s always calling people they disagree with Nazis, but also why internet trolls—and their offline teenage equivalents—gravitate to the shock value of Nazi gesturing.
All of this prologue is to get at why, in 2025, when confronted with Nazi symbolism, it’s not immediately obvious what to make of it. They’re joking, and joking because they hate Nazis, right? Right?
So when X owner and electric-car gazillionaire Elon Musk—now a member of the new Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency—doing what appeared to be a fascist salute at a Trump rally, there was no consensus about how to interpret it. The context allowed for plausible deniability—and he denies it. That he also followed it up with a Nazi joke and by uh going to Germany to tell far-right Germans that Germans need to stop feeling guilty about the past.
We’ve said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it. @elonmusk, the Holocaust is not a joke. https://t.co/oeXLod2C1W
— Jonathan Greenblatt (@JGreenblattADL) January 23, 2025
The argument set forth by Musk’s arm-raise is less about the gesture itself than about whether America is or not a fascist dictatorship as of a few days ago. For those who already thought yes, this was just the latest and most visually upsetting data point. As for those who either supported Trump’s candidacy or see his win as a disappointment from which America will one day move on, the gesture was interpreted as something between a nothingburger (edgelord provokes, film at 11) and a smear.
.@elonmusk is being falsely smeared.
Elon is a great friend of Israel. He visited Israel after the October 7 massacre in which Hamas terrorists committed the worst atrocity against the Jewish people since the Holocaust. He has since repeatedly and forcefully supported Israel’s… https://t.co/VkBptanDmp
— Benjamin Netanyahu – בנימין נתניהו (@netanyahu) January 23, 2025
Musk is, if I may repeat my 2022 self, an edgelord. He wants to get a rise out of the people this sort of behaviour gets a rise out of. He’s not just very online but so online that rather than use his billions not to need to bother with social media, he bought Twitter so he could meld it into something of his liking. The big-picture significance to his purchase is that the edgelords and fringe-right sorts whom one could roll one’s eyes at back in the day are now front and centre in Washington, D.C.
Jewish opinion on the arm-lift has been divided. Divided along partisan lines, but with a particularly strong dose of convictions on both sides that the gesture obviously was or wasn’t what it looked like.
Last night on @foxnewsnight I told @tracegallagher that these smears on Elon are the height of chutzpah. pic.twitter.com/SB8dmxnI0w
— Bethany S. Mandel (@bethanyshondark) January 22, 2025
Can’t believe this still needs to be said: Musk’s Nazi salute wasn’t an accident. It follows years of him embracing & normalizing antisemitism & extremism
And regardless of intent, the impact of this – behind the presidential podium! – is even more emboldened violent antisemites
— Amy Spitalnick (@amyspitalnick) January 23, 2025
I mean in fairness all they have to go on about Musk is that he’s likened Soros to Magneto and said he’s trying to destroy civilization, blamed the ADL for Twitter’s (excuse me, X’s) money drying up, and agreed it was the “absolute truth” that Jews hate white people, and
— Emily Tamkin (@emilyctamkin.bsky.social) January 20, 2025 at 6:10 PM
Something that can be confusing for many Jews (or, at least, for this Jew) is that while there’s widespread consensus that Nazis are bad news, there’s no consistent reason why people think this about Nazis. And if your reason for hating Nazis happens to be the thing where they mass-murdered Jews, you might find yourself if nothing else disoriented by the fact that the same progressive movement prepared to look the other way when people praise Hamas (indeed, whose adherents sometimes praise Hamas) considers Nazism the height of evil.
Some were more than disoriented.
Weird how so many Canadians upset about Elon’s Nazi salute didn’t say anything when it happened right here, in Toronto and Montreal.
Same folks who were silent about the gunshots, firebombs, arsons, and terrorist plots against Jews they know…
— Jesse Brown (@jessebrown.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 11:04 AM
Quick someone draw me a ven diagram of people horrified by Elon Musk’s “Nazi salute” and people who said fuck-all about actual terrorists marching through our streets and campuses.
— Yael Bar tur 🎗️ (@yaelbt) January 21, 2025
Jews often stand accused of oversensitivity to antisemitism. And some of us are! There’s a concurrent tradition of Jews being well aware of that stereotype and wanting not to make mountains of molehills.
There is also, beyond the Jewish community, the thing where the hypersensitive environment of the last decade-plus had people flagging trace-amounts or imagined instances of racism, most egregiously in the form of out-of-context “Karen” videos. But to limit this to Jews, there was the time in 2014 when one was meant to be mad at Zara for an outfit that supposedly looked like a concentration camp uniform, or in 2023—January 2023, crucially—when the New York Times did a crossword puzzle that some believed to be in the shape of a swastika.
Oct. 7 certainly changed things where anti-antisemitism was concerned. It made squint-and-you-see-it stories of Nazi imagery in fast fashion and word games seem like nonsense from another era… while also heightening many Jews’ sense of awareness of antisemitism for perhaps the first time.
And Trump’s second, Muskier term is shaping up to be a bunch more of an illiberal break from norms than his first. The deportations, the tariffs, the objections to birthright citizenship, and the general approach of coming in day one and announcing that nothing would be as it had been. Even if you object to left illiberalism, this is yeah maybe not the sort of pushback you’d want. (Anti-woke opinion, like Jewish opinion, is divided.)
The #Resistance approach to Trump’s first term seemed hyperbolic from the vantage point of the Biden years. He was just a meh one-term Republican president, right? And now that there actually is an authoritarian turn, we’re at a place where you seem hysterical if you suggest as much.
Elon Musk is not a Nazi in the 1930s-1940s sense of the term for the same reason that no one today is. There are successors to Nazism and groups with echoes of Nazism and people (and bots) who wish Hitler had won. But specific groups end when they end, so it’s a bit like asking whether Michelle Obama is a 1920s flapper, whether Justin Trudeau is a beatnik, or whether Ariana Grande is a medieval monk. The relevant question is not whether the US is now full-time cosplaying another era, complete with the same victims (aka Jews, mainly). It’s whether things are going all-out authoritarian, in America and, perhaps, beyond. It’s whether liberal democracy is kaput.
At least for now, though, the Trumpism-is-Nazism interpretation has a silver lining for Canadian Jews, at least unless you take a full-doomer perspective and assume this culminates in Canada’s annexation into a Trumpian Reich. But assuming the US doesn’t annex the Annex, we’re looking pretty, pretty good at the moment. Everything is up for interpretation, but it easier to generously interpret a Free Palestine yard sign (or a few hundred of them) than the richest man in the world sending a bat signal to right-wing extremists that America is now in their pasty outstretched hands.
The CJN’s opinion editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at pbovy@thecjn.ca, not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai. For more opinions about Jewish culture wars, subscribe to the free Bonjour Chai newsletter on Substack.
The post Put your hand up if you still think Elon Musk did a Nazi salute a week ago in Washington appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
RSS
Israel Says Missile Launched by Yemen’s Houthis ‘Most Likely’ Intercepted

Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi addresses followers via a video link at the al-Shaab Mosque, formerly al-Saleh Mosque, in Sanaa, Yemen, Feb. 6, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah
The Israeli army said on Saturday that a missile fired from Yemen towards Israeli territory had been “most likely successfully intercepted,” while Yemen’s Houthi forces claimed responsibility for the launch.
Israel has threatened Yemen’s Iran-aligned Houthi movement – which has been attacking Israel in what it says is solidarity with Gaza – with a naval and air blockade if its attacks on Israel persist.
The Houthi military spokesperson Yahya Saree said the group was responsible for Saturday’s attack, adding that it fired a missile towards the southern Israeli city of Beersheba.
Since the start of Israel’s war in Gaza in October 2023, the Houthis, who control most of Yemen, have been firing at Israel and at shipping in the Red Sea, disrupting global trade.
Most of the dozens of missiles and drones they have launched have been intercepted or fallen short. Israel has carried out a series of retaliatory strikes.
The post Israel Says Missile Launched by Yemen’s Houthis ‘Most Likely’ Intercepted first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Iran Holds Funeral for Commanders and Scientists Killed in War with Israel

People attend the funeral procession of Iranian military commanders, nuclear scientists and others killed in Israeli strikes, in Tehran, Iran, June 28, 2025. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Large crowds of mourners dressed in black lined streets in Iran’s capital Tehran as the country held a funeral on Saturday for top military commanders, nuclear scientists and some of the civilians killed during this month’s aerial war with Israel.
At least 16 scientists and 10 senior commanders were among those mourned at the funeral, according to state media, including armed forces chief Major General Mohammad Bagheri, Revolutionary Guards commander General Hossein Salami, and Guards Aerospace Force chief General Amir Ali Hajizadeh.
Their coffins were driven into Tehran’s Azadi Square adorned with their photos and national flags, as crowds waved flags and some reached out to touch the caskets and throw rose petals onto them. State-run Press TV showed an image of ballistic missiles on display.
Mass prayers were later held in the square.
State TV said the funeral, dubbed the “procession of the Martyrs of Power,” was held for a total of 60 people killed in the war, including four women and four children.
In attendance were President Masoud Pezeshkian and other senior figures including Ali Shamkhani, who was seriously wounded during the conflict and is an adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as Khamenei’s son Mojtaba.
“Today, Iranians, through heroic resistance against two regimes armed with nuclear weapons, protected their honor and dignity, and look to the future prouder, more dignified, and more resolute than ever,” Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi, who also attended the funeral, said in a Telegram post.
There was no immediate statement from Khamenei, who has not appeared publicly since the conflict began. In past funerals, he led prayers over the coffins of senior commanders ahead of public ceremonies broadcast on state television.
Israel launched the air war on June 13, attacking Iranian nuclear facilities and killing top military commanders as well as civilians in the worst blow to the Islamic Republic since the 1980s war with Iraq.
Iran retaliated with barrages of missiles on Israeli military sites, infrastructure and cities. The United States entered the war on June 22 with strikes on Iranian nuclear facilities.
TRUMP THREAT
Israel, the only Middle Eastern country widely believed to have nuclear weapons, said it aimed to prevent Tehran from developing its own nuclear weapons.
Iran denies having a nuclear weapons program. The U.N. nuclear watchdog has said it has “no credible indication” of an active, coordinated weapons program in Iran.
Bagheri, Salami and Hajizadeh were killed on June 13, the first day of the war. Bagheri was being buried at the Behesht Zahra cemetery outside Tehran mid-afternoon on Saturday. Salami and Hajizadeh were due to be buried on Sunday.
US President Donald Trump said on Friday that he would consider bombing Iran again, while Khamenei, who has appeared in two pre-recorded video messages since the start of the war, has said Iran would respond to any future US attack by striking US military bases in the Middle East.
A senior Israeli military official said on Friday that Israel had delivered a “major blow” to Iran’s nuclear project. On Saturday, Iran’s Revolutionary Guards said in a statement that Israel and the US “failed to achieve their stated objectives” in the war.
According to Iranian health ministry figures, 610 people were killed on the Iranian side in the war before a ceasefire went into effect on Tuesday. More than 4,700 were injured.
Activist news agency HRANA put the number of killed at 974, including 387 civilians.
Israel’s health ministry said 28 were killed in Israel and 3,238 injured.
The post Iran Holds Funeral for Commanders and Scientists Killed in War with Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Pro-Palestinian Rapper Leads ‘Death to the IDF’ Chant at English Music festival

Revellers dance as Avril Lavigne performs on the Other Stage during the Glastonbury Festival at Worthy Farm, in Pilton, Somerset, Britain, June 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Dylan Martinez
i24 News – Chants of “death to the IDF” were heard during the English Glastonbury music festival on Saturday ahead of the appearance of the pro-Palestinian Irish rappers Kneecap.
One half of punk duo based Bob Vylan (who both use aliases to protect their privacy) shouted out during a section of their show “Death to the IDF” – the Israeli military. Videos posted on X (formerly Twitter) show the crowd responding to and repeating the cheer.
This comes after officials had petitioned the music festival to drop the band. The rap duo also expressed support for the following act, Kneecap, who the BCC refused to show live after one of its members, Liam Óg Ó hAnnaidh – better known by stage name Mo Chara – was charged with a terror offense.
The post Pro-Palestinian Rapper Leads ‘Death to the IDF’ Chant at English Music festival first appeared on Algemeiner.com.