“Antisemitism,” the German writer August Bebel remarked more than a century ago, “is the socialism of fools.” Recent events prove as much. For many on the global Left, antisemitism, dressed up in moral righteousness, has become the latest pet cause. And regrettably, once venerable institutions are now mainstreaming it for the broader public.
On Aug. 31, a flotilla of nearly 500 boats with hundreds of activists on board, including onetime climate campaigner Greta Thunberg, embarked from Spain to Gaza. Their stated mission? To break Israel’s naval blockade and deliver food and other humanitarian supplies to the enclave. According to Reuters, thousands of supporters gathered at Barcelona’s port to see them off, with many waving Palestinian flags and chanting, “Free Palestine” and “It’s not a war, it’s a genocide.”
Dozens of other boats joined the caravan, which included one of Nelson Mandela’s grandsons, several European politicians, self-described “indigenous rights” activists, and a Spanish influencer nicknamed “Barbie Gaza,” among others. It was, by all appearances, the fashionable place to be. All of the “right people” were there. Footage from TikTok and other social media accounts testifies to a partylike atmosphere, with selfies galore, music and dancing, and no shortage of smug self-certainty — or, appropriately enough, drama. Unity Mitford, the infamous British-born socialite and Hitler fan girl, would have loved it.
Mitford, her biographer David Pryce-Jones observed, showed “no powers of observation or description, and worse, no self-consciousness.” Rather, she found fanaticism — in her case, fascism and antisemitism — to be fashionable. They were but causes to be worn and flaunted: a sign of being part of the “in crowd.” Mitford, like her present-day antecedents, craved the limelight, finding virtue not in being virtuous but in being at the cusp of the latest trend. And then, just as now, that trend was antisemitism. Mitford, Pryce-Jones noted, was herself an exemplar of a phenomenon: the “frivolity of evil.” But such frivolity demands to be taken seriously. After all, the costs are too high.
Indeed, there was no shortage of self-assurance or preaching in between the partying aboard the flotilla. And what seems to have passed for knowledge and moral admonitions was everything but.
For example, “Barbie Gaza,” born Ana Maria Alcalde, denied that Hamas and other Islamist terrorists raped their victims. Speaking about the Israeli women taken hostage by the terrorist group, many of whom endured months of torture, sexual violence, and depravity, Barbie Gaza assured her thousands of social media followers: “It’s a hoax that they killed or raped the girls. They treated them well. One of them even said she felt ugly because they didn’t touch her.” In between such pronouncements, she filmed herself dancing, phone in hand, with the requisite prop of a keffiyeh testifying to her ideological purity. What the Islamists involved in the endeavor thought of her exposed midriff, tight shirts, and generously applied makeup isn’t known. But totalitarian ideologies have long been willing to put up with “useful idiots.” After all, they serve a purpose.
The Global Sumud Flotilla, or GSF, was allegedly financed and organized by Hamas-linked entities and people. Thunberg, the celebrity chosen to be the face of the flotilla, didn’t organize it. Rather, the Palestinian Conference for Palestinians Abroad did. On Sept. 30, the Israel Defense Forces revealed new documents found in the Gaza Strip exposing who was behind the flotilla. As it turns out, Thunberg and her fashionable friends were but window dressing.
“The newly uncovered materials,” Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs noted, “provide direct proof that Hamas financed the so-called ‘Sumud’ flotilla and even covertly owned many of its vessels through Cyber Neptune — a Spanish front company headed by Saif Abu Keshk,” a PCPA operative. The PCPA was founded by Hamas in 2018 to be its overseas representative body. In 2021, Israel designated the PCPA a terrorist organization. The U.S. government, noting the organization’s links with Hamas, a designated terrorist group, has placed sanctions on the PCPA. Indeed, in June 2025, the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control targeted top PCPA apparatchiks, such as Amin Abu Rashid, for sanctions. A U.S. Treasury press release described Rashid as a “top Hamas operative in Europe responsible for raising millions of U.S. dollars in funds for Hamas by using sham charities as a cover.”
Rashid wasn’t the only GSF backer with Hamas ties. Saif Abu Kishk, a Palestinian based in Barcelona, served on the flotilla’s steering committee. In June 2025, Egyptian authorities arrested Abu Kishk, who was leading the “March to Gaza” campaign in collaboration with Yahia Sarri, an infamous Muslim Brotherhood cleric based in Algeria with direct ties to Hamas. Sarri has had documented contact with Hamas leaders, even attending conferences with, and being photographed alongside, them. In January 2024, Sarri met with Basem Naim, the head of Hamas’s Department of International Relations. That meeting “paved the way for Sarri’s collaboration with campaigns designed to serve Hamas: the March to Gaza and the Global Sumud Flotilla,” Israel’s Ministry for Diaspora Affairs observed. The documents captured in Gaza provide “concrete evidence of Hamas’s strategic control over the flotilla’s logistics and narrative.”
Other persons involved with GSF can be linked to U.S.-designated terrorist organizations. For example, Muhammad Nadir al Nuri, a self-styled “humanitarian activist,” has been photographed with Ghazi Hamad, a top Hamas apparatchik. Wael Nawar, a member of the GSF steering committee and a former spokesman for the flotilla, has had documented meetings with a host of Palestinian terrorist groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. In February 2025, Nawar was photographed participating in the funeral for Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime head of Hezbollah who was killed in an IDF strike. Another key figure in the flotilla movement is Zaher Birawi. Hamas documents seized in Gaza identify Birawi as the head of PCPA’s Hamas sector in the United Kingdom.
In short, the “aid flotilla” could more accurately be labeled as a Hamas Love Boat. A 22-page report published in September 2025, “Global Sumud Flotilla: A Humanitarian Cover With Documented Links to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” highlights the GSF’s sordid origins and links, complete with photographic evidence and social media posts of many of its operatives. The flotilla was, in every sense, part of a propaganda campaign, and one tied to terrorists.
Indeed, in spite of its pretensions, the GSF didn’t seem to have much, if any, aid on board. Israel, Italy, and Greece, among others, offered to use regional ports to unload the aid that the flotilla was allegedly carrying. But tellingly, GSF organizers refused.
By the end of September, the party was over. The Israeli navy intercepted the flotilla. The amount of aid found on board amounted to barely two tons, amounting to “less than one-tenth of a single aid truck,” Israel’s Foreign Ministry pointed out. For comparison, a single aid truck carries approximately 20 tons of aid into Gaza. An average of 300 aid trucks enter Gaza every day.
Of course, the flotilla wasn’t meant to deliver humanitarian assistance. Rather, it was meant to assist Hamas and other terrorist groups in their information warfare campaign against the Jewish state. In this, it met with some measure of success, the antics of Barbie Gaza and the moral preening of a failed environmental activist from Sweden notwithstanding. But legacy media, unwilling to ask questions about the flotilla’s nefarious ties, and lawmakers eager to recite Hamas-approved talking points, provided the necessary lift.
On Oct. 6, Thunberg and hundreds of her compatriots were deported to Greece and Slovakia, but not before several U.S. lawmakers, celebrities, and others decried their brief detention.
On Oct. 6, Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and more than two dozen other members of California’s congressional delegation sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio urging him to do “everything in his power” to secure the release of nearly two dozen American citizens who participated in the flotilla. Advocating constituents who are detained abroad is, of course, what one expects from their duly elected representatives. But parroting terrorist propaganda isn’t.
The letter asserted that participants in the GSF were merely taking part in a “non-violent mission to deliver desperately needed humanitarian aid to Palestinians in Gaza.” Worse still, it presented the GSF’s mission as not only being legitimate, but necessary, asserting: “We call for humanitarian aid to be sent to the people of Gaza” since “the humanitarian situation grows more dire by the day.” Yet these congressional members failed to note the party responsible for the worsening humanitarian situation in Gaza: Hamas. Indeed, the word “Hamas” doesn’t appear even once in either that missive or many accompanying news reports.
As the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis noted, between Aug. 16 and Sept. 16, a total of 117,600 tons of food aid were delivered into Gaza. This is roughly the equivalent of 4,400 calories of food per person per day, more than twice the daily recommended amount. Israel has done its best to facilitate the delivery of food and other essentials amid a chaotic war against an enemy that not only attacks civilian targets but that intentionally seeks to blend into the population. Arguably, no other nation in modern history has sent more aid into an active war zone occupied by an enemy that not only sacrifices its own people as human shields but also steals aid and foodstuffs and targets those, such as the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, seeking to distribute it.
By some metrics, Hamas looted an astonishing 88% of food trucks slated for delivery in Gaza. Hamas then sold the aid on the black market, using the windfall to refurbish its war chest. Thus, aid meant for Palestinians in Gaza only enriches the very group responsible for their plight.
The problem with aid flowing to Palestinians in Gaza isn’t the Israelis. It’s not a supply problem. Rather, it’s a distribution problem. Hamas steals aid. There is widely available footage of Hamas doing just that. This has been known for quite some time, certainly long before the flotilla and subsequent letter from Khanna and his colleagues. Yet they fail to mention Hamas’s culpability.
Israel seems to be the only country in history that is expected to effectively aid, feed, and empower the very enemy that it is fighting against. Revealingly, only the world’s sole Jewish state is held to this standard.
The letter from some of California’s congressional delegation is significant in other respects. The flotilla was clearly linked to people connected to U.S.-designated terrorist groups. It is deeply troubling that members of Congress would advocate on their behalf without addressing the GSF’s nefarious connections — all of which were open source prior to the letter’s publication. By offering their imprimatur, unthinking or otherwise, these members are effectively mainstreaming extremism of the worst sort.
Unfortunately, this problem is years in the making. For example, in the summer of 2019, Reps. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) and Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) tried to go on a trip to Israel — all of which was, per their itinerary, labeled “Palestine.” The trip was sponsored by Miftah, a nongovernmental organization that has claimed that Jews consume Christian blood and has praised Palestinian suicide bombers. Other congressional representatives, such as Rep. Mark Pocan (D-WI), have also attended Miftah-organized trips. Notably, Tlaib and Omar’s itinerary included meetings with Defense for Children International Palestine, or DCI-P.
As CAMERA documented in 2018 in the Washington Examiner, DCI-P has links to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist group. NGO Monitor has extensively documented these ties. For example, one DCI-P employee, Hashem Abu Maria, was even celebrated by the PFLP as a “commander” of the terrorist group after his 2014 death. And the onetime secretary of DCI-P’s board, Fatima Daana, was the widow of the commander of the PFLP’s Abu Ali Mustafa Brigades.
It should be newsworthy that high-profile members of Congress were attending a trip sponsored by an organization with a history of praising terrorist attacks and spreading blood libels. But at the time, many mainstream news outlets, including those that covered the trip itself, failed to report these relevant facts. All these years later, we are now at a point where doing the propaganda bidding of Hamas is almost blasé. This is how the toxic virus of antisemitism, responsible for the murder of millions within living memory, spreads. Those trusted with telling the truth fail to do so. And those who should know better seemingly don’t.
There is a broader lesson here as well. Antisemitism has long been presented as the province of rubes and the unsophisticated. But history suggests otherwise. After all, many Nazis were members of the professional class: academics, lawyers, and doctors paved the way for the Holocaust. Of the 15 Nazis assembled for the 1942 Wannsee Conference, in which the “solution” to the so-called Jewish question was proposed, seven had advanced degrees. As the historian Andrew Roberts observed: “The Holocaust could not have been carried out without the willing cooperation of scientists, statisticians, demographers and social scientists” who were “operating in a moral vacuum.”
A host of artists and architects fed the Nazi war machine. Indeed, Hitler himself was a failed artist whose fantasies were, at their core, utopian. Albert Speer, his architect, was building this brave new world. He just had to use slave labor and murder Jews en masse to achieve it. The artists and celebrities of today have moved on from environmentalism and other, more recent trends, turning instead to something with more enduring appeal: the world’s oldest hatred.
Elites, just as much as the uneducated and underprivileged, are key to antisemitism’s success. This isn’t surprising. Antisemitism is, by its very nature, a sign of privilege. But history also tells us what comes next. Antisemitism corrupts, and it corrupts absolutely. What starts with the Jews, or in this case, the Jewish state, never ends with them. An all-encompassing ideology, it casts away everything else.
As David Pryce-Jones observed of Unity Mitford, one of the many British aristocrats who admired Nazism, she “was to find that a fanaticism whose aim is to destroy other people also destroys the fanatic.” To this, it must be added that it destroys society as well. Gaza itself is a testimony to this fact. “It is,” Pryce-Jones noted, “a cautionary tale of our times.” Indeed.
Sean Durns is a senior research analyst for CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis.
