KINSELLA: Antisemitic conspiracy theories seek to instill panic and fear

Some extremist and terrorist groups believe that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan

Published May 16, 2026  •  Last updated 20 minutes ago  •  4 minute read

Bullet holes mark the front doors and windows after Jewish Temple Emanu-El in Toronto was shot up on Tuesday, March 3, 2026. Photo by Peter J Thompson /National Post

Conspiracy theories can be harmless or they can be the opposite.

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In the main, conspiracy theories are stories that try to create meaning in an often meaningless world. They try to impose order on chaos. Sometimes, they assign blame.

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The Earth is flat. The moon landing was faked. Paul McCartney is dead. Birds aren’t real. Governments are seeding chemicals in the atmosphere using chemtrails. Area 51 in Nevada is where the remains of space aliens are kept. Those are among the many (mostly) harmless conspiracy theories.

Then there are conspiracy theories that aren’t harmless at all. They seek to instill panic and fear – and they do so by accusing a particular group of something particularly terrible.

So: 9/11 was an inside job. Covid-19 wasn’t real, and vaccines don’t work. There is a deep state – or New World Order or the like – that secretly controls the world. The Sandy Hook Elementary School slaughter was false flag operation, carried out by crisis actors. And so on and so on.

There many conspiracy theories like that – ones that hurt people, and lead to spilled blood.

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Most persistent conspiracy theories involve Jews

The most persistent conspiracy theories, however, have to do with Jews.

Antisemitism is a conspiracy theory, in and of itself. It has been around since the Middle Ages: Jews killed Jesus, Jews consume the organs and blood of Christians, Jews poison the water and food. Some extremist and terrorist groups – the Aryan Nations, the Nation of Islam, the Christian Identity Movement and others – believe that Jews are the literal descendants of Satan.

There is an age-old Russian forgery, titled The Protocols of Elders of Zion, that asserts Jews are behind a secret conspiracy to control the world. Henry Ford, the automaker, distributed that at every one of his car dealerships.

Animals, bizarrely, have often played a role in some of these antisemitic conspiracy theories. So, when tourists were attacked by sharks at a Red Sea resort in Egypt in 2010, Israel was blamed for it. The Israeli spy agency had planted GPS units in the backs of the sharks, an Egyptian governor claimed.

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Hezbollah, the terror group, claimed in 2016 that Israel used “spy eagles” against them. Similarly, Saudi Arabia asserted in 2019 that the Jewish state had used satellite-tracking vultures. The terror group Hamas, not to be outdone, insisted Israel was using “spy dolphins” against it in the waters off Gaza in 2015.

At this point in the column, you may be laughing. Spy eagles and GPS-controlled attack sharks seem like the stuff of (bad) science fiction. But conspiracy theories don’t need to be plausible – they usually aren’t. They just need to make some fantastical claim, and blame someone for something bad.

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New York Times once considered greatest newspaper in the world

Which brings us to Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for what was formerly considered the greatest newspaper in the world, The New York Times. On May 11, Kristof wrote a 3,500-word column titled, “The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians.”

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The fact that Kristof was given enough space to write 3,500 words is, as any reporter or editor will tell you, very significant. It doesn’t just mean the columnist wrote a lot. It means a conscious decision was made, by senior editors and management, to actively promote what Kristof had to say.

This is what he had to say, relying on the say-so of a Palestinian he does not name: “On one occasion, he said, he was held down and stripped naked, and as he was blindfolded and handcuffed, a dog was summoned. With encouragement from a handler in Hebrew, he said, the dog mounted him.”

The dog raped the man, Kristof claimed.

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He went on: “Other Palestinian prisoners and human rights monitors have also cited reports of police dogs being coached to rape prisoners.”

He actually wrote those things. And The New York Times actually published those things.

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None of it stands up to scrutiny

It’s almost redundant, but it must be said: none of it stands up to scrutiny.

One of Kristof’s sources was removed from an academic post after being accused of sexual harassment. Another one is led by a man whose organization is active with Hamas. Those are his sources.

It is not enough, then, to simply call the promotion of the “dog rape” conspiracy theory antisemitic. It is much more than that.

It is not enough to point out what everyone knows, which is that a dog cannot be trained to rape a human being.

It is not enough to merely mock Kristof’s lunacy, either. Doing so underestimates the power of conspiracy theories rooted in Jew hatred. There is a reason such madness has survived the centuries, never completely going away.

But The New York Times? Nicolas Kristof? How did they, of all people, decide to publish such harmful garbage?

We may never know. What we do know is this, because it comes from Nicholas Kristof himself: his father fought for the Nazis.

And that, as it turns out, isn’t a conspiracy theory at all.

It’s the truth.

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