How to use antisemitism as armor
Why the world's most powerful people are using hate as a shield
Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia, stood at the podium of the United Nations Security Council yesterday. Hours before, he explained that the real problem wasn’t himself.
It was the algorithm.
A few days earlier, he had posted “Heil Hitler” on X with a link to an article. And Petro’s answer, delivered as Colombia enters the presidency of the UN Security Council this month, was that the algorithm was at fault for having amplified his words to 35 million people. The man who typed the words was blameless. The technology that spread them was the problem. And, even better, he positioned himself as the one who would solve that problem.
This is how antisemitism works as a political strategy in 2026. Not as a liability. As armor.
The President Who Blamed the Algorithm
Petro posted “Heil Hitler” on Sunday in response to a column by journalist Felipe Zuleta, who had written in support of a right-wing presidential candidate. On Tuesday, he explained that the tweet was meant to show how Zuleta had drifted toward fascism. The problem is that Zuleta never used the phrase Petro attributed to him. The closest thing in the column to anything resembling it was this: “Colombia doesn’t need more rhetoric; it needs order, authority, and economic freedom.” Petro took those words and answered with the salute of the man who murdered six million Jews, attached to nothing Zuleta actually wrote. He used “Heil Hitler” as a rhetorical prop, untethered from any argument, aimed at a political opponent.
Maybe that is not an endorsement of Hitler. But it certainly isn’t respect for his victims. Approximately 2,000 Jewish citizens live in Colombia. Their president reached for the language of their people’s annihilation to score a point in a domestic political dispute.
Then came the Security Council speech. Petro announced on X that he would account for the spread of his tweet by blaming algorithms and AI. A sitting head of state typed a Nazi slogan, hit send, and then went before the world’s most powerful diplomatic body to blame a recommendation engine for showing it to people. A lame indictment of a technology that elementary school children routinely master, and the President of Colombia walks away clean.
His record as president gives abundant reasons to hold him to account that have nothing to do with Israel. His Total Peace policy has collapsed. Colombia accounts for 67 percent of global coca cultivation. In 2025 alone, 1.4 million Colombians suffered violence. His fiscal deficit ranks among the worst in the country’s modern history. He is facing a constitutional crisis at home, with an investigative body calling for his suspension over alleged meddling in elections scheduled for June 21st.
AOC flew to Bogotá to meet with him. He is a member of a global progressive forum established by Bernie Sanders. When Petro posted “Heil Hitler,” neither of them said a word. That silence is not a coincidence. Petro has spent years positioning himself as the leading antisemitic voice in Latin American progressive politics. Any American ally who now criticizes him on any subject opens themself to the charge that they are doing Israel’s bidding. His antisemitism is not separate from his relationship with the American progressive left. It is what makes that relationship untouchable. Every legitimate question about coca cultivation, about the violence, about the fiscal disaster, arrives pre-labeled as a Zionist operation. The antisemitism absorbed the criticism before it could land.
The Candidate Nobody Can Touch
When John Fetterman told CNN that a person with a clear Nazi tattoo on their chest could probably be concluded to be a Nazi sympathizer, Graham Platner’s response took about twenty minutes. He called Fetterman “a stooge for AIPAC and the Republican Party.” A senator raising a concern about a Nazi symbol became, in one tweet, a foreign agent. Cenk Uygur then made the underlying logic explicit for everyone watching: “If you want a handy list of people who work for Israel, look at everyone criticizing Graham Platner now, especially Democrats. I get why Republicans want to tear him down. But Democrats attacking their own candidate only happens when they are ordered to do so by their handlers.”
That is the mechanism, stated in public, without embarrassment.
Platner won Maine’s Democratic Senate primary last night. He won while facing a New York Times report in which a former girlfriend said he had told her, during their relationship, that his Totenkopf tattoo was a Nazi symbol, directly contradicting his public denials. He won while facing separate allegations of sexually explicit messages sent to women while newly married, and accounts of abusive behavior from former partners. Bernie Sanders, whose early endorsement gave Platner his initial credibility with the progressive base, did not rescind his support. No major Democrat who had previously backed him withdrew. He walks into the general election as the party’s standard-bearer, with its full structural support.
Every person who might have held Platner accountable first had to calculate whether doing so would get them labeled as an Israeli operative. Fetterman made the calculation and criticized him anyway. He was immediately called an AIPAC stooge. Most Democrats watched that happen and went quiet. The armor held.
One number is worth noting. Janet Mills, who had suspended her campaign months ago, still drew about 20 percent of the vote last night. One in five Maine Democrats voted for a candidate who was not running rather than vote for Platner. The party has not yet said out loud what that number means.
The Streamer Who Turned a Border Stop Into a Story
Far-left Twitch streamer Hasan Piker was denied entry to the United Kingdom last week. He named Israel as the cause. He offered no evidence. Sympathetic coverage followed, framing him as a victim of foreign censorship and Israeli pressure on British authorities. He did not just survive the incident. He came out of it with positive press.
That is the mechanism at its most efficient. Other figures use antisemitism defensively, to deflect criticism that has already arrived. Piker used it to generate coverage before any other narrative could take hold. The denied entry became the story, Israel became the villain, and everything else about Piker receded before a single critical piece could be written.
And there is plenty more that could be written. Piker’s early career videos were explicitly violent and misogynistic. He called a refugee woman disgusting. He dismissed Ukrainian suffering over Russia’s annexation of Crimea. He has expressed explicit support for Hezbollah. He said America deserved 9/11. He used a shock collar on his dog. I could go on.
But, among his many faults, Piker is also blatantly antisemitic. He once infamously called Jews “inbred,” repeatedly trivialized the suffering of Israeli hostages, and said it didn’t matter if rapes occurred on October 7th. Those statements, by themselves, probably didn’t result in his visa being denied. But they were what allowed him to shift the conversation about his other issues before it even started.
The Formula
Three men. Three countries. Three sets of serious, documented problems. One outcome: All three were rewarded.
The political move that Petro, Platner, and Piker used relies on latent antisemitism. It doesn’t work without it. What we are witnessing, in real time and on a global scale, is the normalization of the idea that Jews calling out antisemitism are doing so in bad faith to shut down conversations about Israel. This notion itself is embedded with hate. It assumes that Jews’ motivation for calling out hate comes from loyalty to a foreign country. What should be obvious somehow never occurs to so many: We are just trying to stay alive.
What’s even more concerning than the hate that causes people to think this way, is the idea’s functional outcome now that it has become normalized. If Jews call out antisemitism, the people spreading it can now use that to their advantage. They can turn our awareness-raising into political armor. And they can use that political armor to shield themselves not just against accusations of antisemitism, but against anything they want.
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None of the three is a sure thing. Petro is term-limited and out of office in August, possibly replaced by someone from the party he despises. Platner won a primary, which is not a Senate seat. Piker, after the California candidates he backed lost their races, conceded he is “not a kingmaker.”
That ought to settle the nerves. It doesn’t. Whether any of these men lasts is almost beside the point, because the technique will outlast all of them. It carried a sitting president through a Nazi salute and a Senate nominee past a Nazi tattoo, and it did the same for a streamer who holds no office at all. Whoever reaches for it next inherits something proven and already normal, with the Jews most likely to object filed in advance as foreign agents arguing in bad faith.
That filing is the part to refuse. The one that classifies our objection to “Heil Hitler” as loyalty to a government on the other side of the world. The truth is older than that. It’s not about strategy. It’s about survival. There are roughly 2,500 Jews in Colombia. Their president typed the Nazi slogan, shouted by legions of Nazi soliders, for the duration of their genocide of six million Jews. The Jews condemning it are trying to stay alive.
I am grateful for every single person whose brain hasn’t been boiling in totalitarian Nazi sludge. And grateful for you too. Shit times
All three instances make clear that the recourse to Jew hatred/"antizionism"/Israel conspiracy beliefs as either an explanation or a source of political credit has functional value: it camouflages intellectual and ideological bankruptcy.