- The QAnon conspiracy theory movement builds off of anti-Semitic tropes and false claims that have circulated worldwide for centuries.
- QAnon echoes centuries-old false claims that Jews secretly dominated the world and murdered Christian children.
- Members of the QAnon community have used anti-Semitic rhetoric online.
- “Even though Jews are not necessarily the target of QAnon, most of those theories sound familiar to anyone who knows anything about the history of anti-Semitism,” Michael Brenner, the director of American University’s Centre for Israel Studies and a Jewish history professor, told Insider.
Exercise is usually a moment of escape for Gabriel. But one day in June, when the 31-year-old hopped on his Peloton spin bike, something stopped him in his tracks.
As he looked at the screen’s leaderboard, which shows how others taking the spin class are performing, QAnon hashtags populated the bike’s screen. The hashtags indicated that people who follow QAnon — a baseless far-right conspiracy theory that alleges President Donald Trump is fighting a Satanic deep-state cabal of human traffickers —were taking the same class.
Gabriel, who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation from QAnon believers, was immediately afraid. Some QAnon followers have been linked to crimes like murders and kidnappings related to their belief in the conspiracy theory, and the FBI has warned that the movement has the potential to become a domestic terrorism threat. Gabriel is Jewish, and familiar with the danger of hate. His grandfather liberated concentration camps at the end of the Holocaust. For him, QAnon feels like an extension of hatred towards Jews.
“It’s just such thinly veiled, anti-Semitic tropes,” Gabriel told Insider. “I do feel that it’s propagating this really dangerous movement.”
Read the article by Rachel E. Greenspan in Business Insider Australia.