THE ANTI-SEMITIC CLASSIC: TURNING THE VICTIMS OF A PLANNED GENOCIDE INTO THE PERPETRATORS

"Well by quoting something called The Book of Esther which is in the Christian Old Testament, a controversial book for a long time, Martin Luther thought it shouldn't been there but it is there. And it's the story, among other things if a genocide of Persians. Oh yeah, 75,000 Persians." (Tucker Carlson)

It seems things have gotten easier to explain for almost everything wrong in this world. It is the Jews, Israel, the Zionists, Mossad. The justification can be traced down to one of two writings - The Book of Esther and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was only a matter of time that outspoken Israel critic Tucker Carlson aka Tucker Qatarson, will refer to one of these. He didn't disappoint, A short while back, he quoted The Book of Esther. Proof that the Jews are genocidal.

The Book of Esther is a story of how Haman, the chief minister in ancient Persia, plotted against Mordecai, a prominent Jew, by tricking the King to annihilate all the Jews living in the land. The King issued a decree that it be done.

Esther 3-13 : "And the letters were sent by posts into all the king's provinces, to destroy, to kill, and to cause to perish, all Jews, both young and old, little children and women, in one day, even upon the thirteenth day of the twelfth month, which is the month Adar, and to take the spoil of them for a prey." 

Queen Esther, who was a Jew, revealed Haman's plot to the King and petitioned for her people's lives. The King realised he had been tricked by Haman. As the King had already sent out the decree to exterminate the Jews, he could not withdraw that order. So he decreed the Jews could arm and protect themselves. 

Esther 9-16: "But the other Jews that were in the king's provinces gathered themselves together, and stood for their lives, and had rest from their enemies, and slew of their foes seventy and five thousand, but they laid not their hands on the prey,"

On the D-day that Haman had plotted for Persians to attack the Jews, the aggressors were slaughtered - 75,000 (attackers - not women and children).  The word “prey” (or “plunder,” “spoil,” or “booty” in other translations) refers to the property, goods, and valuables of those they defeated. 9-10 and 9-15 repeat the fact the Jews did not plunder nor take the spoils of the attackers, even though the King's decree allow them. This shows the Jews were merely defending themselves..  

"Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter."  Isaiah 5-20

The Hebrew "Satan" means adversary or accuser. The Septuagint translates it to Greek "diabolos" which means "slanderer," "defamer," or "accuser". This evolves into the English "Devil". Folks like Tucker Carlson and Candice Owens have flipped from staunch conservatives to outright antagonism of the right. Both are neither stupid or mis-informed. They know exactly what they are doing when they invoke Esther. They simply taped into an antisemitic classic that have been utilised for centuries past -- the anti-semite trope of inverting the story of Esther to depict the Jews as a blood-thirsty people. Some see a spiritual backdrop of a diabolical principal acting through Tucker, others see Qatari $ flowing into some accounts.

In the early days of Christianity, and the medieval ages, Christian interpreters dealt with difficult or violent parts of the Old Testament, including the killings in Esther 9,  mainly by typology and allegory. This avoided confronting the text as a story of real people killing real people. They rewrote it in their minds as a coded message about Christian spiritual truths, so the bloodshed no longer felt problematic.

Rabanus Maurus (c. 780–856), the Carolingian scholar and Archbishop of Mainz, was one of the first major Christian commentators to address the violent ending of Esther at length. In his Expositio in Librum Esther, he sometimes reversed roles typologically: Haman could prefigure the “bloody people of the Jews” who killed the prophets and Christ, while the Jewish victory was spiritualized as the Church’s warfare against its enemies. This allowed him to acknowledge the slaughter while turning its meaning against the Jews.

Other medieval Christian writers frequently ignored the book, downplayed its canonicity, or expressed discomfort with its “revengeful spirit,” laying groundwork for later outright hostility.

Medieval and early modern Christian commentaries and polemics repeatedly highlighted the 75,000 killed as proof of Jewish character. Most prominent was Martin Luther (1483–1546) who wrote that the Jews “love the book of Esther, which so well fits their bloodthirsty, vengeful, murderous lust and hope.”  This became a foundational text for later Christian antisemitic readings of Esther. 

In more modern times, Esther has been a recurring text in antisemitic rhetoric precisely because its narrative of Jewish survival and self-defense against annihilation can be (has been, and still is by enemies of Israel) flipped to accuse Jews of the very thing Haman planned. Scholarly treatments of the book’s reception, history and antisemitic propaganda confirm this pattern across Christian, Russian, Nazi, and other contexts.

Russian antisemitism has a long history (pogroms, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery from the Tsarist era, Stalin-era campaigns, etc.), but direct, high-profile use of Esther/Purim as a “Jewish genocide” charge appears less dominant than blood libels, economic tropes, or later Soviet anti-Zionism. Broader Christian and nationalist commentaries in the Russian sphere participated in the wider European pattern of viewing the book’s ending as evidence of Jewish vengefulness, though specific mass-propaganda posters or state campaigns centered on Esther are better documented in Nazi Germany and Iran than in Russia.

Nazi propaganda systematically inverted the Book of Esther, treating the Jews’ defensive response as proof of inherent Jewish bloodthirstiness and a template for alleged plans to massacre non-Jews (especially Germans). It ignored or minimized Haman’s genocidal decree against the Jews and reframed Purim as a “murder festival.”  Propagandists focused almost exclusively on Esther 9: the Jews kill roughly 75,000 of their attackers (plus Haman’s ten sons) after receiving royal permission to defend themselves. They presented this as an unprovoked or ritualistic slaughter of innocent Persians, evidence that Jews celebrate mass murder of Gentiles and would do the same to Germans if given the chance. The preceding plot -- Haman’s decree “to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate all Jews, young and old, women and children” -- was erased or treated as secondary.: Antisemitic poster explicitly urged: “Read the Book of Esther and you will know what the Jews want to do to you.”

In short, Nazi use of Esther followed a consistent pattern: strip away the context of self-defense against annihilation, amplify the body count as evidence of Jewish character, and project that alleged character onto contemporary Germans as an existential threat requiring preemptive action. This was one strand of a much larger antisemitic propaganda apparatus, but it was deliberate, repeated, and tied directly to the biblical text and the holiday.

In Iran (modern and earlier 20th-century), official and semi-official propaganda has inverted the story into an “Iranian Holocaust,” claiming Esther and Mordecai orchestrated a massacre of tens or hundreds of thousands of Persians/Iranians, with Purim as a celebration of it. This appears in state-linked media and political statements.

Sources include IRGC-linked outlets, the Mo’oud Center, Fars News, political figures (e.g., Majlis members), and social media. The narrative draws on the biblical text while invoking Quranic verses portraying Jews as fabricators of history.

The tomb of Esther and Mordecai in Hamadan has been vandalized or used as a protest site, with banners about the “Holocaust of 77,000 Iranians.” This intensified under the Islamic Republic and echoes earlier 20th-century Iranian antisemitic publications that borrowed from European (including Nazi-influenced) motifs.

Traversing the centuries, from Haman to Hamas, the moral inversion of Esther remains the same anti-semitic playbook. 

The true damage of this inversion of truth is not to the ancient text, but to the living people against whom it was aimed -- you and I, innocent Islamic school kids, mindless social media consumers, the wokes and those on the Left, like Tucker and Candice Owens -- those taught to see their neighbors as eternal murderers, and thereby prepared to become murderers themselves.

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