Redi Tlhabi broadcasts to a third of a billion people for a Qatari based network, and she lives in Washington DC. For four months she has recited the oldest conspiracy theory in Europe, named it as antisemitism, and then told her audience it is true. Measured against the two screens the United States itself uses, the IHRA working definition and Natan Sharansky’s 3D test, an identifiable and fully documented body of her output stops being simply criticism of Israel.

South African journalist Redi Tlhabi before leaving overseas worked for many years as a broadcaster on Radio 702. She hosted her own program called the Redi Tlhabi Show for about 10 years. Radio 702 is part of Primedia a broadcast media group founded by Issie Kirsch and his son William in 1994. Besides having Jewish management in its formative years, Radio 702 also featured well known and popular Jewish radio personalities John Berks and Stan Katz. This era also saw the new democratic South Africa formed and Radio 702 led the way as a talk radio station where openness and freedom of expression on radio flourished.

Tlhabi is a South African citizen, and she now lives in Washington, DC. At present it seems she is not a US citizen. She works for Al Jazeera, the broadcaster funded in large part by the government of Qatar and chartered as an arm of the Qatari state.  Tlhabi presents UpFront for, whose American outlet, AJ , the United States Department of Justice ordered in 2020 to register as a foreign agent after concluding that it operated at the direction of the Qatari government. AJ refused. The network says it reaches more than 430 million people across over 150 countries. To that she adds roughly 700,000 followers on X.

There is a gospel Redi Tlhabi has preached with regularity this year that it now functions as an obvious self – evident truth. She takes the oldest conspiracy theory in European history, the belief that Jews secretly control the money, the media and the machinery of government, and she states it aloud. Before anyone can object, she names it. She calls it an antisemitic trope. Having shown that she knows exactly what it is, she informs her audience that it happens, on inspection, to be true. Sadly she forgets to inform her audience that her own Qatari employer is far from being Jewish and that she worked for a South African Jewish media company where she enjoyed a successful career and without any complaint against her apparent Jewish controllers.

Bigotry is seldom logical or fair, but always harmful and dangerous. Tlhabi has overstepped the antisemitism red line and now presents an affront to human dignity and freedom not only of Jews but to democratic society of all races and creeds where respect, truth and justice still matter.

Like happiness, antisemitism means different thing to different people. Yet antisemitism mutates. It has moved from being hatred of Jews to hatred of the Jewish state. This reality is strongly contested by anti Israel and anti Zionist voices but nevertheless the standard definition has found traction. Let’s begin with the standard, even if Tlhabi will say the standard is rigged. The United States government itself uses the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) working definition. The State Department has applied it since 2010; Executive Order 13899 made it a reference point for federal civil-rights enforcement in 2019; the 2023 National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism adopted it; and more than half of the states in........

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