The Paris Olympics and the rise of Jew-hatred

By Robert Spencer, Frontpage Magazine

Who is responsible for the Paris Olympics’ anti-Christian orgy of wokeness?

The most prosaic and immediately accurate answer is the French government, which has had years to prepare for these Olympics, and surely must have known in advance about all the drag queens, the mockery of the Last Supper, and the rest.

The rot, however, goes much deeper, and the disgraceful display had scarcely ended in Paris when some circles began to point fingers at another culprit: the Jews.

In so doing, they demonstrated yet again how respectable antisemitism has become since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacres, and how divorced from reality this fashionable new hatred really is.

On Friday evening, an X user who has over 92,000 followers and calls himself “Orthodox Canonist” (he is clearly an Orthodox Christian, not an Orthodox Jew) outed the person whom he claimed was the culprit for the mockery of Christianity at the Olympics.

Thomas Jolly is artistic director of the ceremonies for the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris, and so he is very much responsible for what a disgusted world saw on Friday, but “Orthodox Canonist” claimed to know something else about him, something that purportedly explained the entire anti-Christian bent of the Olympic ceremony:

“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.

Having just finished writing a book about antisemitism and its contemporary recrudescence, I was intrigued, and tried to find out whether this was true, and if so, to what extent Jolly’s alleged Jewishness guided his decision-making while planning Friday’s monstrosity.

Repeated Internet searches with various relevant keywords, however, turned up nothing: neither Jolly nor anyone else seemed to have identified him as Jewish either by ancestry or upbringing or religious conviction.

Despite the fact that a generation of schoolchildren take Wikipedia as the infallible source for knowledge about anything and everything, anyone can still edit it, or at least anyone who isn’t known to be a dissident from the left’s agenda.

Since the Olympics Opening Ceremony, Thomas Jolly’s page has been the site of a war between those who claim (again without any supporting evidence) he is Jewish and those who remove the claim for lack of a supporting citation.

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.”

By Friday, after a few minor edits, it still said essentially the same thing: “Thomas Jolly is a French actor and artistic director of La Piccola Familia, a theater company that he founded in Rouen in 2006.”

After the Opening Ceremony, however, the edits started coming in fast: first, “Thomas Jolly is a French f@ggot and artistic director of La Piccola Familia, a theater company that he founded in Rouen in 2006.”

Later: “Thomas Jolly is an artistic director who is notorious for mocking the Catholic faith when he depicted drag queens reenacting the last supper at his artistic display during the opening ceremony of the 2024 summer Olympics. The incident created an outrage among many Christian communities and was seen by many as a deliberate act of hatred for Christianity.”

And finally, what was perhaps inevitable: “Thomas Jolly (born 1 February 1982 in Rouen) from a Jewish [sic] family is a French actor and artistic director of La Piccola Familia…”

This was removed as unsourced, but there followed numerous attempts to insert the claim that Jolly was Jewish into his Wikipedia bio.

None traced the claim to a source that actually said that Jolly was Jewish.

On X, I asked “Orthodox Canonist” and “Klaus Arminius” to provide a source for their claims; neither answered, and “Orthodox Canonist” blocked me.

Now, Thomas Jolly may conceivably really be Jewish, but if so, neither he nor anyone else has spoken about it until now.

What is much more likely, however, is that the claims that are now circulating about his being Jewish are simply manifestations of the new antisemitism.

If something bad happens, “the Jews” must be behind it, and because they supposedly carry out their nefarious plots behind the scenes, no evidence needs to be adduced.

Attacks on Christianity in particular must be the work of Jews; never mind that Macron’s government, like all leftist globalist regimes, hates Christianity for promoting the dignity of the individual, which the collectivists want so desperately to efface.

The Paris Olympics episode, which in reality had no connection to Jews or Judaism, was an illuminating glimpse into how post-Oct. 7 antisemitism works: anything negative is attributed to Jews, and no evidence is offered, or in Jew-hating circles, considered necessary.

They all know, or think they know, the source of all evil in the world.

If you think that this kind of thinking led to pogroms and genocide in the past and could easily do so again in the future, you’re quite right.