Credit: DR

Tânger Correia, head of the list of the third largest Portuguese party in the European elections, today suggested to the Portuguese press that Jewish workers in the Twin Towers were warned about the attacks of September 11, 2001. Correia arrived in Israel as a diplomat a week before the fateful day and said that there was a “rumor” that “there was going to be something big in the USA”, admitting that there may have been a “warning” to the Jewish population to stay away from the Towers. “Whether there was a warning or not, the question remains.”

Jews are seen as plutocrats by the main political circles on the left and right in Portugal. In 2024, left-wing protesters accused Jewish landlords of endangering the right to housing and a political newspaper published their names and those of their companies. No party leader sitting in parliament publicly condemned it. In 2023, the country's largest synagogue was vandalized. In 2022, the socialist government carried out a plan of state and journalistic corruption that aimed to destroy the law of the Sephardim and the strongest Portuguese Jewish community. In 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, an “April captain”, Rodrigo Sousa Castro wrote that “Jews have the vaccines they want” and called it “a kind of historical revenge”. In all of the cases mentioned above, no party leader sitting in parliament expressed public condemnation.

Not all the activists of the Portuguese parties are against the Jews and Israel, quite the opposite, but their leaders in recent years have not been able to hide this. On the left, too involved with the interests of Arab and Muslim countries, there is a constant increase in animosity against Jewish traditionalism and Israelism; on the right, there is an aversion against globalism, multiculturalism and foreigners in general, especially Muslim and gypsy immigrants, as well as Jews, although these are usually "secret targets".

The statements made today by Tânger Correia, from the Chega party, a nationalist party that in Portugal has been defined as “extreme right”, will certainly deserve furious reactions from party leaders of the center and left parties, but not in defense of the Jews or Israel, but rather for mere political convenience. One way or another, the Portuguese political elites are immersed in traditional anti-Judaism, or anti-Jewish success, or anti-Israelism. And all these concepts are present in the comprehensive word anti-Semitism.

Decades of leftist and radical Islamist propaganda campaigns (the “red-green alliance”) culminated in the marginalization of the “cursed race”. Israel is isolated. Anti-Semitism too. “Anti-racists” placed anti-Semitism outside the world of racism. Even the massacres of Jews no longer escape relativization. "Depends on the context". Everything is racism, except anti-Semitism. But worse. Jews are seen as oppressors who, as such, must be fought. The oppressor, in the era of wokism, is condemned, especially if he is Jewish, the white man who is rich at the expense of others. The Jew is the only one who does not count among the minorities to be protected.

There is only one exception. When the Anti-Semitic attacks are carried out by the extreme right (always very poorly defined), the Wokists quickly descend the stairs to assert their moral superiority. This fact allows all states to claim that they fiercely combat anti-Semitism. It is fake.

The Holocaust itself is only invoked to glorify a wide range of supposed victims, with the word Jew sometimes appearing wrapped in them with a great cost. Only victims who are not Jewish are glorified. Even Jewish women no longer escape oblivion, no matter how catastrophic the violence inflicted on them. Anne Frank herself already appears in erotic literature. The traditional Jew must disappear.

In the last decade, nationalist movements have prospered, taking advantage of both times of crisis, economic instability, unemployment and insecurity, and the gag that wokism is imposing on them, with a reduction in freedom of expression due to “political correctness”.
Within these movements are a pro-Israel faction that declares its intention to renounce anti-Semitism, a faction associated with Israel due to the common interest in combating Islamic terrorism, but which simultaneously maintains anti-Semitic positions, and an anti-Israel and anti-Semite faction.

Israel must develop a long-term strategy to confront all these emerging threats, which not only endangers the small state but also undermines the security of Jews and Israelis in Europe and Portugal.