The Paris Olympics’ ghastly Opening Ceremony had scarcely concluded on Friday than the claim began to circulate that the world’s all-purpose bogeyman was behind it: the Jews. This was to be expected in light of the fact that the world has seen a shocking explosion of antisemitism since the Hamas massacres of Oct. 7, 2023, with the reappearance and wide circulation on some social media accounts of anti-Jewish conspiracy theories that haven’t been taken seriously on this wide a scale since the halcyon days of the Third Reich.
The claim that the Olympics’ anti-Christian display (which was indeed an anti-Christian display even if it depicted, as many have claimed, the Greek god Dionysios and not the Last Supper) was a Jewish mockery of Christianity was just the latest in this unpleasant new social media trend. Those who insisted on this, however, were sawing off the limb upon which they were perched.
The central claim is that Thomas Jolly, artistic director of the ceremonies for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games, is Jewish and designed the Opening Ceremony out of hatred of Christianity. An X user who has over 92,000 followers and calls himself “Orthodox Canonist” claimed Friday: “The organizer of the 2024 Paris Olympics with all of it’s [sic] satanic, masonic & LGBTQ imagery is…. Jewish.” Echoing this claim a few hours later was “Klaus Arminius,” who is apparently another Orthodox Christian, and has 88,000 X followers: “Meet Thomas Jolly, the ‘artist’ behind the satanic and anti-Christian Paris Olympics’ ceremony. Thomas is a 42 year old jewish [sic] and gay man.”
Neither “Orthodox Canonist” nor “Klaus Arminius,” however, offered any evidence for their claim; nor, as far as I could discover, did anyone else who made it. There was good reason for this: there wasn’t any. Wikipedia quickly became the site of a furious battle, with Jolly’s bio being edited to say he was Jewish and the claim removed for lack of evidence multiple times. Going back to the beginning, Jolly’s Wikipedia page was first published on May 31, 2024. All it said at that time about his background was that he was a “French actor and theater and opera director.”
No claim that Jolly was Jewish appeared in the bio until after the Olympic Opening Ceremony, and repeated Internet searches with various relevant keywords turned up nothing: neither Jolly nor anyone else seemed to have identified him as Jewish either by ancestry or upbringing or religious conviction. So why were “Orthodox Canonist,” “Klaus Arminius” and the rest so avid to identify Jolly as Jewish? Because they hold to the idea, which has been held by some Christians from the very beginning of Christianity, that in rejecting Christ, Jews in the aggregate became enemies of both God and mankind. If the Olympics or anything else featured an anti-Christian display, Jews must be behind it. Jesus himself said, “Salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22), but that is not a New Testament passage you will often hear the new Christian antisemites quoting.
The Christians who were avid to scapegoat “the Jews” and Judaism as behind the Olympic mockery haven’t thought this through in other ways as well. As Rabbi Michael Barclay noted here at PJ Media, in its gleefully mockery of the sacred, the Olympics ceremony was as offensive to Jews as to Christians. The ceremony celebrated trans madness and the LGBTQ agenda, which are just as abhorrent to traditional Judaism as they are to traditional Christianity. (Yes, there are leftist professing believers in both traditions who celebrate everything that is deviant and perverse, but that doesn’t change the moral teachings of either faith.)
Related: As Islamic Groups Vow Massacres, Paris Olympics Target Christianity
Also, Jolly didn’t build the sets and hire the actors and stage the whole thing himself. Even if he were Jewish, which he is not, he had plenty of help from people of Christian backgrounds. Is that an indictment of Christianity? Not to the new social media antisemites. They would likely claim that the crafty Jews deceived the poor Christians.
In this, however, they just dig the hole deeper for themselves. Judaism and Christianity share scriptures and a great many teachings. If Judaism is a false religion that gives rise to evil people who wish to mock and destroy Christianity, then Christianity is likewise false, as it is based on the same Hebrew scriptures. The new Christian antisemites try to evade this conclusion by claiming that modern Judaism is based on that Talmud, a book they falsely claim contains all manner of evil teachings, and not on the Hebrew Bible at all. Yet this is sheer fantasy, and demonstrates a complete lack of awareness and understanding regarding Jewish religious practice.
Thus the Christian antisemites, as they grow more assertive and open in this latest and most disquieting social contagion, actually undermine the Christian faith they profess to love as they attack Jews and Judaism. The Olympic Opening Ceremony wasn’t the first manifestation of this fashionable new Jew-hatred, and it won’t be the last. In its utterly unsupported, fact-free, and ill-thought-out claims, however, it demonstrates the ugly irrationality of these claims. In light of the last hundred years of Jewish history (and much more before that), Christians and all people of good will should reject this hatred and scapegoating before it once again works itself out to a horrifically bloody conclusion.
