Why you can’t argue with antisemitic trolls

I’ve spent most of my life debating ideas.

Not in the sense of being difficult, but in the sense of taking a position, testing it, and defending it to see whether it survives contact with an opposing view.

It’s a skill I learnt early. At school, I was in debating teams, where I learned that it wasn’t enough to feel strongly about something. You had to make a case. You had to listen to the other side. You had to understand the opposing case and recognise when someone has made a point that genuinely lands.

Even today, I still enjoy a serious counterargument. Every now and then, someone challenges a source, questions a statistic or raises something I haven’t properly considered. Not often, obviously (let’s not get carried away) – but when it happens, I value it, because a good counterargument forces you to sharpen your thinking.

That’s how debate is supposed to work. Arguments are met with arguments. Evidence is met with evidence. Claims are tested to see whether they’re true.

But there’s one glaring exception.

Antisemitism.

When the subject is Israel, the Jewish people, Hamas, October 7 or antisemitism itself, the normal rules go out the window.

I can spend hours researching an article on these matters – checking the facts, distinguishing between what’s known, what’s alleged and what’s opinion, and setting out the argument as clearly as I can. Then I publish it.

The overwhelming feedback is always positive and supportive, and most readers engage with what I’ve written in exactly that spirit. But to the extent that I do get pushback, it’s rarely a contest of ideas. The evidence isn’t challenged and the argument isn’t answered. Instead, what comes back is abuse, sneering, slurs, personal attacks, grotesque moral accusations and ugly slogans repeated as though repetition somehow turns them into truth. The facts aren’t rebutted. They’re simply ignored. And that’s what makes this different from ordinary disagreement: the purpose isn’t to test the argument, but to poison the space in which the argument is being made.

People get heated about politics. They become tribal about parties, elections and leaders. I’ve seen plenty of stupidity in those debates and have probably contributed the odd moment myself.

But antisemitism has a particular darkness to it. It doesn’t simply say, “You’re wrong.” It says, “You have no right to even speak” – usually in the most vile language imaginable.

I see this every day on own Facebook page. Like many people who write publicly, I use filters to catch vile comments before they appear. Those filters don’t know politics. They don’t know whether someone agrees with me. They simply catch language that crosses a line.

Yet the overwhelming majority of what they catch appears beneath posts about Israel, Jews or antisemitism.

That matters. If the anti-Israel response were mostly thoughtful, factual or balanced, more of it would appear openly on the page. It wouldn’t be caught by filters designed to identify abuse.

But again and again, the response collapses almost immediately into bile.

And there’s something else. Usually I block these people to ensure no recurrence of their offensive behaviour – and when I do I notice a recurring pattern in who they are and how they present themselves.

They’re overwhelmingly male and generally appear to be somewhere between their mid-twenties and late forties. Most have remarkably few visible Facebook friends (often only ten or fifteen). Their profile pictures are rarely cheerful images with partners, families or friends in fact, quite often, there’s no recognisable face at all. Instead, there are clenched fists, skulls, blood, death, dark figures and symbols that can only be described as satanic or demonic in appearance.

On the few occasions I’ve looked further down their pages, the same atmosphere often continues. There are antisemitic memes, relentless pro-Palestinian material, morbid images and a generalised sense of anger at society.

To be fair, this is all anecdotal. I haven’t catalogued thousands of profiles or subjected the findings to formal analysis. It’s simply a personal observation based on repeatedly dealing with the people who post the most abusive material.

But when the same characteristics appear again and again, the recurring profile they reveal becomes difficult to dismiss as coincidence. People who hate Israel and the Jews without ever having seriously studied them; people who haven’t weighed the evidence and reluctantly reached a conclusion; people who are unhappy, alienated, and just want someone to blame. People who just hate for the sake of hating.

This explains why genuine online debate is so rare. Debate requires discipline. You have to understand the opposing argument, organise your own evidence and accept the possibility that some of your assumptions may be wrong.

Abuse requires none of that. It requires only anger and a target – something that the Jews have understood for centuries – long, long, before this latest generation of trolls were born.

Personal unhappiness, alienation or anger isn’t a licence for antisemitism. Plenty of lonely or disaffected people never become antisemites. But these traits may explain why facts have so little effect. The facts aren’t addressing the true source of the hostility.

Antisemitism doesn’t begin with facts and work towards a conclusion. It begins with a conclusion and attacks anything that gets in the way.

You can point these people to history and they’ll ignore it. You can point them the crimes of Hamas and they’ll change the subject. You can point them Jewish suffering and they’ll minimise it. You can point them antisemitic abuse happening in plain sight and they’ll justify it, excuse it or pretend it isn’t there.

This is nature of this impenetrable wall: it has been built to keep facts out.

Ordinary disagreement can be reasoned with because it’s still operating in the world of argument. Antisemitism often operates in the world of resentment, conspiracy, hatred and moral inversion.

And that’s the real point. These people aren’t engaging with the argument because, in most cases, they appear incapable of doing so. They don’t test evidence, weigh competing claims or offer a coherent alternative. They arrive with the verdict already written and respond to anything that challenges it with rage.

Their antisemitism isn’t the product of thought. It’s the absence of it.

That’s why facts make so little difference. These people aren’t looking to be persuaded; they’re looking for somewhere to direct their hate.

They don’t rebut. They abuse. They don’t reason. They accuse. They don’t answer the argument. They attack the person making it.

That’s the impenetrable wall of antisemitism. It isn’t built from evidence or logic. It’s built to keep both out.

I’ll still debate almost anyone on almost anything. But antisemitic trolls aren’t offering counterarguments. They’re trying to intimidate, contaminate and silence.

Their abuse tells us nothing about Israel or the Jewish people.

Instead, it tells us everything about them…..

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