A Scottish activist organization has found the perfect way to defend Palestinian rights: post a photo of a Jewish actress with devil horns, then act shocked when police show up asking questions about antisemitism.
The group’s petition to cancel an upcoming theatrical performance hinged on a single, inspired strategy. Take an image. Add horns. Post it online as part of a cancel campaign. What could possibly go wrong?
Police are now investigating whether the post violates hate crime legislation. The activists are reportedly baffled by this development, having apparently believed that combining a cancellation petition with classical antisemitic imagery would somehow skate past legal scrutiny on technical grounds.
Here’s the actual miracle: we live in a world where someone can post medieval demon iconography of a Jewish person and genuinely expect the response to be “well, that’s just robust political discourse.” The mental gymnastics required to believe that this particular tactic—visual dehumanization paired with a call to prevent someone from working—represents legitimate activism is genuinely impressive.
The actress in question is a performer. She has a career. She was scheduled to perform. The group didn’t like this and decided the appropriate response was to visually mark her as inhuman. Then they seemed genuinely confused when law enforcement treated this as potentially criminal rather than as a valid form of protest.
Freedom of expression is real and important. It is also not freedom from consequences, and it definitely does not include the right to post dehumanizing imagery of people based on their religion while simultaneously demanding their professional erasure. Those are not the same thing. One is speech. The other is harassment with a historical playbook.
The group’s logic appears to be: we care deeply about justice, therefore any tactic we use to pursue it is automatically justified. This is how every authoritarian movement in history has reasoned. The cause is righteous, so the methods don’t matter. The enemy is evil, so they can be drawn with horns.
What makes this genuinely absurd is not that activists got angry about a performance. That’s normal. What makes it absurd is that somewhere in the planning process, someone suggested adding demonic imagery to a Jewish woman’s face and nobody in the room said, “Wait, maybe that’s the exact opposite of what we should do here.”
Police investigating a potential hate crime isn’t censorship. It’s the legal system doing its job. If the group wanted to organize a boycott, protest outside the theater, write angry op-eds, or publicly debate the politics involved—all of that is protected speech and it’s legitimate. None of that requires making someone look like a demon.
The real punchline is that this incident will now be used by every bad-faith actor to argue that pro-Palestinian activism is inherently antisemitic, which is itself a form of intellectual dishonesty. Most activism isn’t like this. Most activists don’t think the answer to political disagreement is dehumanizing imagery. But this group did, and now they’re learning that actions have consequences.
Freedom of expression means the government can’t imprison you for your speech. It doesn’t mean your speech is consequence-free. It doesn’t mean private organizations have to platform you. It doesn’t mean police can’t investigate potential hate crimes. And it absolutely doesn’t mean you can post dehumanizing imagery and then cry censorship when people notice.
The actress will likely perform anyway. The group’s petition will have accomplished nothing except generating a police investigation and proving that somewhere in Scotland, someone thought devil horns on a Jewish woman’s face was a proportionate political response. History will remember this as the moment a supposedly principled activist organization decided that visual antisemitism was worth the risk.
That’s not defending Palestinians. That’s just being bad at activism and worse at understanding why certain imagery matters.