‘Morally required to hate Jews’: Scholar warns European Parliament of a new era of normalized antisemitism

Europe’s universities are becoming “morally required” to hate Jews, warned Dr. Charles Asher Small, Founding Director and President of the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy (ISGAP), in a blistering address to the European Parliament last week.

Speaking at a plenary session organized by the Simon Wiesenthal Center and the Belgian Friends of Israel, and hosted by MEPs Lukas Mandl (EPP, Austria), Moritz Körner (Renew Europe/FDP, Germany) and Hannes Heide (S&D, Austria), Small said antisemitism in Europe had reached a level of social acceptance unseen in generations.

“We are living in a time of normalized Jew-hatred,” he said. “In this society, on this continent, it has become morally required to hate Jews. You want to get a degree at a university, you want to get a good position in a proper media outlet – it’s morally required to demonstrate your hate for the existence of the self-determination of the Jewish people.”

Small, whose institute has spent years tracing foreign ideological and financial influence in Western universities, accused academic and political elites of abandoning liberal democratic values for “the highest bidder.” He cited ISGAP’s Follow the Money research, which has documented more than $100 billion in undisclosed Qatari funding flowing into U.S. academic institutions over the past two decades.

“Qatar is playing with a trillion dollars in assets,” he said.

ISGAP’s reports revealed that Texas A&M University received at least $1.3 billion from Qatari sources, including projects with “dual-use military and nuclear implications.” Two weeks after the release of ISGAP’s second report in early 2024, Texas A&M announced it would close its Qatar campus, citing “strategic and security concerns.”

While ISGAP’s data so far focuses on the United States, Small said similar patterns of influence are beginning to appear in Europe, where Gulf-funded partnerships and research chairs are growing rapidly – often without public transparency.

Europe’s universities 'at a crossroads'

Small’s speech came amid a surge in antisemitic incidents across Europe since the Hamas attacks in Israel on October 7, 2023. According to the EU’s Fundamental Rights Agency, antisemitic hate speech and harassment rose by more than 300 percent across member states in the following year. A 2024 EU survey found that 80 percent of Jewish students had witnessed antisemitic hostility on campus.

Katarina von Schnurbein, the European Commission’s Coordinator on Combating Antisemitism, has warned that universities are becoming “breeding grounds for extremist ideologies and the delegitimization of Jewish identity,” urging governments to adopt stronger funding-disclosure rules.

“In every generation, ladies and gentlemen, we have a choice – a choice to defend liberal democratic principles, the notion that despite any of our differences – our so-called race, ethnicity, religion, or income – that in a democratic society we have the right to be equal under one legal system,” Small said in his address. “This, in my view, is worth struggling for and defending – and perhaps even thinking of expanding it.”

Founded in 2004, ISGAP has become one of the world’s leading research centers on contemporary antisemitism and ideological extremism. Beyond its U.S.-based investigations, the institute now runs several flagship European programs, including the ISGAP-Oxford Summer Institute and the Fellowship Training Programme in Critical Contemporary Antisemitism Studies, Discrimination and Human Rights at the Woolf Institute, University of Cambridge.

Both initiatives convene international scholars, policymakers, and civil-society leaders to develop academic and policy strategies for countering antisemitism and promoting democratic values in education and governance. Through these programs and a growing presence in Brussels, London and Rome, ISGAP has deepened its European partnerships and briefed EU policymakers on issues ranging from campus radicalization to foreign-funding transparency.

As European governments scramble to respond to rising antisemitic threats, from university protests to violent attacks on Jewish sites, Small’s warning at the heart of the EU offered a grim but urgent challenge.

“We’ve sold ourselves,” Small concluded. “We’ve sold ourselves to the highest bidder, no matter what the values they impose upon us. The question is whether Europe still has the courage to defend its own.”

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