"A world in which the Jews once again would become the scape goats for all people’s fears and frustrations would be a world in which free people could not breathe easy and the enslaved would be even more enslaved." - Bernard-Henri Lévy, January 22, 2015

Bernard-Henri Lévy went on to explain to the United Nations General Assembly just how such a world would be created. To achieve that antisemites need to normalise just three narratives:

1. The narrative that Jews are "detestable because they are supposed to support an evil, illegitimate, murderous state" must gain traction.

He calls this the "anti-Zionist delirium of the merciless adversaries of the re-establishment of the Jews in their historical fatherland." We have heard such views promoted loudly at Australia's Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion. Far too many in Australia have fallen into this delusion.

2. The narrative that denies and negate the Holocaust. He says this argument would say, "The Jews are all the more detestable because they are supposed to base their beloved Israel on imaginary suffering, or suffering that at the very least has been outrageously exaggerated." He calls this "the shabby and infamous denial of the Holocaust."

Through a combination of Holocaust Inversion, which falsely claims the situation in Gaza is worse than the Holocaust, and wrong compares Israel to the Nazis, this need to negate the Holocaust has been surpassed. It no longer needs to be denied if you can convince people that, yes it was bad, but the Israelis are worse as are the Jews who oppose annihilating Israel "in response". This has been pushed through the genocide libel and many smaller libels.

3. The final narrative is based on the idea of "competitive victimhood" which Bernard-Henri Lévy calls a "modern-day scourge" and "stupidity". Under this narrative addressing Jewish suffering, and particularly the memory of the Holocaust, is a Jewish crime. It is seen as an effort to confuse people, and to "stifle" and "overshadow" the suffering of others, particularly the Palestinians.

The final narrative allows antisemitism to spread by dismissing claims of antisemitism, dismissing attacks on Jews like October 7 (hence the efforts to pull down hostage posters), and labelling efforts to address antisemitism as themselves an evil manipulation.

The full speech is in the comments. It is old, but interesting to re-read in the current times. Bernard-Henri Lévy’s 2015 statement argues that the return of antisemitism and Jewish scapegoating acts as a primary warning sign for the collapse of universal human freedom and global democracy.

Lévy suggests that when a society allows antisemitism to rise, it signals a deeper moral decay that ultimately harms all oppressed people. A critical analysis of his three core narratives reveals how modern prejudice evolves, adapts, and spreads through public discourse.

1. The Demonization of Israel

The Argument: Lévy states that portraying Israel as an uniquely evil or illegitimate state serves as a modern vehicle for collective hatred against Jewish people everywhere.
The Critical View: Supporters of this view note that holding a Jewish state to an unfair or obsessive standard—while ignoring worse abuses elsewhere—crosses the line from political critique into ethnic hostility. Critics of this view argue that distinguishing between legitimate political opposition to Israeli government policies and the hatred of Jewish people as a group remains a complex and heavily contested boundary in global politics.

2. Holocaust Denial, Distortion, and Inversion

The Argument: This narrative either claims the Holocaust was a lie or uses "Holocaust inversion," which compares Israeli actions directly to Nazi Germany to reverse the roles of victim and perpetrator.
The Critical View: Analysts point out that minimizing or inverting the Holocaust serves a double purpose. It relieves historical guilt for European antisemitism and simultaneously paints Jews as active abusers rather than historic victims. This shifts public empathy away from Jewish suffering and legitimizes hostility against them.

3. Competitive Victimhood

The Argument: Lévy identifies "competitive victimhood" as a modern tactic where acknowledging Jewish pain or the Holocaust is viewed as an aggressive attempt to silence or erase the suffering of other groups, such as Palestinians.
The Critical View: This dynamic creates a zero-sum game of human suffering. When empathy becomes a competition, acknowledging one group's trauma is falsely framed as an attack on another. This framework dismisses contemporary attacks on Jewish communities—such as the October 7 attacks—as fake or deserved, which allows new waves of antisemitism to gain social acceptance.

Conclusion

Lévy's analysis demonstrates that modern antisemitism relies less on traditional racial theories and more on political and moral inversion. By tying the safety of Jews to the safety of all free people, he warns that accepting these three narratives erodes truth, justice, and human rights on a global scale.