Hannah Rose on the connection between antisemitism and the targetting of LGBTQ+ people

In October 2022, a 19-year-old killed two men and wounded a third at a LGBTQ+ bar in the centre of Bratislava. Hours later he died by suicide.

But not long before the attack, the shooter posted on then-Twitter a link to a manifesto on an anonymous filesharing site. The document had references to accelerationist narratives, the ‘Great Replacement‘ conspiracy and identified Jewish people as his main enemy.

The case didn’t get a lot of media attention at the time, likely explained by the relatively small number of victims, writes The Guardian in a deep dive piece looking into the attacker’s motivations and evidence he may have been inspired by the Buffalo, NY, shooter that killed 10 black people earlier that same year.

ISD analyst Hannah Rose spoke to the Guardian about the connection between the attacker’s target selection and his ideology rooted in antisemitism and the Great Replacement. Hannah explained how anti-LGBTQ+ hatred and antisemitism often intersect under this conspiracy as it accuses Jewish people of promoting an LGBTQ+ agenda to destroy the perceived traditional family and supposedly lower white birth rates.

“It’s not just Jewish communities which are victims of antisemitism. For a lot of [shooters], attacking an LGBTQ+ bar is also a means of attacking Jewish people. So the threat to one community becomes a danger to many others,” she said.