The Antisemitic Gospel According to Redi Tlhabi
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 the USA have endorsed it. The definition carries its own brake, written into its text: criticism of Israel similar to that leveled against any other country cannot be regarded as antisemitic. (My emphasis)
The IHRA definition offers, as its textbook illustration, the making of “mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective, such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.” That is the classic canard, named by the authors of the definition.
Tlhabi recites it on a loop. On 4 June she reproduced it almost verbatim:
“Control the whole world… I thought this was an antisemitic trope.” She clearly identifies with this hoary old lie.
On 11 May 2026 she asked her followers whether it is an “antisemitic trope still” to say Israel “wants to control social media.”
On 21 March 2026 she dropped any vestige of a bland facade:
On 5 June 2026 she instructed her audience to stop caring what they are called, because words like ‘control, influence, money’ simply describe the truth. This is the defining moment and the turning point when the certainty of prejudice allows no questioning or doubt. We have seen it before and we thought it was dead and buried after the Nazi era: Sheer and unadulterated anti-Jewish hatred and vilification.
Natan Sharansky’s older 3D test draws the same line and names the three markers of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel animus: demonization, double standards, and delegitimization. A writer may despise the Israeli government, reject Zionism as a politics, and call the conduct of the war in Gaza criminal, and still sit on the safe side of every line. The bar is set high by design. Criticism is not silenced. Obsessive discrimination is not lightly inferred. Tlhabi comfortably clears these hurdles and effortlessly enters the terrain of vicious hate filled antisemitism.
The machinery does not vary. She recites the conspiracy theory, names it as a conspiracy theory so that nobody can accuse her of ignorance and then asserts that it is accurate. Tlhabi has done it across dozens of posts, in the open, repeatedly and with determination from a desk in Washington, with the authority of a state broadcaster that reaches a third of a billion people. All the while casting herself as the composed party being gas lit by Zionists.
On 13 March she ran the charge as sarcasm, reciting “it is antisemitic to say Israel controls US politicians” in the voice of someone tired of pretending it is false. The conduct matches the IHRA definition’s own example of the world-conspiracy myth, and it matches Sharansky’s demonization criterion. Absurd too and equally insulting of the sovereignty and power of the USA to suggest that its politicians are unduly influenced by a foreign government or individuals.
Tlhabi’s response to a blog in the Times of Israel (TOI) by a private identified contributor is illustrative of her conspiracy theorizing. The article titled “Africa Must Fragment, South Africa First” argued that South Africa should be broken into ethnic successor states. A Tlhabi social media user posted this blog on Tlhabi’s comment section adding that (undefined) “they”, were “behind this nyaka nyaka (a colloquial African term for chaos) and “will stop at NOTHING.” Tlhabi quote-tweeted that post with a resounding affirmation:
“Nnete,” she wrote in Sesotho, her mother tongue and: “Mossad is GOOD. I hope our investigative journalists are working. I’m happy to give them leads.”
A Tlhabi social media user’s comment had become, in Tlhabi’s hands, proof of an Israeli intelligence operation to fragment a continent, and she was volunteering her services to help reporters investigate and expose this evil plan. The IHRA definition speaks of the myth of a world Jewish conspiracy. Here is that myth, transposed to Africa, credited to the Mossad by name, and offered to journalists as a tip.
Tlhabi’s second category of demonization shifts from the Jewish State, Israel to individual Jews in South Africa. Her most sustained personal campaign of the year is against a rabbi. She has called South Africa’s Chief Rabbi, Warren Goldstein, “a divisive, hateful man”. She has charged that he “whips up fear and uses hyperbole to create the impression that Jews are in danger, from the rest of us.” She fails to acknowledge the real and existential dangers Jewish communities have faced worldwide since the 7 October 2023 atrocities and the incitement and actual physical attacks on Jewish civilians in Western cities. Instead, she attributes a respected national religious leader’s concern for his congregation as paranoia and a fraudulent accusation against ordinary society.
This malicious instinct extends to private Jewish South African citizens. Mark Saltzman, a member of the prominent family behind the South African pharmacy chain Dis-Chem criticized her over Israel. She recast his family’s philanthropy as proof of a hidden design, writing that he “inadvertently confirms that money is donated as a [form] of control.” The old trope about Jewish money, applied this time to a Jewish businessman rather than to a lobby in the abstract, surfaced the moment the quarrel spotlighted her personal animus against Israel.
In the USA, when a New York primary produced a result some Jewish New Yorkers found frightening, she reposted a message that mocked the fear: “Praying for your safety tonight, after one Jewish man was defeated by another Jewish man.”
She reposted an item declaring that “Jews are many things, but stupid is not one of them.” She is perfectly right that Jews indeed have excelled inter alia in academic, scientific and economic spheres, but her framing of their undoubted accomplishments is meant in a disparaging and dehumanizing sense by referring to cryptic and unnamed “many things” that Jews are good at. Were any other religious, ethnic or national group to be described in this manner, it would rightly be regarded as racist.
In her coverage of a shooting at an Islamic centre and the complaint that “‘Jewish institutions’ need the attention. And protection…”, she suggested that Jewish fear of violence is a pose. In her view, the World Jewish Congress recasts Jewish anxiety about antisemitism as a cynical tactic “at best conspiratorial.” In her timeline it runs as a recurring theme.
The third category of her antisemitism is the easiest to evidence and the least contested. Sharansky’s demonization and delegitimation test is fulfilled. Tlhabi has posted the bare utterance “Israel is a terrorist state” on at least seven separate occasions in four months, the way a congregation recites a creed. She has luridly described Israeli soldiers as “savages”, as “murderers” in “the grip of some psychosis”, as a “genocidal state led by psychopaths”, and as “filth”. Such is the gospel of Tlhabi. A reader may believe that the Israeli military has committed grave crimes in Gaza and still recognize that “savages,” “psychopaths” and “filth” is the vocabulary of degradation and dehumanization – the precise things the antisemitism definitions exist to flag.
Her reply is on the record, and it deserves to be put plainly. She holds that opposition to Zionism concerns a political ideology and a state, with no bearing on Jews as a people, and that the charge of antisemitism is a cudgel used to silence her. Writing in News24, she observed that when she criticizes Israel, she is called an antisemite and added that she can “live with this title.” The frameworks marshaled against her are, moreover, contested. The American Civil Liberties Union and others have warned that the IHRA examples can be stretched to chill legitimate speech, and many reasonable people read the Israel-related clauses in good faith and reject them. This tired response overlooks the crucial delineation between criticism and defamation. Between informed comment and character assassination: Between established facts and baseless dogmatic accusations. Anyone who resists rational and factual challenge is not part of the enterprise called civilizational enquiry and debate.
The safe harbor she relies on to protect criticism of Israel is “similar to that leveled against any other country.” No – it is completely different: A double standard and hypocrisy as wide as the Grand Canyon. At present there is a genocide case against Myanmar pending in the ICJ. One does not see the leaders and supporters of Myanmar being described by Tlhabi or the media as psychopaths or the like. Similarly, those responsible for the huge human suffering, sexual abuse, starvation and death in Sudan are not singled out for dehumanization or demonization. The deposed President of Syria, responsible for suffering and displacement of millions of Syrians also has not been subjected to close scrutiny or denunciation by Tlhabi – certainly not with such extreme language.
Measured against the definition the United States government itself applies and against the test a former Soviet prisoner devised to separate criticism from hatred, an identifiable body of what Redi Tlhabi broadcasts meets the egregious markers of antisemitism: world conspiracy theories, demonization delegitimation and double standards.
Tlhabi enjoys the freedoms in the USA including freedom of speech which she does not accord others who challenges her views. She benefits from a platform which is a Qatari state backed broadcaster with a reach of more than 430 million people and a personal following of three quarters of a million. She is a foreign national in Washington DC who has satisfied herself that the world conspiracy is real and that her task is to help the rest of us see it. She noticed the trope. She named it. Then she told a third of a billion people that it was true. She is unwilling to allow her bigoted views to stand scrutiny. She must be held accountable for the incitement and violence which has manifested in the US and major Western countries against individuals, although unfortunately she is not alone. She is abusing her freedoms to deprive Jews of their right to safety and dignity.
