France defeated Morocco 2-0 in a World Cup quarterfinal outside Boston. It was a soccer match: 22 men, one ball, and 90 minutes. By any rational measure, the Jewish people had nothing to do with it.
Yet within hours, crowds in European cities were chanting, “Hamas! Hamas! All Jews to the gas chambers.” Others shouted that Jews were a cancer. In The Hague, police were pelted with bottles before dispersing crowds near dawn.
Arrests followed in The Hague and Amsterdam, where fires were set. In London, rioting broke out on Edgware Road, and a police officer was left bleeding after being struck in the head. From Rotterdam to Brussels, the same poison surfaced.
Sit with the insanity of that for a moment. A North African team lost a soccer match, and the reflex – the immediate, unthinking reflex – was to call for the murder of Jews.
This is not about soccer. It never was.
Let me also be precise, because fairness matters. The overwhelming majority of Moroccan fans mourned a painful loss, went home, and hurt no one. The problem is not a nationality, a race, or a faith.
The problem is an ancient habit of hatred that waits for any excuse, however absurd, and then finds its way to the same target it has always found. The match did not create the hatred. It merely lit it.
Perhaps it is time the world stopped asking what Jews supposedly did and began asking itself a far more uncomfortable question: Why is it always the Jews?
A soccer match, a pandemic, an economic crisis, a war, an assassination, a wildfire, an election – somehow, sooner or later, someone finds a way to blame the Jews.
We saw the same mechanism after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Before investigators had established the motive, before the suspect was even in custody, and before the public knew the basic facts, conspiracy theories spread online claiming that Israel or the Mossad was responsible.
One analysis found that posts promoting the lie drew more than 139 million views in the five days after the killing. The accusation moved faster than the manhunt. Israel’s prime minister was forced to deny it twice. None of it was true. All of it spread anyway.
Because the truth was never the point. The lie was the point.
We have watched this pattern for two thousand years. When the Black Death swept through Europe, Jews were accused of poisoning wells, and Jewish communities were burned alive for a plague they were dying from alongside everyone else.
During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews were accused of corrupting the faith and were expelled, tortured, or murdered. In the villages of Eastern Europe, the Cossacks arrived with accusations and left mass graves.
In Germany, Jews were blamed for military defeat, inflation, unemployment, and national humiliation – and the world learned where that sentence ends.
My own grandparents survived what that logic ultimately produced. I do not write about this as distant history. I write about it as family.
Every generation believes its grievance is unique. Every generation invents a fresh reason and attaches it to the oldest target. The plague, the war, the economy, the weather, the assassination, the football score – the accusation is a template, and only the blank changes.
The same old scapegoat
The accusation changes. The target never does.
Consider how completely the accusations contradict one another. Jews are blamed for capitalism and for communism. They are accused of controlling Wall Street and of destroying economies.
They are called rootless globalists and, at the same time, accused of loyalty only to Israel. They are portrayed as weak parasites and as all-powerful puppet masters controlling governments, media, universities, banks, and elections.
These claims cannot all be true. They cannot even logically coexist. Yet they survive because antisemitism has never depended on evidence. It depends on the willingness to believe that someone else is always responsible.
There are approximately 15 million Jews in a world of more than eight billion people – less than 0.2% of humanity. Yet this tiny people are routinely accused of controlling nations, markets, wars, and institutions spanning the globe.
The scale of the accusation should itself expose the absurdity.
If Jews truly possessed the extraordinary power attributed to them, would history look the way it does? Would Jews have spent centuries being expelled from country after country? Would six million have been murdered in the Holocaust?
Would Jewish schools and synagogues around the world require armed guards? Would Israel, a country smaller than New Jersey, have spent most of its existence fighting for the right to exist?
The conspiracy collapses the moment it is tested against reality.
There is another fact worth confronting. While Jews represent less than two-tenths of one percent of the world’s population, Jewish contributions to humanity have been extraordinary.
Jewish scientists and physicians have transformed medicine. Jewish researchers have reshaped physics, chemistry, and economics. Jewish entrepreneurs and innovators have helped build industries that changed how the world communicates, travels, treats disease, grows food, and accesses information.
Jewish thinkers have shaped law, ethics, literature, and philosophy.
Jewish individuals have received roughly one-fifth of Nobel Prizes, despite representing only a tiny fraction of humanity.
Israel, despite its size and the constant pressure of war, has become a global leader in emergency medicine, cybersecurity, agriculture, desalination, water technology, and scientific innovation.
Elon Musk has observed that, on a per-capita basis, the Jewish people may have contributed more to humanity than any other group.
Whether one agrees with that exact formulation or not, the broader record is undeniable: a remarkably small people have made an impact on civilization far beyond their numbers.
Should that not inspire respect rather than resentment? Curiosity rather than conspiracy? Gratitude rather than suspicion?
Is jealousy part of the answer? Perhaps, sometimes. Success can inspire admiration, but it can also provoke resentment in those looking for a reason to explain their own disappointments.
Yet jealousy alone does not explain the endurance or ferocity of antisemitism. The deeper problem is the human desire to avoid responsibility.
Blaming Jews is easier than confronting failed governments. Easier than admitting military defeat. Easier than acknowledging economic mistakes. Easier than examining corruption, extremism, or social failure.
A civilization that blames Jews for everything eventually accepts responsibility for nothing.
I have spent my career building bridges through business, through the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce and the Multicultural Business Coalition, because commerce and sport are supposed to be great equalizers.
They are places where a Moroccan, a Frenchman, a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim can compete, trade, build, win, lose, and still recognize one another’s humanity.
When a soccer match becomes the pretext for chants about gas chambers, what has broken is not the game, but something inside the people watching it – and inside societies that hear such chants and treat them as just another night of unrest.
This is no longer only a Jewish issue. It is a test of civilization itself.
The Holocaust did not begin with gas chambers. It began with words. With slogans. With rumors. With conspiracy theories.
With ordinary people convincing themselves that Jews were responsible for problems they neither created nor controlled. It began when hatred was repeated so often that the absurd began to sound normal.
That is why every chant matters. Every lie matters. Every public figure who excuses it, every institution that minimizes it, and every bystander who shrugs, carries a piece of responsibility for what comes next.
So here is my challenge to everyone who reaches for the Jew as the answer to every loss, tragedy, or conspiracy: write the accusation down in plain language.
Explain how a Jewish family in Brooklyn, Antwerp, or Casablanca caused France to score two goals.
Explain how Jews caused a pandemic, an economic crash, a wildfire, or an assassination. Explain how 15 million people secretly control a world of more than eight billion.
Then read the sentence back to yourself.
Does it add up? Does it make one bit of sense? Or is it simply hatred searching for an excuse?
It is time for the world to look itself in the mirror. Not the Jews – the world.
Before blaming Jews again, ask one honest question: If this accusation were directed at any other people on earth, would I believe it?
If the answer is no, then perhaps the problem was never the Jews. Perhaps the real problem is humanity’s willingness to believe any lie, however contradictory or absurd, so long as it points toward the same ancient target.
Enough is enough. We have buried too many generations beneath the same lie to pretend we no longer recognize its face. Call it what it is wherever it appears, in whatever language it is shouted, and whatever grievance it hides behind.
The world owes itself one honest question: Why always the Jews?
Until it has the courage to answer, the accusation will keep changing – and the target will remain the same.
The writer is founder and CEO of the Orthodox Jewish Chamber of Commerce and co-founder and secretary of the Multicultural Business Coalition. He has spent more than two decades building bridges between diverse communities through commerce, economic opportunity, and mutual respect.