The anti-Semitic delusions of Candace Owens

In a way, I’m glad Candace Owens held up a copy of the notoriously anti-Semitic screed, The Talmudic Jew, during her latest digital rant. For it confirms what she is. More importantly, it lays down a gauntlet to the right. To the left too, in fact. It demands of them the following: are you going to turn a blind eye to this propagation of bloodcurdling lies about the Jews, or are you going to do something about it?

It’s an extraordinary image – Ms Owens, once a darling of America’s online right, sporting a demented grin as she holds aloft one of the most scurrilous and libellous texts about the Jews. She was venting about Ben Shapiro after he dissed her in his speech at Turning Point USA’s AmericaFest conference last week. Shapiro called the likes of Owens ‘frauds’ and ‘grifters’ for spreading conspiracy theories about the murder of Charlie Kirk.

‘Ben Shapiro, fuck you’, said Owens in her wild-eyed video response. You’re nothing more than a ‘Talmudic Jew’, she spat, with extraordinary venom. ‘I encourage other people at home to learn what is in that Talmud’, she said, holding up a copy of The Talmudic Jew by August Rohling, published in 1871.

And there it was, one of the digital right’s best-known figures, a woman with more than five million YouTube subscribers, hawking a book full of anti-Semitic lies. Rohling was a German Catholic theologian. He was an infamous Jew-hater. The Talmudic Jew depicts the Talmud as a ‘repository of anti-Christian hatred’ and a ‘manual for swindling Gentiles’, says Hussein Aboubakr Mansour. And of course it’s fraudulent, Mansour writes. It relies on ‘medieval anti-Jewish polemics and out-of-context quotations’.

Rohling later wrote a hateful pamphlet on the ‘human sacrifices’ carried out by rabbis. The Jews do indeed engage in the ritual murder of Christian children, he wrote. It was a pseudo-academic revival of the medieval blood libel. And it helped to whip up Jewphobic animus across Germany and beyond. That a 21st-century right-winger is citing this Jew-hater – worse, actively promoting his work – is extraordinary.

Owens has been falling down the helter skelter of anti-Semitism for some time. She has feverishly promoted the libel that Jews were behind the transatlantic slave trade. She whispers darkly of the ‘secret Jewish gangs ’ that do ‘horrific things’ in Hollywood. And of course she is consumed by a frothing abhorrence for the Jewish State. A ‘cult nation’, she calls it. We have watched in real time as a once sensible woman has been devoured by the crankery that festers in the internet’s dark, sweaty corners.

The digital right is now awash with Jew hatred. There’s also the Groyper movement led by that dateless Hitler fanboy, Nick Fuentes. Lord Daniel Finkelstein recently ran afoul of these geek Jew-haters. ‘I hope you become a bar of soap’, they spat at him. ‘Your dad has become a lampshade’, said one of these lowlifes who clearly can’t decide if the Holocaust is a Jew-peddled myth or if it did happen and was a good thing. Open sewers of ancient hatred gushing through the digital highway.

This is where we are, then – just days after one of the worst massacres of Jews of modern times, an ‘influencer’ promotes an anti-Jewish tract to her millions of viewers. A week after Aussie Jews were mercilessly slain by suspected adherents to the death cult of ISIS, Candace Owens encourages her followers to read a book that depicts the Jews as a uniquely deceitful, swindling people. Jews murdered one day and defamed the next – it is intolerable.

Will others on the right now join Ben Shapiro in calling out the conspiracy theories and crazed racism of the digital mob? What about the left? There are some who have condemned Owens. But these are often the same people who have spent the past two years beating the streets every weekend alongside people who have said openly anti-Semitic things – gangs of Islamists calling for the return of the ‘Army of Muhammad’ to finish off the Jews and irate Israelophobes calling the Jewish nation a Nazi entity. They haven’t got a leg to stand on when it comes to the American right’s turning of a blind eye to virulent Jew hatred, because they’ve been doing the same for years.

Ignoring the ugly rebirth of the world’s oldest racism is no longer an option. No decent person can now look the other way as Jews are murdered, libelled and mocked with their own historic grief by armies of haters calling them Nazis. Whether it comes in the thin, grotesque finery of ‘anti-Zionism’ or in the open, Rohling-style anti-Semitism of Candace Owens, firm opposition is now called for. Let’s call it the Candace Owens Test: will you condemn this propagation of racist libels that have inflamed murderous hatred for Jews, or will you not? I guess we’re about to find out.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.