“The Zionist entity is burning down the UK to defend the genocide in the Gaza” (Press TV, 2024)

I demonstrate in my book Outcast (Bassi, 2023) how a dominant body of academic left literature on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict pitches Zionism as the globalising crucible and exporter of colonialism, imperialism, social dispossession, injustice, repression, and racism everywhere. Zionism (including all associated Jews who are not adequately repentant) is considered the root evil and harm to humanity. This literature comprehends Zionism as the now-to-future blueprint of ethnic cleansing and genocide worldwide, as the western world is unconsciously being Israelised. Our contemporary era is thus framed as an epic global decolonisation war against Zionism and its collaborators.

In my academic discipline of geography, Najib’s (2025) paper, “The United Kingdom’s first anti-Muslim pogroms in a context of genocidal Islamophobia in Gaza”, is one manifestation of this thesis, which identifies a new genocidal Islamophobia. This post-7/10 genocidal Islamophobia, which succeeds a post-9/11 structural Islamophobia, is deemed to be the most pernicious, the most nefarious, and the most inhumane Islamophobia (see Beydoun, 2024) – mainly funded, produced, disseminated and propagated by pro-Israeli activists (see Bazian, 2024). Following this ideological trajectory, Najib (2025: 3) states that while the primary driver of the far-right riots that proceeded the tragic Southport murders was Islamophobia and racism, more was actually going on: “the far-right rioters […] sympathy for Zionism” was “open and enthusiastic (Press TV, 2024)”, with this sympathy extending to the then UK Prime Minister. In actual fact, she continues, in a “strategic consensus” between fascism and Zionism (Najib, 2025: 3), the riots were not spontaneous but Zionist organised “anti-Muslim pogroms” (Najib, 2025: 1).

Conspiratorial thinking (in contrast to a theory about a conspiracy) sees “certain events or situations” as “secretly manipulated behind the scenes by powerful forces with negative intent” (European Commission, 2026). Conspiratorial antisemitism is the imagination of the ‘hidden’ danger and harm posed by an excessively powerful Jewish collective. Crucially, in conspiratorial thinking – as opposed to critical thinking – there is no new knowledge to build and assemble, just the job of debunking and exposing (see Latour, 2003). Those in academia should be cautious of conspiratorial creep masquerading as critical thought.

Beware the rabbit hole.