The Antisemitic Chant That Has No Place in Albania

Tirana Examiner

On 1 June, hundreds of people marched in Tirana against the resort project at Zvërnec. They were protesting the violence of 30 May when private guards dragged a protester across the ground while police watched.

Then, in front of the Prime Minister’s Office, some in the crowd chanted “Poshtë Izraeli.” Down with Israel.

Israel has nothing to do with Zvërnec. The investor is American. The financing is described as Gulf. There is no Israeli party anywhere in this project. The chant did not come from the facts of the case. It was brought into the protest by people pushing an agenda that has nothing to do with the Albanian coast.

The man who put that chant in front of the world is Olsi Jazexhi. Within hours of the march he posted the video on X under his own name, with the caption: “Albanians chant: Down with Israel, down with Edi Rama!” That caption is why he filmed it. The protest was not his concern. The chant was.

Jazexhi has a long record on this single subject. He has defended Hamas by name on Albanian television. He has claimed Israel runs Kosovo’s Muslims as agents of Mossad. He has called the Zvërnec protest the third stage of a “Zionist takeover” of Albania, lumping it together with the relocation of an Iranian dissident group and the Bektashi sovereignty arrangement. Three unrelated things, blamed on one hidden hand. That is not criticism of a government. It is the oldest antisemitic lie in Europe, the one that puts a secret Jewish author behind every event.

These are the people manipulating Albanian youth. They take a genuine protest and a generation of angry young people and they feed them a hatred that is not theirs. And they do it in Albania, the country whose people, Muslim and Christian alike, hid Jews in their homes through the Second World War and returned them to the world alive. That is the inheritance these agitators are spending.

The chant “Poshtë Izraeli” did not belong in the protest. Albania’s young deserve better than to be used as a microphone for someone else’s hatred.