When will we stop falling for fabricated antisemitism scandals?

It began as do all the best broiguses: with a one-star review in the Telegraph. “This was the ugliest Edinburgh Fringe Festival moment I've ever witnessed,” lamented Dominic Cavendish.

According to the paper’s theatre critic, two Israeli theatre-goers were bullied out of Reginald D Hunter’s show by an audience in the grip of a “mob mentality” after objecting to a joke comparing Israel to an abusive partner.

After the couple left, Hunter made another joke with the punchline “f**king Jews”. From there, things followed a formula.

Board of Deputies issues apoplectic statement. Wrongdoer apologises but is cancelled anyway. Unsatisfied with this punishment, the Daily Mail brings up the rear with an “exclusive interview” with the victims.

Witnesses – including national broadcasters – come out of the woodwork, saying the incident has been substantially misrepresented. They have photos and videos to prove it. By this point it’s too late – the damage is done. And that, my friends, is how you create an antisemitism scandal.

“Shimon” and “Talia” are not an Israeli couple visiting Britain for a “romantic holiday”, as the Mail had claimed. Nor had they "objected – politely – to a rather lame joke at Israel’s expense”.

They are Mark Lewis and Mandy Blumenthal, two of Britain’s most notorious pro-Israel activists, and they seemed dead set on making the biggest scene possible.

I have spoken to several people who attended Hunter’s gig. All say that Blumenthal leapt to her feet as soon as the joke left Hunter’s mouth; screamed “shame!” and “antisemite!” at the top of her lungs, scarcely pausing for breath; accused the room of being full of Hamas apologists; and allegedly said their women and children would be raped and murdered by terrorists (“That’s rich coming from an Israeli, given that this is happening to Palestinian prisoners,” one audience member retorted).

They say that Hunter begged the couple to leave with refunds but they refused. At this point, some in the audience began – understandably – to lose patience. A few asked the couple to leave or pipe down; two young men shouted “Free Palestine”.

In a video posted to social media, Hunter can be heard settling the crowd: “Don’t say nothing to ‘em,” he says, “let’s end this peacefully”. Strangely, none of the outlets that initially reported the incident have corrected the record. Thank God Mark Twain, who famously said truth travels slower than lies, never lived to see Twitter.

Reginald D Hunter and the 'mysterious peoples'

In the end, it was left to Hunter to do the fact-checking professional journalists hadn’t. This was not, it transpired, Lewis and Blumenthal’s first rodeo. Though apparently too scared to show their faces to the media, the couple are no strangers to press attention.

They have a history of courting it, using their emigration to Israel in 2018 – making use of Israel’s first law, the Jewish right of return, and making them about as Israeli as a British expat to Marbella is “Spanish” – as an opportunity to tell the BBC Jews would be unsafe in Jeremy Corbyn’s Britain. Nor are they the “charming and friendly” pair made out in the Mail.

In 2017, Blumenthal and her brother Alan, then an MP candidate for UKIP, allegedly “barracked” Haneen Zoabi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, calling her a terrorist sympathiser and, per one account, a “racist b*tch”. 

Lewis is something of a professional bully: in 2018, the body that regulates solicitors fined him £2,500 and ordered him to pay £10,000 in costs after he called an 18-year-old social media user a "stupid c**t" and said he hoped his father "would sit shiva [the seven-day Jewish mourning period] for you soon".

Both Blumenthal and Lewis spearheaded the 2018 relaunch of Herut UK, a hard-right Zionist party whose Israeli analogue merged with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud in 1988.

Lewis is a former director of UK Lawyers for Israel, the group that had Palestinian children’s artwork removed from a London hospital.

The pair are also closely associated with the far-right: Lewis recently represented “Nazi-curious” Nina Power, while Blumenthal has been pictured with Ambrosine Shitrit, a mate of Tommy Robinson.

How two of the most hardened and best-informed Israel advocates in the country ended up on a “romantic holiday” at the gig of a comedian who has expressed support for the Palestinian cause is a mystery I’m sure will forever remain unsolved.

In the joke that offended Lewis and Blumenthal, Hunter describes a woman who claims to be the victim of domestic abuse when in fact she is the abuser. “It’s like being married to Israel,” Hunter quipped. This joke doesn’t just have a nub of truth – it is true.

Despite enjoying the backing of a global superpower, a century-long chokehold on Palestinian life and now, a bountiful 40,000 dead Gazans (far fewer than its ministers would like), Israel insists it is David fighting Goliath.

This crazy-making inversion of reality requires conjuring imaginary threats. In Gaza, the Israeli army insists Hamas operatives lurk under practically every school, UN building and hospital in the strip, supplying selective evidence for its claims. Outside of Israel, its supporters see such menacing mirages everywhere – or at least, they pretend to.

In Pennsylvania, a man aggressing a group of Palestine protesters hit himself in the face before claiming he was hit by one of their flags.

In Chicago, a woman called the police on the DePaul University Palestine encampment, claiming she’d been surrounded by activists who can be heard in the background saying she is free to leave. “The looks on people’s faces in the audience,” Blumenthal told the Mail in her tell-all interview, “it was like they wanted to attack and beat us.”

Lewis and Blumenthal are the abusers of Hunter’s joke, two bullies who insist that they were bullied.

The pair embody an Israel-pilled imaginary that intersects two contiguous phenomena: the cognitive dissonance that comes from being descended from victims of one genocide while endorsing another; and a liberal mode of identity formation in which – as Asad Haider writes, paraphrasing Judith Butler – “we become subjects who participate in politics through our subjection to power”.

This bastardised identity politics paradoxically demands that to have agency we must be victims, confecting others’ harm to distract from or justify their own. “Pair come looking for trouble and find it” would’ve been my headline.

Who does this remind you of? For me, it’s Gideon Falter, the pro-Israel campaigner who in April marched into a London Palestine protest claiming he was taking the long route home from synagogue and just so happened to be accompanied by a full security detail and a Shabbat-breaking videographer.

Like Lewis and Blumenthal, Falter was caught out in his lie – though unlike them he wasn’t allowed to get away with it. That’s because it is not truth that arbitrates scandal, but media credulity.

Outlets cherry-pick what to believe based on what sells papers and fits a broader narrative they want to advance – just look at the everlasting shelf life of the Corbyn “wreathgate” affair – and a Black comedian chasing two Jews out of a theatre was simply too good a story to pass up.

A similar antisemitism scandal threatened to erupt around Hunter in 2006 but didn’t. At his Edinburgh show that year, Hunter made a joke about Austrians not perceiving the Rwandan genocide as a real genocide like the Holocaust. A writer on Da Ali G Show – one of the most racist and misogynistic things ever to air on primetime TV – complained in the Times, but the story went nowhere.

The reason they got him this time is that to a far greater degree than in 2006, there is an appetite from all corners of the media for stories that expose animosity between Jews and other minorities and that flip the script on Israel and its supporters as genocidaires. Reginald D Hunter’s shtick hasn’t changed – the world has. He was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Rivkah Brown is a commissioning editor and reporter for Novara Media

Follow her on X: @rivkahbrown

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.