China’s role in the rise of anti-Semitism has been under-emphasized since Oct. 7, and it is getting more sophisticated and targeted in a way that guarantees Beijing has no plans to let up.

China’s three-pronged strategy starts with the easy one: social media. As Aaron Keyak, one of the State Department’s officials monitoring global anti-Semitism, told Josh Rogin in January, Chinese users of social media see what the government wants them to see. Thanks to the tight regime of CCP censorship, China can spread whatever internet wildfires it wants whenever it wants—but that also means Beijing has forfeited any plausible deniability of its role.

And after the Oct. 7 attacks, what the CCP wanted users to see was a stream of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. “There’s a parallel rise on China’s internet of pro-Hamas and anti-Israel content,” Rogin wrote. “The Chinese tech companies, which operate under strict instructions from Chinese government censors, have played a big role. Chinese internet search giants Baidu and Alibaba went so far as to actually temporarily erase the country of Israel from their maps.”

One example of how this works: Weibo is one of China’s most popular video-sharing programs. Within days of the Oct. 7 Hamas attack, Chinese state TV broadcast the claim that America is controlled by a cabal of money-hungry Jews. Weibo then made sure the clip went viral. As is so often the case, China’s anti-Semitism and its anti-Americanism go hand in hand.

There’s also the hugely popular China-controlled app TikTok, which saw a surge in anti-Semitism and anti-Israel censorship serious enough to draw the attention of members of Congress last year—though its data harvesting remains the point of greatest concern to the U.S.

The second prong is fueling the pro-Hamas movement that has roiled US politics over the past year. In May, Rep. Rashida Tlaib headlined a conference in Detroit affiliated with the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a designated terrorist group. The conference’s web domain was owned by the People’s Forum, an arm of Marxist millionaire Neville Roy Singham’s sprawling CCP propaganda empire. Singham is married to Code Pink founder Jodie Evans. When the New York Times reported on the power couple’s ties to China last year, it noted that “Few on the American political left would discuss the couple publicly, fearing lawsuits or harassment. Others said that criticism would undermine progressive causes.”

The director of the People’s Forum made a furious anti-American speech at the same PFLP-aligned conference. The People’s Forum has also helped organize and publicize pro-Palestinian street protests and walkouts since Oct. 7. In just the first five weeks after the Hamas attacks, the Free Press reported in November 2023, the People’s Forum “co-organized at least four protests… One rally, in Times Square, happened on October 8 before Israel had even counted its dead.”

The third prong is a bit more sophisticated, and suggests the CCP propaganda machine is evolving. Last week, the Washington Post reported that China is “using fake accounts on social media to spread divisive and sometimes explicitly antisemitic claims and conspiracy theories about politicians,” focusing its attention on critics of the CCP, such as Rep. Barry Moore and Sen. Marco Rubio.

One such tweet, part of the Chinese influence operation known as Spamouflage: “What made Barry Moore win? It was the bloody Jewish consortium! Just because he supported the evil Israel.”

Such tweets are reminiscent of the wackier anti-Hillary Clinton ads that Russian trolls spread on Facebook in 2016. One showed a devil-horned Clinton boxing against Jesus, with the tagline: “ ‘Like’ if you want Jesus to win!”

Tweets about “the bloody Jewish consortium”—great name for Borough Park-based punk rock band, by the way—don’t have the reach that the CCP would hope for. As the Post explains, “Posts on X from the Spamouflage network grew from less than 60,000 views per week late last year to 300,000 views per week — an increase of five times, according to The Post analysis. By contrast, [Elon] Musk’s interview with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in August got 275 million views, and many posts on the platform routinely get more views and engagement than the Spamouflage posts.”

The larger concern would be the amount of effort and resources the CCP is putting into fanning the flames of anti-Semitic propaganda. China has by far the world’s largest share of social media users—about 1 billion. And its economic power makes it a far different caliber of foe than Russia or Iran, which both pose immediate security threats to the West but have no instrument of soft power that can match TikTok’s billion global users.

State sponsored anti-Semitism out of China has the potential to supercharge the current crisis. Considering the staying power of Soviet anti-Zionism, China may leave an unprecedented multi-generational legacy of Jew-hatred in the world.

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