As riots swept across France over the weekend, a coordinated wave of antisemitic conspiracy theories spread across X blaming the unrest on Jews and Israel, according to a new report from the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM). The most-viewed post, published October 17 by a verified account called @A13Beast, claimed that “the Civil War sought by the jewish elite has finally begun in France” and drew 88,637 views and 5,500 likes.
A new report from CAM’s Antisemitism Research Center (ARC), titled “The Jews Did This to France: Antisemitic Blame Narratives on X During the French Unrest,” identified 1,384 posts from 816 unique accounts between October 16 and 18 that blamed the riots on Jews, “Zionists,” Israel or the Mossad. Seven of those posts called for violence against Jews, their expulsion, or their extermination.
The riots brought hundreds of thousands of anti-government protesters into the streets across France. Rioters attacked police stations, set public buildings ablaze and looted shops. On Saturday night, a synagogue in Paris’s 19th arrondissement was ransacked. Video footage showed belongings strewn across the floor and cupboard doors torn off or hanging from a single hinge. The French Jewish news site IsraJ reported that the rabbi’s office was also ransacked.
The motive behind the synagogue break-in remains unclear. One congregant told IsraJ, “It really looks like an attempted robbery. You can see that whoever did this was probably looking for money. The Torah scrolls were untouched; we simply found the contents of the lockers scattered on the floor.” Robert Ejnes, executive director of CRIF, the umbrella organization of French Jewish institutions, told JNS that so far “nothing indicates that this was an antisemitic attack.” He added, “It may have been a robbery. We remain in high alert, working with police and the authorities.” The congregation asked that its name and address be withheld for security reasons.
CAM CEO Sacha Roytman said the attack carried a warning regardless of motive. “When chaos and violence take over the streets, synagogues are the first to suffer,” Roytman said. “The desecration of the synagogue in Paris is a clear warning sign — what begins against Jews never stops there.”
The Narrative Was Ready Before the Riots
The ARC found that the conspiracy theory was in circulation before the protests even began. It started as a small French-language conversation, with 74 posts in the first 24 hours. Once the protests turned violent, English-language accounts took over, and 784 posts followed the next day.
English ultimately dominated the campaign, accounting for 69 percent of the posts and 86 percent of the views. French posts made up 21 percent, Arabic 5 percent, and Spanish 3 percent. Arabic posts had the highest median views per post, boosted by large accounts.
Many of the English-language posts were replies aimed directly at Jewish, pro-Israel and American commentators. “Jews did this to France. Don’t let them do it to America,” wrote @Jvnior, a verified account with 182,000 followers.
Paid accounts carried the bulk of the reach. According to the report, 144 X Premium accounts, the blue-check subscribers whose posts X boosts as part of its ad-revenue sharing program, published 224 posts. Those posts made up only 16 percent of the total but drew 73 percent of all views.
Far Right and Islamists, Same Message
The posts came from opposite ends of the political spectrum and arrived at the same conclusion. Far-right and white-nationalist accounts wrote 21 percent of the posts but drew 34 percent of the views and 42 percent of the likes. Islamist accounts wrote the most posts, 419 in total, or 30 percent of the dataset, drawing 23 percent of views. Conspiracy-theory accounts accounted for 14 percent of posts and far-left accounts 4 percent. Once 20 possible false positives were removed, far-right accounts rose to 53 percent of all views while the Islamist share fell to 12 percent.
The ARC identified seven distinct variations of the narrative. The “Jewish elite orchestration” variant had the highest reach. “Whatever’s happening in France, the root cause is actually Jewish capture of the West,” wrote @LearnToToad, a verified account whose post drew more than 22,000 views.
Claims of Israeli or Mossad orchestration were the most numerous and dominated Islamist, Arabic and Spanish posts. One account posted simply, “Mossad is burning France right now.” A Spanish-language post from @Gloria_Rsq claimed, “For me all this was orchestrated by the United States and Israel. France/Macron were the ones who criticized Trump and the genocide in Gaza; those two are making them pay for it.”
The “Zionist manipulation” variant spread through large English and French accounts. @hayasaka_aryan, an account with 263,000 followers, wrote of “the agent of Zionism leading the brown masses to destroy Paris.” A newer framing claimed pro-Israel accounts were behind the chaos. One account, @MariamOssamaa, posted “Israel is feeding the chaos and punishing Europe” 32 times in roughly two hours.
The “Kalergi Plan” and “Great Replacement” conspiracies, which accuse Jews of deliberately importing immigrants to destroy Europe, were driven largely by a single spam account that posted 107 replies, including the claim that “Jewish NGOs actively imported these people as part of a long planned civil war.” The Great Replacement theory carries particular weight in France, where it was popularized by French writer Renaud Camus in his 2011 book Le Grand Remplacement.
French-language posts leaned heavily on the Rothschild banking family, exploiting President Emmanuel Macron’s past career as an investment banker at Rothschild & Co. “David de Rothschild’s covers, Macron and Brigitte sleep soundly tonight… The underclass serves power with organised looting and destruction,” wrote French account @gabriel_draghi. Another account, @PaxTubeOfficial, posted, “Everyone is getting poorer for ZOG’s benefit,” using the neo-Nazi acronym for “Zionist Occupied Government.”
Some posts invoked Hitler directly. “Listen to Adolf Hitler speak about jewish control of the British Empire, Western ‘Democracies’ & the ‘achievements’ of their Liberal systems,” wrote @iamthecat69. Another account, @Fantastic6133, wrote, “Islam isn’t burning France down. The jews are. They are doing it to all of our countries… Welcome to the jew World Order.”
Images reinforced the text. A post from an account called “Black Panther” (@AhmdAbwzyd9206) declared, “What you are witnessing in France is the end of the global Zionist project — that wretched dream of a world run by unelected planners. It is collapsing all across Europe simultaneously, and America must excise this cancer before it destroys the rest of the body.” The post carried two illustrations. The first showed a grinning IDF soldier vacuuming cash out of a safe stamped “U.S. Taxpayers” under the caption “American taxes, fueling Israel’s war.” The second depicted President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pouring buckets of slop into a trough labeled “Goy Slop” at a “Trump Farm,” where figures in red MAGA hats feed like livestock.
An account styling itself the “Anti-Dehumanization League,” with the handle @TheTrueADL and a watermelon as its avatar, mocked the Anti-Defamation League while blaming Israel for France’s economic collapse. “This all because you terrorists send all the money to israel and your masters in the jeffrey epstein pedo cabal. nothing left for the french people,” the account wrote. “You got too greedy and too evil. israel has destroyed france.”
Arabic-language accounts drew a map of supposed Jewish power. Abdulsatar Bochnak (@malksa481) opened his post with a news headline about protests “against cost of living and deterioration of public services,” then pivoted: “The Jews are concentrated in New York first, then Paris second, London third, Antwerp fourth, and the rest have their center in Herzliya, and they are the ones who run the game of money, media, politics, elections, and rulers without anyone else on the entire planet Earth.” Another Arabic account, khalib Alshebwaniy (@knawlgy), needed only one sentence: “Israel is behind the demonstrations taking place in France.”
The @Jvnior account also pushed a separate claim: “Israeli settlers tried to kill French Mayor Bernard Boudou when he visited the West Bank [sic] Then, France started burning 24 hours later.”
Fourth Time in Three Months
The French riots mark the fourth time in under three months that the ARC has documented the identical pattern on X.
When tens of thousands of migrants crossed into the Spanish enclave of Ceuta on July 30, 2026, posts from 119 influencer accounts recast the border crisis as a Jewish plot, reaching an estimated 103 million people in 72 hours. On the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the ARC tracked a campaign recasting al-Qaeda’s massacre of nearly 3,000 Americans as a “false flag” operation by Jews and Israel. When a violent incident struck the cockpit of Flydubai flight FZ1073 bound for Tel Aviv on September 30, the first post blaming Israel appeared 67 minutes after the distress signal, and antisemitic conspiracy posts about the flight drew 85.9 million views in four days.
“Each time the event changes, but the story is the same,” the report states. “A crisis hits, Jews are blamed, and social media accounts reinforce the lies on a huge scale.”
“Once again, with the unfolding situation in France, we are seeing the rapid and systematic exploitation of a news event by antisemites to spread conspiracy theories against Jews and Israel,” CAM Editor-in-Chief Barney Breen-Portnoy said. “The ARC’s research offers further evidence of a well-worn script used to repackage age-old antisemitic hatred for a vast modern-day digital audience.”
The ARC’s researchers collected 18,381 posts from X using 25 search queries in seven languages. Any post linking the unrest to Jews, Israel, Zionists or the Mossad was counted as antisemitic, because, as the report states, nothing connects the French unrest to Israel. Researchers read all 4,922 candidate text groups by hand and individually reviewed the 100 most-viewed posts. Because keyword searches miss posts that rely entirely on coded language, the ARC stresses that every figure in the report is a minimum.
The riots in France erupted over the cost of living and the decline of public services. Within 24 hours, hundreds of thousands of people on X had been told the Jews were responsible, by neo-Nazis in America, Islamists writing in Arabic, and French conspiracy theorists invoking the Rothschilds. CAM summed up the danger in a post as the riots raged: “They came for the Jews first. Now they’re coming for France.”
Read the full CAM report here.
