The Blogs: How Antisemitism Is Manufactured

On January 2, 2026, I published an opinion piece called Africa Must Fragment, South Africa First. I argued that colonial borders are not sacred forever and that peaceful, referendum-based self-determination should be available to peoples who want it.

People were free to call the argument dangerous, historically illiterate, offensive or stupid. Some did. Fine. That is what publication is for. What happened afterward was different. Because the piece appeared in The Times of Israel, it gradually stopped being treated simply as my opinion. It became evidence of Israeli involvement, then of a hidden operation, and eventually of foreign interference in South African unrest. By August, Femi Fani-Kayode was pointing to it immediately after writing about hidden financing and foreign actors. That is the record I want to examine.

The masthead became the evidence

Nobody in Israel commissioned the article, instructed me to write it or paid me to write it. I used The Times of Israel because it gave me a blog platform years ago, before I had a Substack readership, and I kept using it. The site states that blog posts are contributed by third parties and that the opinions and facts are presented solely by their authors. I wrote the piece. The newspaper gave me somewhere to publish it. It was not the author or the Israeli government, and I am not Israeli.

The association nevertheless began doing work that evidence had not done. I described the early stage in When Israel Is the Desired Villain. Then a social-media discussion went further. A user posted my article and said an undefined “they” were behind the disorder. Broadcaster Redi Tlhabi replied Nnete — true — invoked Mossad, said investigative journalists should be working on it, and offered leads. Lawrence Nowosenetz recorded the exchange in The Antisemitic Gospel According to Redi Tlhabi, and I responded in Redi Tlhabi and the Death of a Word.

I neither participated in nor found in the cited record any bank transfer, instruction, meeting, intermediary or communication linking me to a protest organizer. Nothing in that record connected Israel to my article beyond the name of the platform. By the time I wrote The Construction of a Conspiracy Theory, the pattern was already visible: authorship was being collapsed into publication, publication into Israel, and Israel into Mossad. That is association, not evidence.

By June the theory had grown more elaborate. Global Geopolitics published The Recognition Network, linking my writing with the Mthwakazi Republic Party, Somaliland, Western Cape independence advocacy, Israeli interests, mineral geography and donor networks. Those are legitimate subjects to examine. But the article also conceded that publicly available evidence could not establish coordination rather than parallel interests, and that no coordinated operational program had been shown. There was a calendar problem too: H.R. 2633, the US-South Africa Bilateral Relations Review Act of 2025, had been introduced on April 3, 2025, with a Senate companion following in September. Both predated my January article. I set out that chronology in The Case That Concedes Itself.

On May 27, Mzoxolo Mpolase of Political Analysis South Africa traced the evidentiary trail and found that it ended at one blog post: mine. Marika Sboros reported and endorsed that finding in the Daily Friend on June 21, writing that the “chain of evidence ends” there and noting that my article posits no funding channel, instruction or organizational relationship between Israel and the protests. Sboros also documented how the suspicion was moving into public political discussion. By July, after comments by Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola and Justice Minister Mmamoloko Kubayi, the ICJ case, unidentified foreign actors and Israel had been placed close enough together for a later writer to treat the association as established. The Sunday Times recorded the central weakness in Kubayi’s remarks: she presented no evidence that Israel or any other foreign state was involved. I discussed that gap in Evidence at The Hague. None in Pretoria.

The confrontation was still active in late August. On August 25, South Africa submitted a further dossier to the ICJ alleging Israeli non-compliance with the Court’s provisional-measures orders. South Africa is entitled to pursue its legal case and to criticize Israel. It should also expect a response, and Israel and its allies are entitled to make one. That response takes the form of diplomatic pressure, legislation in parliaments, public argument and open advocacy. Those forms of response are overt, attributable and open to examination. Covert interference is a different proposition and still has to be proved, and so does the involvement of any particular person. An opinion column written by someone who holds no Israeli office and acts on no Israeli instruction is not a diplomatic instrument, and it is not evidence of one.

Fani-Kayode made the leap explicit

On August 7, Femi Fani-Kayode published Part 5 of A Bond That Must Never Be Broken. Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had described him a month earlier as High Commissioner-designate to South Africa, saying his letters of credence were presented “preparatory to” assumption of duty. TheCable reported that he still intended to present those credentials to President Cyril Ramaphosa before officially commencing the assignment.

Fani-Kayode endorsed the claim that “foreign entities” were stoking unrest in South Africa. Immediately after discussing hidden financing, he told readers they did not have to dig too deep to identify those entities. His evidence was my January article, written, he said, by “Israeli columnist Grant Arthur Gotchin.” My name is Gochin. I am not Israeli.

There are two other verification problems, although neither is as important as the false nationality and the unsupported inference of foreign agency. Fani-Kayode converted my headline into a purported verbatim quotation, changing “South Africa First” into “South Africa must be the first to fragment.” The alteration did not supply evidence of financing, instruction or coordination. He also put quotation marks around the proposition that “foreign entities are stoking unrest in South Africa” and attributed it to Kubayi. Those words were the Sunday Times headline, not the minister’s words. The article beneath the headline says she stopped short of accusing Israel and supplied no evidence of foreign involvement.

So the bridge from hidden money and foreign actors to Israel was an opinion column, a misspelled surname, a nationality that is not mine, and two headline-derived formulations presented as quotations. None of that establishes who funded, instructed or coordinated anything.

There is an irony here. Much of Fani-Kayode’s broader argument is sound. He objects to Nigerians being stereotyped as criminals, drug dealers or illegal immigrants because of the conduct of some Nigerians, and he argues that migrants have become convenient scapegoats for failures of the South African state. I agree. A Nigerian should not become representative evidence against Nigerians. Yet in the same essay my opinion becomes evidence against Israel and a clue to mysterious foreign actors. He rejects collective guilt for Nigerians and then collectivizes me into a state of which I am not even a citizen. I addressed that contradiction in A Standard That Must Never Be Broken.

Fourteen copies are still one allegation

The passage did not stay in one place. I found fourteen third-party publications carrying the essay and the paragraph concerning me:

Premium Times Nigeria
Vanguard
Leadership
Blueprint Newspapers
The Sun Nigeria
The Eagle Online
The News
Abuja Network News
allAfrica
TheCable
Reuben Abati
Modern Ghana
The Nation
The Trent

Fani-Kayode also published Part 5 on his own site. PRNigeria separately turned the allegation into a news report, saying that he had linked the unrest to broader geopolitical interests and citing my article as part of that argument.

These were not fourteen independent investigations, and some were syndicated republications. allAfrica, for example, expressly credits Premium Times. That is precisely why the shared errors matter. The same misspelled surname, false nationality and headline-derived formulations travel with the allegation. They are textual fingerprints of inheritance from a common source, not independent corroboration. Fourteen appearances of one allegation do not create fourteen pieces of evidence. They show how repetition can make one allegation look larger than it is.

Where antisemitism enters

Let me be precise. Fani-Kayode did not write “the Jews.” I am not saying that criticism of Israel, criticism of my January article, or scrutiny of my public roles is antisemitic. It plainly is not. Global Geopolitics relied in part on my advisory relationship with the Mthwakazi Republic Party and other positions I have held. Those are fair subjects for scrutiny, and serious critics have attacked my argument without reference to my religion.

The IHRA working definition, which is non-legally binding, draws the same boundary. Its illustrative examples say expressly that criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. Those same examples include conspiracy allegations about Jews, holding Jews collectively responsible for Israel, and accusing Jewish citizens of greater loyalty to Israel than to their own countries. I am not claiming that IHRA has adjudicated this case, or that every person in this chain consciously intended an antisemitic allegation. The narrower question is whether the inference depends on a recognizably antisemitic mechanism: treating a Jewish writer’s proximity to Israel as evidence of secret Israeli agency.

That is the problem here. I am Jewish and I publish on an Israeli platform, so I am recast as Israeli; the platform becomes Israel; my private political opinion becomes evidence of what Israel wants; and that supposed intention is used to explain a covert operation for which no operational evidence has been produced. Words such as “Zionists,” “foreign interests” and “networks” are not inherently antisemitic. The problem is using identity and association to avoid proving agency: who instructed whom, who paid whom, who coordinated what, and when.

I asked for the evidence

On August 11 I wrote to the Nigerian Embassy in Washington for onward transmission to Nigeria’s Minister of Foreign Affairs. I did not ask Nigeria to agree with my argument. I asked whether Fani-Kayode was alleging that I funded, directed or coordinated unrest in South Africa, or acted for Israel or another government. If so, I asked for the evidence; if not, I asked for correction.

There was no substantive response. On August 23, after establishing how widely the passage had been republished, I sent a second formal demand for retraction, apology and correction. I gave seven days’ notice. By publication, that notice period had expired. I had received neither evidence nor correction from Fani-Kayode, the Nigerian Embassy in Washington or Nigeria’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

On August 30, while that period was expiring, Nigeria took the South African crisis to the African Union. President Bola Tinubu, speaking through Vice President Kashim Shettima at the 21st Extraordinary Session of the AU Assembly in Luanda, described the problem as recurring xenophobic and Afrophobic attacks against Africans and other nationals in South Africa, said such attacks undermine African solidarity, and asked that the matter be placed on the agenda of the AU Assembly in January 2027. He also acknowledged South Africa’s sovereign right to enforce its immigration laws.

What Nigeria did not say is the point. Presenting its case to Africa’s heads of state, Nigeria attributed the attacks to no foreign hand. Not Israel, not Jews, not Zionists, not The Times of Israel, not me. It identified the attacks themselves as the problem requiring continental action. In the same speech, Nigeria expressly identified external interference in another context — foreign military forces, mercenaries and private military contractors — but did not connect that warning to South African xenophobia.

That is not proof that no foreign influence could ever exist, and the African Union has made no finding. It does show how far Fani-Kayode’s insinuation had traveled beyond what his own government was prepared to put before African heads of state.

That silence does not make Fani-Kayode’s essay Nigerian government policy, and I do not claim that it does. It does, however, leave the underlying factual question unanswered after formal notice. Nigeria was prepared to ask the African Union to act on South African xenophobia and Afrophobia. It has still produced no evidence that my opinion article, Israel, or any hidden foreign network caused that violence. The request remains simple: if there is evidence of financing, instruction, coordination or agency, produce it. If there is none, retract the allegation and correct the record.

My January article is public and my name is on it. Anyone can read it, call it foolish or offensive, and demolish the argument. None of that requires a conspiracy theory. The accusation built around it is different. The financiers, foreign actors, instructions, network and evidence are all hidden. The one visible thing is the person attached to Israel.

Fani-Kayode argues that Nigerians should not be held collectively responsible for individual Nigerians. I agree. I am asking for the same rule. The Times of Israel gave me a blog. I wrote an article. That is the proven connection. Everything else — Israel, Mossad, hidden financiers and foreign instructions — was added later, without proof.

Antisemitism does not require somebody finally to say “the Jews.” Much of the work can be done earlier, when a person is collapsed into a group, a masthead into a government, an opinion into an operation and identity into evidence.

Identity is not evidence.