When Egypt was knocked out of the FIFA World Cup after a tense match against Argentina, the fury of many Egyptian fans did not stop at the referee’s decisions. Within hours, social media users were accusing “the Jews” of manipulating the game.
Someone even altered the Wikipedia page of French referee François Letexier to falsely claim that he was born into an Orthodox Jewish family. The fabrication spread quickly, and for many enraged commentators it seemed to explain everything.
Israel had no role in the tournament. No Jewish organization was involved.
There was no evidence that the referee was Jewish, and nothing about the match required a Jewish explanation. Yet the instinctive answer for many was a Jewish conspiracy. That reflex is the story.
This episode may look trivial or absurd, but it reveals a deeper disease in the Arab political culture.
Antisemitism has moved far beyond hostility to Israel to become a ready-made explanation for defeat, humiliation, corruption, injustice, and national frustration. When reality is inconvenient, the Jew is summoned as the hidden hand.
An ideology emerges
Western discussions of antisemitism in the Middle East are usually reduced to the Arab-Israeli conflict, as if anti-Jewish hatred were merely a reaction to Israeli policy.
According to that view, peace negotiations, territorial compromise, or a change of government in Jerusalem would naturally drain antisemitism of its force. This is comforting. It is also wrong.
The Arab-Israeli conflict has undoubtedly intensified anti-Jewish attitudes. But in many Arab societies, modern antisemitism has developed into an ideology of its own.
It is not simply opposition to Zionism or merely anger over war. It is a worldview that portrays Jews as a secret force manipulating politics, media, finance, revolutions, wars, and even soccer matches.
The roots of this ideology are layered. Traditional religious prejudices provided an old vocabulary of suspicion.
In the 20th century, European antisemitic literature and Nazi propaganda entered the Arab world and gave those prejudices a modern political structure.
After 1948, Arab nationalist regimes and later Islamist movements absorbed and amplified these narratives, presenting Jews not only as enemies of Israel’s neighbors but also as an invisible power behind the region’s suffering.
Over time, this discourse became useful. It allowed failing regimes to evade responsibility. Military defeats could be blamed on Zionist plots. Economic collapse could be blamed on Jewish influence. Corruption, authoritarianism, social decay, and institutional weakness could all be explained without confronting the people and systems actually responsible. Antisemitism became not only hatred but also political anesthesia.
That is why it has survived so many political changes. Governments have fallen. Alliances have shifted. Several Arab states have normalized relations with Israel. Yet the image of the Jew as puppet master remains embedded in media commentary, political rhetoric, religious preaching, schoolyard talk, and online culture. The Egypt-Argentina incident was not an exception. It was a symptom.
Exporting antisemitism
The danger no longer stops at the borders of the Middle East. Over the past three decades, satellite television, transnational Islamist movements, migration, campus activism, and digital platforms have carried these narratives into Europe and North America.
After the October 7 attacks, Western societies saw an alarming normalization of anti-Jewish slogans, conspiracy theories, and intimidation of Jewish communities.
These trends have many sources, including far-right extremism and radical-left anti-Zionism. But one source is still too rarely named: the antisemitic discourse that grew inside modern Arab political culture and then migrated into global activist networks.
Naming this source does not mean treating every criticism of Israel as antisemitic. It does not excuse anti-Muslim bigotry. It does not minimize the threat of white supremacist antisemitism.
On the contrary, serious analysis requires moral clarity in all directions. But moral clarity also requires refusing to ignore antisemitism when it comes wrapped in the language of anti-imperialism, anti-Zionism, resistance, or social justice.
For too long, the study of antisemitism has been divided into familiar categories: European antisemitism, the legacy of the Holocaust, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. These are essential but incomplete.
They do not fully explain why a soccer referee can be transformed overnight into a Jewish conspirator or why Jewish students in Western democracies are increasingly asked to answer for events they did not cause and governments they do not control.
To understand today’s global antisemitism, policy-makers, educators, and civil society leaders must examine how anti-Jewish ideas were cultivated in the modern Arab world, how they were legitimized by regimes and movements, and how they now circulate through digital and activist ecosystems far beyond the region.
The Middle East is not only a theater of conflict. It is also a producer of political ideas, including destructive ones.
Ignoring this reality leaves the world fighting the symptoms of contemporary antisemitism while overlooking one of its most influential ideological sources.
The lie about the referee was quickly removed from Wikipedia. The worldview that made it believable remains much harder to delete.■
The writer is a research fellow and Washington, DC, coordinator at the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.