Dave Portnoy, Mohammed Khan and the anti-Jewish horseshoe

Some dumb people made a dumb decision at a bar in Philadelphia this weekend. In a booth at the Barstool Sports-owned Sansom street, a group of guys paid a waitress to hold up a sign that said “Fuck the Jews.” In their pisswater beer-soaked joy, they giggled and filmed it and put it on Instagram. In the hours after, professional doxxers StopAntisemitism located the video, identified the young men and blasted their name all over X. Enter Barstool founder Dave Portnoy.

Dave, for those unaware of his antics, is what could best be described as a professional beefer. He fights anyone, usually on Twitter, and has threatened to “skullfuck” his adversaries with tweets on multiple occasions. He also happens to be Jewish. Since Portnoy found out about the incident, we’ve been on a real rollercoaster. The retribution began with the staff responsible for the sign, one of whom Portnoy referred to as “one of the dumbest fucking humans I’ve ever spoken to.” They were promptly fired. But Portnoy’s Complaint was just beginning. 

He then turned his ire towards a Temple University student named Mohammed Khan, who originally copped to organizing the sign, and was prepared to go on an apology tour to Auschwitz: the standard remedy that the Jewish community turns to whenever someone “does a hate speech.” But then he changed his mind. Perhaps he wasn’t into the idea of a long plane journey; perhaps inspired by the successes of Shiloh Hendrix and Karmelo Anthony, he thought he could make a quick buck from ethnic strife. In any case, within 24 hours, Khan had set up a GiveSendGo, recorded a bizarre video in which he claimed writing “fuck the Jews” on a nightclub sign was a criticism of Israel’s war in Gaza and, perhaps most troubling of all, appeared with prolific anti-Semite Stew Peters to discuss whether Jewish supremacy was at play in all this. In his apology video on X, he was both claiming that it was protected speech under the First Amendment and also that he didn’t do it, and he was merely a “citizen journalist” highlighting the injustice around him. He’s all over the place.

Aside from the rank stupidity and clearly ChatGPTed PR statement, the most telling thing about Khan is that in trying to explain his foolish actions on the night, he attempted to work the angles beloved by both sides of the anti-Semitic horseshoe. To the right, he says, “the Jews did this, they’re evil, they’re coming for my right to make edgy jokes” while to the left, he says, “this is actually about Israel, they’re doing genocide, this was a brave protest.”

This, in a nutshell, is what the world has been like for Jews across the western world for the last 18 months. To the increasingly insane Hitler-minimizing Twitter right, we are in control of the world, able to cancel anyone, rampant purveyors of pornography and vice that must be fought against. To the left, we are genocidaires, bloodthirsty child-killing monsters who will not stop until Israel is expanded to encompass the entire Arabian peninsula. Clearly, both characterizations are stupid and in the case of Khan, both maintained in a desperate attempt to avoid the consequences of being a moron. 

There’s no way of knowing where this microsaga will end, or whether either side will get bored of picking on Jews and move on to somewhere else. Just today allegations emerged that Khan has a side hustle as an OnlyFans pimp and likes to torment homeless people, so really this story could go anywhere. But so often Jews, when faced with pure hate, withdraw from the fight and cede the ground to the extremists. This time, armed with 9.2 million bro-leaning followers, Dave Portnoy is taking the gloves off and calling a spade a spade. In time, Mohammed Khan may come to realize, he should have just gone to Auschwitz.