In a stunning rebuke of the rising anti-Semitism spreading across Europe and the West, the CEO of one of the most liberal media companies in the U.S. is coming out in defense of the Jewish State.
Mathias Döpfner — CEO of Politico and Business Insider's parent company Axel Springer SE — penned an October 7 op-ed dissecting his discussions with Nova Music Festival co-founder Omir Affir, a survivor of the wanton slaughter terrorist organization Hamas unleashed upon the Jewish people two years earlier. Döpfner speculated on how survivors like Affir are able to deal with European leaders and others grotesquely painting them as the perpetrators while Hamas and their death cult cohorts are the true victims.
“What is clear,” wrote Döpfner, “is that when it really mattered, Europe and large parts of the free world failed. The old anti-Semitic propaganda poison is still working: Once again, the Jews are to blame for everything. Even for their own murder.” In this the Axel Springer leader demonstrated a brave departure from the leftist and woke right media echo chambers that are obsessed with turning the only true democracy in the Middle East into a pariah.
After calling out world leaders at the UN and countries across Europe who made the diplomatically idiotic decision of recognizing a Palestinian state still terrorized by Hamas, Döpfner wrote that the underlying message is that the West is rubber-stamping cold-blooded murder:
The lesson for terrorists and autocrats around the world is encouraging: recognition of a state that is an unjust regime does not come as a reward for establishing the rule of law, for peace, and for the release of hostages, but as a reward for the barbarism of Oct. 7.
Döpfner proceeded to blast the European Union for being “the largest donor of foreign aid to Palestinians with a ‘bilateral allocation’ of 1.36 billion euros.” As he concluded, “This money benefited not so much the poor people in Gaza as the construction of tunnels and the arming of terrorists.” Rather than cutting off this pipeline into Hamas’s coffers, the EU doubled down in April 2025 when The European Commission proposed a “multi-annual comprehensive support program of up to €1.6 billion for the recovery and resilience of the Palestinian territories.”
Döpfner didn’t pull any punches. “Indirectly, the EU is thus subsidizing not the democratization of a region, but the prolongation of a war.”
Maybe the rest of the media can take a page from Döpfner and stop acting like useful idiots for the Islamist regimes that seek the total destruction of Israel and its people.