Campaign Against Antisemitism’s analysis is that Mr Amesbury’s actions amount to breaches of the International Definition of Antisemitism and qualify as antisemitic discourse according to our methodology.
Whilst the term “Illuminati” originally referred to a short-lived Enlightenment-era fraternal organisation, it has come to be associated with a variety of conspiracy theories, all of which allege that the “Illuminati” infiltrated the ranks of European Jewish bankers in the nineteenth century. These theories variously assert that the bankers, Jews and Illuminati were behind the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of the Federal Reserve system in the United States, later forming the influential American think tank Council on Foreign Relations and subsequently what the far-right refers to as the New World Order, under whose control institutions such as the United Nations and the European Union are imagined to be. By sharing an image which suggested that global banks and corporations were involved in “efforts to enslave mankind”, linked to the so-called “Illuminati”, and which additionally displayed a stereoypically antisemitic caricature, in which Jews are depicted as quasi-demonic, with long, hooked noses [1]; and by retweeting the suggestion that a Jewish businessman was the “puppet-master” of the Conservative cabinet, thereby employing an antisemitic trope with a long history, having been, for example, deployed during the Nazi era and more recently being frequently evoked to demonise Jewish financiers [2], he was disseminating material which was “making mendacious, dehumanising, demonising, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.”
