A Rabbi in the Crosshairs

Tirana Examiner

Look at the placard first, because everything else follows from it.

A man holds it above the crowd in Tirana. On it, the Prime Minister of Albania has been redrawn as a Haredi Jew: black hat, beard, sidelocks. A red sniper’s reticle sits on his face, centred between the eyes. Beside him a woman raises a rifle. The Albanian caption reads that the time has come to hand the sniper to the Mother. Put plainly, the sign says: shoot this Jew. It was carried through a public square, photographed, and circulated as though it were an ordinary banner about a beach.

It is not a banner about a beach. It is a threat to kill, dressed as a poster. A placard that puts a named, living head of government in a gunsight, under a line inviting someone to fire, is a death threat the Criminal Code already names in Article 84. And because the man was first redrawn as a Jew, the heavier provision is Article 265, the incitement of national, racial and religious hatred, which carries years in prison and reaches the printed sheet as squarely as the spoken slogan. The killing the sign urges, the murder of the country’s highest public official, is the act Albanian law treats most gravely of all. That a poster cannot itself pull a trigger is not a point a prosecutor would miss. The point is that someone built it to make others want to. It does not become protest because it was raised at a protest, and it does not become opinion because it wears a costume. The questions are not difficult: who printed it, who carried it, and why, two days on, has no one been asked.

Now the costume. Edi Rama is not a Jew and has never claimed to be. He was drawn as one for a reason. The placard is the visible end of a narrative that has been pushed into these protests from the first day, the narrative that says Albania is being sold, in secret, to the Jews. Take the hat off Rama and you remove the entire point of the image. The hat is the message. The hat says the man in the crosshairs has earned the crosshairs because of what he supposedly is.

That narrative did not grow out of the facts. The investor on the coast is American. The financing is described as Gulf. There is no Israeli company, no Israeli official, nothing Israeli anywhere in the Sazan project. And still the squares have filled with “Down with Israel,” with cries that Rama is selling the country to the Jews, with a gunsight laid over an Albanian face. None of that rose from the coastline. It was delivered.

Ask who is doing the delivering, because the answer is not anonymous. Olsi Jazexhi has spent the protest week telling Albanians, under his own name and to tens of thousands of screens, that they are watching a Zionist takeover of their country. He had numbered it before the marching began: first the Iranian dissident enclave, then the Bektashi state, now the coast, three unrelated things welded into one Jewish plot. Through 2 June he posted in real time that Israel has controlled Albania since 2016, that Rama is colonising the country for the Jews, that Albanians are praying for the death of Ivanka Trump’s clan, a line he went back and edited so that the word Zionist would sit inside it. This is a man who has defended Hamas by name on Albanian television and called his own country a base of the Mossad. He is not reporting the protests. He is scripting them. A man who tells a public audience that a family should be prayed dead, and corrects himself to be certain the word Zionist is in the sentence, is not standing on the safe side of Article 265. Whether that crosses from hatred into crime is for a prosecutor to weigh, not a columnist. It should be weighed.

These are the people manipulating Albanian youth. They take a generation of angry young people, hand them a hatred that was never theirs, and aim it. The boy holding the sniper placard did not invent the rabbi or the rifle. He was given both. Somewhere upstream of his hands, an adult with an audience decided that a quarrel over a coastline would make a convenient carriage for the oldest hatred in Europe, and loaded it.

There is a particular obscenity in choosing Albania for this. This is the country that came out of the Second World War with more Jews inside its borders than it held when the war began, because Albanian families, Muslim and Christian, took strangers into their homes under the word Besa and gave every one of them back to the world alive. That is the inheritance these agitators are burning to win a point in a property fight. A sniper’s cross on a rabbi’s face, raised over a crowd in the heart of Tirana, is not a tradition of this nation. It is a betrayal of its finest one.

The placard is not an excess of passion. It is evidence. It records a threat made in the open, and it points back, frame by frame, to the men who built the conditions for it. Albania’s young deserve a state that prosecutes the first and names the second. Not a microphone for someone else’s murder.

READ ALSO: The Antisemitic Chant That Has No Place in Albania