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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.
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As Gaza War Continues, Hamas Calls for Global Protests While Israel Marks Breakthroughs in Medical Innovation

A pro-Hamas march in London, United Kingdom, Feb. 17, 2024. Photo: Chrissa Giannakoudi via Reuters Connect
As the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas calls for global protests amid stalled Gaza ceasefire talks, Israel has broken new ground despite the ongoing conflict, achieving a major medical breakthrough in synthetic human kidney development.
The contrast illustrates a stark contrast between the priorities of Hamas, an international designated terrorist group that has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades, and Israel, the lone democracy in the Middle East that has long been a leader in tech and medical innovation.
On Wednesday, Hamas urged worldwide protests in support of Palestinians, calling on the international community “to denounce Israel’s genocidal war and starvation policy in Gaza.”
“We call for continuing and escalating the popular pressure in all cities and squares on Friday, Saturday, and Sunday … through rallies, demonstrations and sit-ins outside the embassies of the Israeli regime and its allies, particularly in the US,” the statement read.
The Palestinian terrorist group also called to expose what it described as “the terrorism of the Zio-Nazi occupation against defenseless civilians.”
Hamas’s latest move against Israel comes amid stalled indirect negotiations over a proposed 60-day ceasefire and hostage release deal, which collapsed last month after the group vowed it would not disarm unless an independent Palestinian state is established — rejecting a key Israeli demand to end the war in Gaza.
In its statement, Hamas demanded the opening of all border crossings to allow immediate aid into the war-torn enclave and urged a global condemnation of “the international community’s inaction on the Israeli crimes.”
Amid mounting international pressure to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Israel announced new measures to facilitate the delivery of aid, including temporary pauses in fighting in certain areas and the creation of protected routes for aid convoys.
Israeli officials have previously accused Hamas of diverting aid for terrorist activities and selling supplies at inflated prices to civilians, while also blaming the United Nations and other foreign organizations for enabling this diversion.
Hamas’s statement also emphasized that the “global resistance movement must continue until Israeli aggression on Gaza ends and the siege on the coastal strip is lifted.”
Meanwhile, as Israel faces escalating hostilities and the heavy toll of war, the Jewish state continues to push the boundaries of innovation and resilience, achieving new medical breakthroughs while confronting ongoing challenges.
In a major medical breakthrough, scientists at Sheba Medical Center and Tel Aviv University have successfully grown a synthetic 3D miniature human kidney in a lab using specialized stem cells derived from kidney tissue — one of the most promising advances in regenerative medicine.
Dr. Dror Harats, chairman of Sheba’s Research Authority, described this achievement as a reflection of Israel’s leading role in global medical innovation.
“Despite growing efforts to isolate Israel from international science, breakthroughs like this prove our impact is both lasting and essential,” he said.
In a landmark study, a team from Sheba’s Safra Children’s Hospital and Tel Aviv University’s Sagol Center for Regenerative Medicine created synthetic kidney organs that matured and remained stable for 34 weeks — the longest-lasting and most refined kidney organoids developed to date.
Nearly a decade ago, the research team became the first to successfully isolate human kidney tissue stem cells — the cells responsible for the organ’s development and growth.
Previous attempts to grow kidneys in a lab using general-purpose stem cells were short-lived, typically lasting only a few weeks and often producing unwanted cell types that compromised research accuracy.
However, this Israeli research team used stem cells taken directly from kidney tissue — cells that naturally develop into kidney parts — allowing them to create a much purer and more stable model with key features found in real kidneys.
This medical breakthrough could have far-reaching implications, redefining the current understanding of kidney diseases and advancing the development of innovative treatments.
Researchers believe the model could help assess how medications impact fetal kidneys during pregnancy and move science closer to repairing or replacing damaged kidney tissue with lab-grown cells.
The discovery came days after researchers from Hebrew University of Jerusalem and international partners discovered a way to boost the immune system’s cancer-fighting ability by reprogramming how T cells, which are white blood cells critical to the immune system, produce energy.
The researchers explained in a study published in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications that disabling a protein known as Ant2 in T cells greatly enhances their effectiveness against tumors.
“By disabling Ant2, we triggered a complete shift in how T cells produce and use energy,” Prof. Michael Berger of Hebrew University’s Faculty of Medicine, who co-led the study with doctorate student Omri Yosef, told the Tazpit Press Service. “This reprogramming made them significantly better at recognizing and killing cancer cells.”
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Netherlands to Push EU to Suspend Israel Trade Deal but Won’t Recognize Palestinian State ‘At This Time’

Netherlands Foreign Affairs Minister Caspar Veldkamp addresses a press conference, in New Delhi on April 1, 2025. Photo: ANI Photo/Sanjay Sharma via Reuters Connect
The Netherlands is spearheading efforts to suspend the European Union-Israel trade agreement amid rising EU criticism of Israel’s actions in Gaza, while simultaneously refusing to recognize a Palestinian state, contrasting with other member states as international pressure mounts.
On Thursday, Dutch Foreign Minister Caspar Veldkamp announced that the Netherlands will push the EU to suspend the trade component of the EU-Israel Association Agreement — a pact governing the EU’s political and economic ties with the Jewish state.
This latest anti-Israel initiative follows a recent EU-commissioned report accusing Israel of committing “indiscriminate attacks … starvation … torture … [and] apartheid” against Palestinians in Gaza during its military campaign against Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
Following calls from a majority of EU member states for a formal investigation, this report built on Belgium’s recent decision to review Israel’s compliance with the trade agreement, a process initiated by the Netherlands and led by EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy Kaja Kallas.
According to the report, “there are indications that Israel would be in breach of its human rights obligations” under the 25-year-old EU-Israel Association Agreement.
While the document acknowledges the reality of violence by Hamas, it states that this issue lies outside its scope — failing to address the Palestinian terrorist group’s role in sparking the current war with its bloody rampage across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israeli officials have slammed the report as factually incorrect and morally flawed, noting that Hamas embeds its military infrastructure within civilian targets and Israel’s army takes extensive precautions to try and avoid civilian casualties.
In a Dutch parliamentary debate on Gaza on Thursday, Veldkamp also announced that the government would not recognize a Palestinian state for now — a position that stands in sharp contrast to the recent moves by several other EU member states to extend recognition.
“The Netherlands is not planning to recognize a Palestinian state at this time,” the Dutch diplomat said.
“This war has ceased to be a just war and is now leading to the erosion of Israel’s own security and identity,” he continued.
This latest decision goes against the position of several EU member states, including France, which has committed to recognizing Palestinian statehood in September.
The United Kingdom has likewise indicated it will do so unless Israel acts to ease the humanitarian crisis in Gaza and agrees to a ceasefire.
For its part, Germany said it was not planning to recognize a Palestinian state in the short term, and Italy argued that recognition must occur simultaneously with the recognition of Israel by the new entity.
Spain, Norway, Ireland, and Slovenia all recognized a Palestinian state last year.
Israel has been facing growing pressure from several EU member states seeking to undermine its defensive campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza.
On Thursday, European Commission Vice President Teresa Ribera strongly condemned Israel’s actions in the war-torn enclave, describing the situation as a “grave violation of human dignity.”
“What we are seeing is a concrete population being targeted, killed and condemned to starve to death,” Ribera told Politico. “If it is not genocide, it looks very much like the definition used to express its meaning.”
Until now, the European Commission has refrained from accusing Israel of genocide, but Ribera’s comments mark one of the strongest European condemnations since the outbreak of the war in Gaza.
She also called on the EU to take decisive action by considering the suspension of its trade agreement with Israel and the implementation of sanctions, while emphasizing that such measures would require unanimous approval from all member states.
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Graduate Student Unions Promoting Antisemitism, Reform Group Says

Students listen to a speech at a protest encampment at Stanford University in Stanford, California US, on April 26, 2024. Photo: Carlos Barria via Reuters Connect.
Higher-education-based unions controlled by United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE) are rife with antisemitism and anti-Zionist discrimination, according to a new letter imploring the US Congress’s House Committee on Education and the Workforce to address the matter.
“Tracing its roots to communism in the 1930s, the UE is a radical, pro-Hamas labor union that has a long history of antisemitism,” the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), one of the US’s leading labor reform groups, wrote on July 30 in a message obtained by The Algemeiner. “The UE openly supports the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which is designed to cripple and destroy Israel economically. Today, the UE furthers its antisemitic agenda by unionizing graduate students on college campuses and using its exclusive representation powers to create a hostile environment for Jewish students. The hostile environment includes demanding compulsory dues to fund the UE’s abhorrent activities.”
NRTW went on to describe a litany of alleged injustices to which UE members subject Jewish student-employees in the US’s most prestigious institutions of higher education, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to Cornell University. At MIT, the letter said, “union officers” aided a riotous group which illegally occupied a section of campus with a “Gaza Solidarity Encampment,” participating in the demonstration and even denying access to campus buildings. UE members at Stanford University, meanwhile, allegedly denied religious accommodations to Jewish students who requested exemption from union dues over that branch’s supporting the BDS movement. And Cornell University UE was accused of denying religious exemptions in several cases as well and followed up the rejection with an intrusive “questionnaire” which probed Jewish students for “legally-irrelevant information.”
The situation requires federal oversight and intervention, NRTW said, including Congress’s possibly clarifying that student-employees are not traditional employees and are therefore afforded protections under sections of the Civil Rights Act which apply to the campus.
“These continuing patterns of antisemitism are illegal, immoral, and must be stopped,” the letter continued. “We encourage you to do all that is in your power to investigate and help bring an end to the UE and its affiliates’ nonstop harassment and intimidation of Jewish students … The Trump administration can also use tools available to it under Title VI and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act against colleges who work with unions to create a hostile environment for Jewish students.”
July’s letter is not the first time NRTW has publicized alleged antisemitic abuse in unions representing higher education employees.
In 2024, it represented a group of six City University of New York (CUNY) professors, five of whom are Jewish, who sued to be “freed” from CUNY’s Professional Staff Congress (PSC-CUNY) over its passing a resolution during Israel’s May 2021 war with Hamas which declared solidarity with Palestinians and accused the Jewish state of ethnic cleansing, apartheid, and crimes against humanity. The group contested New York State’s “Taylor Law,” which it said chained the professors to the union’s “bargaining unit” and denied their right to freedom of speech and association by forcing them to be represented in negotiations by an organization they claim holds antisemitic views.
That same year, NRTW prevailed in a discrimination suit filed to exempt another cohort of Jewish MIT students from paying dues to the Graduate Student Union (GSU). The students had attempted to resist financially supporting GSU’s anti-Zionism, but the union bosses attempted to coerce their compliance, telling them that “no principles, teachings, or tenets of Judaism prohibit membership in or the payment of dues or fees” to the union.
“All Americans should have a right to protect their money from going to union bosses they don’t support, whether those objections are based on religion, politics, or any other reason,” NRTW said at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.