Israel is betting on Islamophobia to save its standing in the West


In January this year, the government of Israel hosted an anti-Semitism conference in Jerusalem. This, by itself, is rather unremarkable. But what is noteworthy is who attended: leaders from across the European far right, including representatives from Poland’s PiS, Spain’s Vox, Hungary’s Fidesz, and France’s Rassemblement National. The event was, perhaps, the largest gathering of European right-wingers to discuss anti-Semitism since the US-led umerziehung (re-education) process in post-war Germany.

But the far right are now allies, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu told them, in the fight against the “invasion of radical Islam”. Since January, Netanyahu has continued on this theme, recently warning that “the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic republic of Britain”, and campaigning for re-election under a billboard titled “Don’t let them win” that features the faces of Hezbollah and Iranian leaders alongside those of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani.

Israel’s promotion of Islamophobia is not limited to Netanyahu, nor does it end at its own shores. As Israel’s own reputation has cratered, rather than examining its actions (particularly in Gaza), it has decided its salvation rests in more effective public relations and propaganda campaigns. Some of this has materialised in an effort to prop up its own reputation: “The US-Israel relationship promotes stability”, explained an automated text message that millions of other Americans and I recently received via Israeli-contracted Clock Tower X. But Israel is also going on the offensive by trying to knock down and delegitimise its critics and by rallying the right through a purposeful campaign of Islamophobia.

The strategy may have been informed by a leaked study solicited by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs from US public relations firm Stagwell Global, which found that the most effective tactic in shifting public opinion would be to drive fear of “Radical Islam” and “Jihadism” but, in the absence of any compelling reason why the US should continue to back his country, Netanyahu has increasingly leaned into the argument that Israel is, as he claims foreign leaders have told him, the “model in the struggle against radical Islam which threatens the entire civilised world”.

This has manifested itself in Israel’s leveraging of increasingly virulent Islamophobia as part of its hasbara strategy, for instance in Canada in 2024, when an Israeli-government-funded influence operation using the name United Citizens for Canada conducted social media campaigns claiming that Muslim immigrants to the country posed a threat to society and were trying to impose Islamic law.

In many cases, Americans and Europeans have seen through such efforts. Recent primary wins for prominent Muslim congressional candidates such as Abdul El-Sayed have demonstrated a cross-communal rejection of Islamophobic rhetoric. But in other areas, Muslim communities increasingly feel under siege.

Israeli society is premised on Jewish supremacy and the pursuit of demographic homogeneity, but Western countries are increasingly diverse in both their demographics and their leadership. While the path to peace for Israel may be one that makes Israel look more like the West – a country with equality for all its people – at the core of its current propaganda campaign is the desire to make the West look more like Israel. That poses a test for Western pluralism, but even if the West fails that test, Israel should not assume that such a failure would inherently lead to an embrace of Zionism.

Fear and hatred are powerful tools, and the current Islamophobic campaign is likely to unleash further and deeper harms. But even on its primary objective, to stem the loss of support in Israel’s last bastion of Western far-right opinion, it is far from clear that it will succeed. In the meantime, Europeans and Americans would be wise to see it for what it is: a desperate foreign influence operation driven by a state that is increasingly running out of options.

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2026/8/20/israel-is-betting-on-islamophobia-t...

Ai_Killed_Humanity wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2026 at 4:52pm:


AI took your job because you're a retard

Quote:


Didn't see that reported in leftist media

Islam is a flat earth belief why do you support flat earth beliefs?

Saudi Arabia beheads muslims who leave Islam

Quote:


Islam does not teach a flat earth belief. Mainstream Islamic scholarship and modern Muslim astronomers firmly hold that the Earth is spherical. The Quran and Hadith describe the Earth in terms that accommodate a round shape, such as the rolling or overlaying of night and day in a spherical motion.

Muslims widely use modern science, satellites, and space exploration to understand the physical universe without conflict with their faith.



Far Righters promoting dumb claims ... because they have ultra low IQs, or don't believe the shite they diarrhoea out, or the Jews are manipulating you?

the article argues that Islamophobic discourse serves as the discursive apparatus through which Israel’s genocide is rendered legible.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/08969205251388085

Tallowood, the Boris Yeltsin of ozpolitic.

"We moslems are not violent."

"ISLAM is a religion of Peace."

Denis Cohen-Tannoudji @DCTannoudji
Translated from French
Some orders of magnitude on demographics and geography:

There are as many Israeli Arabs enlisted in the IDF (4,000, mostly Bedouins and Druze) as there are Jews left in all Arab countries (including 2,500 in Morocco and 1,000 in Tunisia).

There were 900,000 Jews in Arab countries in 1945; today, only 4,000 remain. There were 150,000 Israeli Arabs in 1949; today, there are 2.1 million. There were 750,000 Arab refugees in 1949 out of a mandatory Palestine Arab population of 1.4 million. Today, there are 15.5 million Palestinian Arabs in the world (2.1 in Israel, 2.2 in Gaza, 4.8 in the West Bank) and 8.1 million in the diaspora (including 6.8 million in Arab countries).

600,000 of the 900,000 Jews from Arab countries took refuge in Israel; their descendants make up 60% of Israel's Jewish population today. The rest (300,000) took refuge in France, Great Britain, Brazil, and Canada.

There are nearly twice as few Jews in all of Europe (1.3 million, including 450,000 in France) as there are Israeli Arabs (2.1 million).

There are 7.2 million Jews in Israel (including 0.5 million in the territories) out of 15.5 million Jews in the world (or 0.2% of the global population), which is roughly the same as the number of Muslim French people (estimated at 10%, but 20% of births according to the frequency of first names recorded by INSEE).

The number of Jews in the world has still not recovered to its 1939 level (17 million), which fell to 11 million in 1945.

Israel's fertility rate is among the highest in the world (outside of sub-Saharan Africa) at 2.87 children per woman (3 among Jewish women; 2.7 among Arabs; 1.8 among Druze).

There is a population of 490 million inhabitants in the 22 countries of the Arab League (118 in Egypt, 56 in Sudan, 47 in Algeria, 47 in Iraq, 38 in Morocco,…). The average fertility rate is 3.1 children per woman, largely driven by Sudan, Yemen, and Somalia. The lowest rates are in the UAE (1.1), Qatar (1.7), Tunisia (1.8), and Morocco (2.2).
The fertility rate in Europe is 1.38 children per woman (1.6 in France).

The 22 countries of the Arab League cover an area of 13.2 million km² (1.4 times the USA and 1.36 times China). The area of Israel in 1967 is 0.022 million km² (or 600 times less), that of the territories being 0.005 million km².
The area of France is 0.55 million km², that of Europe being 4.23 million km².

https://x.com/DCTannoudji/status/2091586746517745769