By RACHEL SHABI (on her Substack)
AUG 06, 2026
A far-right narrative linking Muslim migration and antisemitism has moved into the mainstream — with some British Jewish groups backing the shift.
From the early 2010s the European far right began recognisably to cast themselves as defenders of Jewish communities, against Islam. The Dutch Geert Wilders proclaimed: “The more Islam grows in the Netherlands, the more anti-Semitism grows.” Marine Le Pen of the French Rassemblement party called herself the best “shield” for French Jews, since she is fighting “the most fervently against Islamist fundamentalism.” It was, for far right parties, a rebrand that brought many benefits. Claiming to care about antisemitism rehabilitated the political fortunes of parties with fascist roots, steeped in antisemitism and previously considered beyond the pale. In performing concern for Jews, those parties also found a useful delivery mechanism for hostility to Muslims and migrants. They formed alliances with increasingly right-wing Israeli governments, happy to shake hands with European parties that espoused unwaveringly anti-Muslim and pro-Israel views – parties that would help to push defintions of antisemitism that stifle criticism of Israel.
This far-right narrative – whereby supposed concerns about antisemitism are invoked in order to bash migrants and Muslims – has comfortably travelled into conventional politics. As this article explains, far-right parties have funnelled anti-migrant and anti-Islam narratives into the European mainstream, either because such parties are in themselves now a part of the mainstream, or becuase they are in alliances with traditional parties, or because centrists have internalised and regurgitated their bigoted frames.
Which is how claims of ‘imported antisemitism’ – supposedly a product of migration into Europe from mostly Muslim countries – has crept into the conversation. In March, after an arson attack on the Jewish charity ambulance service, Hatzolah, Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch urged a crackdown on immigration to help tackle antisemitism. In June last year, the German chancellor Friedrich Merz said that rising antisemitism was due to “the big number of migrants we have within the last ten years”. For Germany, of all nations, to make this claim was, as others have pointed out, a particular irony. It flies in the face of the stats, which show that the vast majority of antisemitic violence in Germany is coming from right wing perpetrators. It’s also an astoundingly revisionist claim, considering that Christian European countries invented antisemitism and perpetuated it in the most pernicious, violent and deadly ways for centuries on end.
You could cite violent extremist Islamism as one contributing factor, among several, behind some of the violent antisemitic attacks in Europe in recent decades. But you cannot with any credibilty extrapulate that into a generalised claim about Islam or about Muslim migrants. And why would you? To do so is pure racism. To do so is to start with anti-Muslim hatred and then grossly contort reality in order to manufacture a validation for such views. To do so is to use one minoritised community as a battering ram with which to attack another.
Europe’s mainstream Jewish bodies have, by and large, drawn a red line at engaging with far-right parties. That said, there have been exceptions, most significantly in Hungary, where the Orthodox Jewish organisation EMIH developed close ties with Victor Orban’s far-right government, and with some Jewish supporters of the AfD in Germany and public figures in France who have expressed a willingness to engage with Marine Le Pen.
In Britain, that line is blurring. A dismal sign of the times came when when the Board of Deputies of British Jews and the Jewish Leadership Council invited the Reform party to a rally oppposing antisemitsm. Some 2000 British Jews composed a letter of opposition to that. Meanwhile, and especially after 7 October 2023, a prominent strand of commentary among Jewish writers and broadcasters has foregrounded Islamism, migrant communities and ‘imported antisemitsm’ as frameworks for explaining contemporary antisemitism in Britain. And last week a Telegraph article penned by a British Jewish writer, under a headline that British Jews have been betrayed by immigration, claimed that antisemitism in the UK is coming from Muslim migrants but that we are all too cowardly or sensitive to say it.
All of which is deeply alarming to see, but cannot be presumed to be representative. As much as Israel’s genocide in Gaza has fractured Britain’s Jewish community, so too has this rightward lurch amid rising hostility to Muslims and migrants. Which means that those of us who outright reject such hateful narratives have to keep insiting on that. Our values must be applied univesally, to everyone, if they are to mean anything at all. Our anti-racism has to be consistent. The path to a future in which Muslim and Jewish communities live in safety and with equity is to unite in solidarity over our shared fears and shared struggles – and strive to create that world together.
Rachel Shabi, 06 August, 2026.
Quaker Socialist Society 