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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.

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.

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.

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

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— 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…

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— Jesse Brown (@jessebrown.bsky.social) January 21, 2025 at 11:04 AM

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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The Gaza-Auschwitz Comparison Is a Moral Failure

British teens placed pictures of Israeli hostages seized by Hamas on the train tracks leading to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the notorious Nazi death camp. Photo: JRoots

The banner proclaiming “Palestine: the victory of the oppressed people over Nazi Zionism,”  was prominently displayed behind Hamas terrorists as they forced hostage Naama Levy — whose pants were bloodied at the time of her capture — to smile in an army uniform. The goal of this image is clear: to “Nazify” Israel, whitewash Hamas’ crimes, and invert the roles of victims and oppressors. This is the essence of the Iran-backed terror group’s propaganda.

This is not merely an act of cruelty and humiliation; it is a calculated political message, designed to invert historical roles: Israel as the modern-day Third Reich, and Zionism as its ideology.

But Hamas is not alone in spreading this message. It is part of a long-standing antisemitic propaganda campaign that has gained renewed traction far beyond Gaza.

On American college campuses, in activist circles, and across social media, this rhetoric finds eager amplifiers: “Israelis are Nazis,” “Israel is genocide,” “Hamas is resistance.” Pseudo-human rights organizations, pseudo-anti-racists, and pseudo-feminists echo these slogans. At the same time, these voices remain disturbingly silent about the mass rapes, murders, and kidnappings carried out by Hamas on October 7. Their hypocrisy speaks volumes about their supposed commitment to justice and human rights.

These comparisons are not simply misguided or exaggerated; they have a double-edged effect. On one hand, they trivialize the Nazi atrocities by equating them with a contemporary conflict, tragic as it may be, that differs fundamentally in purpose and scope. On the other, they invert historical roles, casting Jews — victims of an unparalleled genocide — as today’s oppressors. This shift doesn’t necessarily deny the Holocaust outright, but distorts its meaning, drains it of its uniqueness, and repurposes it as a malleable ideological tool. The result is an assault on memory itself — on its ability to prevent the resurgence of hatred and, most urgently, the rising antisemitism witnessed since October 7, 2023.

The accusations of genocide directed at Israel are not new. They trace back to Yasser Arafat and Soviet propaganda in the 1970s, gaining momentum with each flare-up in Gaza. These claims rely on a deliberate distortion of historical facts. The Holocaust was a systematic and industrialized campaign of extermination, carried out in secrecy to annihilate an entire people. Gaza, despite its immense suffering and devastation, is the scene of a conflict between a terrorist group and a sovereign military — not an extermination effort. Comparing Gaza to Auschwitz distorts history and reduces the Holocaust to a vague, manipulable idea, undermining its status as a universal moral anchor.

This confusion does more than undermine the past; it undermines the present. The legal mechanisms designed to prevent genocide lose their potency when misused in this way. Raphaël Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide,” emphasized its specificity: the deliberate, systematic destruction of a group. By conflating the horrors of asymmetrical warfare with organized genocide, we blur the critical distinction between war and extermination. This misapplication of language is not just a semantic issue; it is a moral failure.

The issue doesn’t end with hashtags or protest slogans. It reaches the highest levels of political discourse. In 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan accused Israel of “surpassing the Nazis in its barbarity” during Operation Protective Edge. In 2022, Mahmoud Abbas claimed Israel had committed “fifty holocausts,” and made these remarks in Berlin — the very city where the Holocaust was meticulously planned.

These statements are more than rhetorical flourishes; they trivialize the Holocaust and weaponize its memory against Israel — and, by extension, against Jews worldwide.

Why this fixation? Part of the answer lies in a broader effort to reshape the moral foundations of the postwar order. For decades, the Holocaust served as a cornerstone of postwar ethics, justifying the establishment of Israel and supporting universal human rights. Yet some now seek to replace this foundation with a new paradigm: decolonization. In this narrative, Israel is no longer the homeland of a persecuted people but the final vestige of colonialism. This reframing severs the historical connection between the Holocaust and Zionism, presenting Israel not as a resolution to Jewish history, but as a historical anomaly to be rectified.

Replacing the memory of the Holocaust with that of other struggles — even legitimate ones — poses a grave threat and betrays the spirit of “Never again,” which was meant as a universal call for vigilance, not as a pretext for contemporary hostility toward Jews. The danger of succumbing to this propaganda is not just the betrayal of historical memory, but its devastating real-world impact. The rise of antisemitism under the guise of political activism threatens the safety of Jewish communities worldwide, and chips away at the universal principles of justice and human rights.

If there is one lesson to be learned from the last 80 years, it is that antisemitism remains rife, though it now takes new forms. The latest version today hides behind the rhetoric of human rights and anti-colonialism. Israel is not the only target; Jews across the globe are under attack. Unless we confront this reality with clarity and determination, we risk allowing history to repeat itself.

Simone Rodan-Benzaquen is the Director of AJC Europe.

The post The Gaza-Auschwitz Comparison Is a Moral Failure first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Behind the Mask of ‘Pro-Peace’ Groups in Israel

A general view shows the port in Haifa, Israel, July 24, 2022. Photo: REUTERS/Ilan Rosenberg

Rula Daood and Alon-Lee Green, the Israeli national directors of the Standing Together movement, were included in the Time 100 Next list for 2024 due to their extensive pacifist activities, such as the national campaign “The North Demands Peace – Deal Now.” As part of this campaign, the organization’s activists hung billboards in northern Israel with the statement “The North Demands Peace” in Arabic and Hebrew. Ironically, or perhaps tragically, one of the billboards placed at the Maxim intersection in Haifa was near a site damaged by a Hezbollah rocket last October. This area also witnessed the horrific terror suicide bombing at Maxim restaurant, co-owned by Arabs and Jews, in 2003, which killed 21 Jews and Arabs and injured 51 others.

The push for a diplomatic solution with Hezbollah for a ceasefire at any cost, without restrictions or the possibility of Israeli action for violations, indicates a lack of security awareness among Standing Together activists. Last November, northern residents, local authorities, and community forums expressed firm opposition to the proposed ceasefire agreement with Lebanon, fearing future violations by Hezbollah and the potential for a terrible massacre. This fear was reinforced when an IDF spokesman revealed Hezbollah’s plans to conquer the Galilee. Although the ceasefire was eventually signed, Hezbollah violated it within five days.

Besides calling for a ceasefire in the north, Standing Together does not address the circumstances that led to the Sword of Iron war. While they importantly call for the return of hostages to Israel, they mislead the public by claiming that “the government and media in Israel are ignoring war crimes in Gaza and claiming everything is fine.” They assert that Israel is waging a war of extermination in Gaza and that “we must not get used to killing and starving innocent Palestinians in Gaza, hundreds of rocket launches daily, or abandoning cities in the north and south.”

At a demonstration, one of the national directors held signs showing Israeli and Palestinian death tolls since the war’s beginning, citing 44,249 Palestinian deaths without specifying how many were Hamas terrorists. This figure, from the Hamas-run Gaza Health Ministry, is unsupported. According to UN data from last May, a third of those killed in Gaza were women and children. A University of Pennsylvania expert’s study suggests the ratio of killed militants to civilians is around 1:1, according to the UN’s assessment. The ratio in urban combat zones around the world is 1:9, meaning nine civilians killed for every combatant killed — and that Israel is doing far more than any other military to avoid and reduce civilian deaths.

Regarding claims of starvation in Gaza, COGAT has facilitated the entry of over a million tons of aid on 57,545 trucks since the war began. From January to July 2024, the average daily food consumption in Gaza was about 3,004 calories per person, compared to 3,540 in Europe and North America, and 2,600 in African countries. Standing Together fails to blame Hamas for systematically stealing humanitarian aid from the residents of Gaza.

Originally supported by a German organization that backs the BDS movement and opposes the IHRA‘s working definition of antisemitism, Standing Together now promotes efforts embraced by the international delegitimization campaigns against Israel. They claim the destruction of Jabalia was for revenge and ethnic cleansing, ignoring the IDF’s continued discovery of weapons and terrorists since the military campaign renewed there on October 5, 2024.

The widespread recognition of organizations like Standing Together in Israel and internationally is concerning. While supposedly promoting coexistence and peace, they spread disinformation that could lead to sanctions harming both Israeli Arabs and Palestinians in the West Bank. Their focus on blaming Israel while neglecting to name Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran as the real culprits blurs the line between victim and attacker, undermining their legitimacy as a coexistence organization.

Tom Yohay is the manager of CAMERA on Campus Israel.

The post Behind the Mask of ‘Pro-Peace’ Groups in Israel first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Palestinian TV: In Gaza, Robbers Ambush Humanitarian Aid Trucks, Exploit Sale of Food

Egyptian trucks carrying humanitarian aid make their way to the Gaza Strip, amid the ongoing conflict in Gaza between Israel and Hamas, at the Kerem Shalom crossing in southern Israel, May 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Amir Cohen

While the International Criminal Court falsely accused Israel of causing “starvation as a method of war and the denial of humanitarian relief,” official Palestinian Authority (PA) TV reported who the real criminals were.

Even before the current ceasefire deal, Israel had been generously letting humanitarian aid into the Hamas-ruled Gaza Strip.

Reporting from Gaza, official PA TV explained that “robbers ambush the aid trucks” and demand “transit fees,” so that by the time the aid reaches the merchants, the prices have increased more than 10 times:

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Official PA TV reporter in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza: “From the moment the traders’ trucks or the humanitarian aid trucks set out from the gate of the Kerem Shalom Crossing until they arrive at Saladin Road, they encounter several ambushes by [Palestinian] robbers.

Some pay transit fees, large sums to pass from Saladin Road to the central [Gaza Strip] … When the trucks, aid, food stamps, and food packages reach the small merchants, the citizen must cover everything that was paid from when the truck sets out until it reaches the citizen. For example, one bag of milk that was sold for 5 shekels is now sold for 55 — you know where the 45 or 50 shekels went.” [emphasis added]

[Official PA TV, Jan. 7, 2025]

Similarly, meat prices are “exorbitant,” leaving citizens unable to afford it, and instead of feeding the hungry, the food was left to spoil:

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Official PA TV reporter in Deir Al-Balah, Gaza: “Certain amounts of meat have begun to enter the [Gazan] markets at exorbitant prices, which thousands may be unable to purchase, and it is likely that some of the food and meat will spoil.”

[Official PA TV, Jan. 5, 2025]

Even PA Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa has mentioned the “unfair distribution” of the humanitarian aid in Gaza:

PA Prime Minister Muhammad Mustafa: “We are monitoring the reports regarding the involvement of several parties in the Gaza Strip in exploiting the [humanitarian] provisions and aid, and their unfair distribution.”

[Official PA TV, Jan. 10, 2025]

Throughout the war, the Hamas terror organization has neglected Gazan civilians and looked out for its own interests only.

Palestinian Media Watch has exposed that Hamas has been using civilians as human shields, stole 28% of Gazans’ salaries, and stole the aid in order to give it to its terrorists.

The author is a senior analyst at Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article was originally published.

The post Palestinian TV: In Gaza, Robbers Ambush Humanitarian Aid Trucks, Exploit Sale of Food first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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