Antisemitism Around the World Cup
How a World Cup fixture was weaponized for a wave of Arabic-language antisemitism on Facebook.
A football match does not usually produce prayers for the burning of a certain group. In July 2026 one did. A single fixture at the FIFA World Cup between Egypt and Argentina produced a concentrated burst of Arabic-language antisemitic content on Facebook: conspiracy theories, dehumanization, and prayers calling for Jews to be burned and annihilated.
Days before the match, the Egyptian coach's display of a Palestinian flag was celebrated across social media and drew no comparable hostility. When one or two Argentine supporters in the stands held up an Israeli flag during the match, it fueled the reaction further. The wave was building on Egypt's defeat and the disputed refereeing, but the sight of the Israeli flag intensified it and gave the antisemitic framing an added visual pretext.
What TecHRI Observed
Monitoring the response across Arabic-language Facebook, TecHRI’s team identified a recurring pattern that escalated in three registers:
- Conspiracy theory: The claim that Jews control FIFA, the referees, the tournament, and in some posts "the planet."
- Dehumanization: Jews were described as "apes and pigs."
- Supplicatory prayers (du‘a) and direct wishes: Calls for Jews to be burned, destroyed, and annihilated, framed as prayer.
TecHRI gathered a sample of 20 posts representing these findings and escalated them to Facebook. Several posts reached high engagement, with thousands of shares in under 24 hours, and comment threads filled with affirmations of such hatred. Following WJC's escalation, the posts were removed.
Egypt’s defeat and the disputed refereeing were recast as proof of Jewish control over the tournament. In one post, an ordinary photograph of a match official was digitally altered to add a kippah, fabricating a Jewish identity to "prove" the claim.
"The Zionists, sons of filth, control FIFA. How could a team that supports Gaza win, and how could the Zionist Messi lose?"
"Sports have proven that the Jews are the ones who control the planet. The Jews are behind the scenes."
Meta’s Hateful Conduct standard explicitly prohibits claims that Jewish people control financial, political, or media institutions. The assertion that Jews control FIFA, an international governing body, is a textbook instance of this enumerated stereotype, not a matter for case-by-case interpretation.
Dehumanization: "Apes and Pigs"
The classical dehumanizing formula appeared throughout the sample, often paired with calls for a group’s destruction.
"The descendants of monkeys and pigs and their followers among the Zionists... We will never rise up until this usurping entity and whoever supports it vanishes."
One post went further, pairing Egyptian and Palestinian flags with an adapted Nazi Parteiadler, an eagle over a Star of David in place of a swastika, and the caption "Zion Macht Frei," a deliberate inversion of the Auschwitz gate inscription. The text called FIFA a "Masonic" body and Jews "cursed pigs, objects of wrath." The graphic uses the iconography of the regime that murdered six million Jews to cast Jews as the new Nazis.
The Prayers: "May Allah destroy the dwellings of the Jews, and ignite them with fire."
The most severe content in the sample called for the destruction of Jews as a people. A single templated supplication recurred verbatim across at least nine separate accounts (just as a sample):
"May Allah destroy the dwellings of the Jews, and ignite them with fire against them, Amen."
Comment threads beneath these posts are filled with one-word affirmations. "Amen." "Amen, O Lord." Each post became a collective act of endorsement, and the prayer propagated as a shareable devotional formula rather than isolated speech.
Other posts were more elaborate:
"May Allah take revenge on Messi and his likes among the Jews, the monkeys, and the pigs... shake the earth beneath their feet, afflict them with natural disasters and chronic diseases, paralyze their limbs and freeze the blood in their veins... make their days black."
The supplicatory form is not incidental. Framing a call for mass death as prayer launders eliminationist content as pious expression and makes it shareable in mainstream religious registers, where affirmation with "Amen" feels like ordinary devotional participation rather than endorsement of a call to violence. TecHRI has documented this pattern across prior investigations. The sports-trigger wave shows the same technique deployed at speed and scale around a live news moment.
The Bigger Picture
A football match does not cause antisemitism. What it does is give it an occasion. The mere visibility of an Israeli flag at a sporting event, held by one or two supporters, was enough to detonate calls for the destruction of a people. Jewish and Israeli identity, wherever it appears in public, is treated by parts of this discourse as an intolerable provocation deserving an eliminationist response.
The content documented here is not borderline. It contains enumerated harmful stereotypes, textbook dehumanization, Nazi imagery, and repeated calls for the annihilation of Jews as a group. Much of it reached the audience it did before any of it was actioned. This is the same enforcement gap TecHRI has documented across languages and platforms: high-reach, plainly violating Arabic-language content persists on the platform, and the most violent expressions are the ones cloaked in the language of prayer.