Michael Roberts: AI and the profits boom

 

AI and the profits boom

by Michael Roberts

As the central bankers of the world met at Jackson Hole, Wyoming for their annual get together to discuss issues affecting the world financial sector and monetary policy, US statistics for corporate profits for the second quarter of 2026 were released. The figures were truly startling. US corporate profits surged by $401 billion in the second quarter of 2026. This pushed total corporate profits to a historic high of $4.3 trillion, or up nearly 23% since Q2 2025.

and pushed gross profit margins (ratio of profits to sales) to 19.4%—the highest recorded in the US since the 1940s!

Both capitalists and Marxists agree: profits matter; they are the driving force for investment in a capitalist economy.  When profits are rising, investment follows and eventually employment even if the investment is labour-saving like AI supposedly is.  So these figures tell you that a recession in the US is not yet on the agenda.

What is happening here to deliver such a revival in US corporate profits?  It appears to be a combination of aggressive corporate price hikes following the end of the pandemic, massive AI infrastructure spending leading to huge profits for those building the datacenters, making chips and other facilities for the AI boom; and Trump’s corporate profit tax cuts. These tax cuts have added nearly $50bn to corporate profits after tax for the top 100 US companies, while hardware and chip makers (the AI “sellers”) have experienced explosive earnings, with tech sector earnings rising more than 65% year-over-year.

But a key factor in driving up profits has been the general suppression of workers’ wages. While pre-tax profits as a share of national income hit 18%, the highest share since the aftermath of the second world war, employees’ share from wages and benefits fell to 60 per cent, the lowest level since the 1950s.  Inflation has outpaced wage growth, causing real hourly earnings to fall by 0.2 per cent in July versus a year earlier.

Chief executives at America’s largest low-wage employers have seen their pay rise by 41 per cent between 2019 and 2025, while the average worker took home only 21 per cent more — that’s below the 26 per cent increase in prices over the period. As the FT put it: “Workers have been gradually losing sway in corporate America since the early 1980s as union membership has declined and companies increasingly outsource jobs to external contractors.” But the decline in labour’s share of income has gained pace since the end of the COVID pandemic and especially over the past 12 months.

The boom in profits is still concentrated in the Magnificent Seven tech companies. They have raised revenue by 36%, but profit even more by 67%, according to work by Brian Green. “This increase in the mass of profits of two thirds in just one year which goes a long way to explain why Wall Street has been so buoyant.”

But there are some caveats to these headline figures. It seems that the tech giants have heavily padded their headline profit figures via “other income” accounting items, capturing massive unrealized investment gains from their stakes in private startups and AI ventures. The big tech companies booked more than $160bn in gains from investments in owning the shares of other AI companies last quarter. Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia and Microsoft all recorded significant boosts to pre-tax profits through valuation gains on equity stakes, including investments in OpenAI, Anthropic and SpaceX. Alphabet recorded $97.9bn in “other income” in the three months to June 30, while Amazon reported $53.4bn. Nvidia recorded a further $7.7bn in the three months to the end of July.

Moreover, the massive investment into AI models and data centres by the Big Tech ‘hypescalers’ looks secure only because the AI companies like OpenAI and Anthropic have a very dubious way of calculating their revenue from AI users, called annual recurring revenue (ARR). They take a recent month’s revenue and multiply it by 12 to set an expectation for the year to come. As Ed Zitron, the top analyst on AI business models, put it “ARR can mean everything from “[actual month] x 12” to“[30 day period of revenue] x 12” and in most cases it’s a number that doesn’t factor in churn. If you use ARR, you’re essentially taking one month and treating it as representative of the entire calendar year, when it isn’t.”  Subscription revenues aren’t enough to justify a more than 600 per cent increase in annualised revenue in less than a year. That assumes that non-subscription revenue will stay high even as the industry enters a price war and is struggling to get customers to pay for the most advanced models.

Moreover, the AI companies and the hyperscalers are increasingly raising credit to pay for their investments. Companies had already tapped debt markets for $217 billion last year, according to Morgan Stanley. By mid-August, they had already smashed past this total, with $445 billion of debt issued and the overall debt splurge will reach nearly $600 billion for 2026. That is more than the combined 2026 budgets for the US Departments of Justice, Transportation and Education. Future capital expenditure plans amount to roughly 3% of US GDP a year up to 2030, more than the annual real GDP growth of the whole economy.  

In the dot-com bubble and bust, the US stock market lost almost half its value between the 2000 peak and the 2003 trough, but the economy suffered only a mild and brief setback. But this time, technology companies are sucking up all their cash and more to invest in the AI boom. Google’s free cash flows went negative for the first time ever in the second quarter of 2026, after cumulatively generating almost $600 billion since the listing in 2004.

Then there is the issue of more obscure liabilities. The hyperscalers are increasingly keeping debt off their books by structuring their data center investments as ‘lease commitments’. Meta’s Hyperion data center project in Louisiana is not supposedly financed by debt. The company secured most of the financing money by promising to ‘rent’ the data center itself for 20 years. As a result, the $27.3 billion loan appears nowhere on Meta’s balance sheet. Goldman Sachs analysts recently tallied $1.5 trillion in these ‘lease commitments’ by the AI hyperscalers: “this treatment can understate leverage and future liquidity needs as these obligations are eventually recognized and contractual payments come due.”  And then there is another estimated $1.5 trillion of “purchase commitments” —promises to buy chips and electricity. Those promises don’t appear on balance sheets either. So while corporate profits have rocketed up, it is being partly driven by the huge financing of AI by hyperscalers in a circular financing model.  

Nvidia is increasingly using its own balance sheet to keep the AI boom running. Nvidia is not only selling the GPUs powering the AI buildout, it is also helping finance the infrastructure and customers buying them, including nearly $50 billion invested in AI labs and a planned $105 billion backstop for the Ohio data-center project tied to OpenAI and SB Energy.  Nvidia is also working with Wall Street firms on up to $500 billion of financing for AI chip purchases, while OpenAI could purchase roughly $350 billion of Nvidia chips for the full Ohio buildout.

The strategy can supercharge Nvidia’s revenue as long as AI demand keeps accelerating, but it also increases Nvidia’s exposure if AI spending starts to slow. If AI labs and data-center developers cannot fund the buildout themselves, Nvidia may increasingly have to support the customers generating demand for its own chips. The bigger the commitments become, the more painful a demand slowdown could be, because Nvidia would be exposed not only through weaker chip sales, but also through the financing and guarantees supporting the AI boom.

Meanwhile AI model usage prices are collapsing as competition from Chinese models intensifies and yet the cost of GPUs, memory, servers and power remains extremely high. This is creating a growing gap between what customers pay and what it costs to build the infrastructure behind AI.

Cheaper AI could drive massive growth in usage, but the bigger question is whether that growth translates into real profits. BCA reckons that AI companies will need to generate $10 trillion a year in revenue just to justify the capex being spent, roughly equivalent to annual global spending on food or healthcare!  AI may be getting dramatically cheaper to use, but if the payoff fails to catch up with the cost of building it, investors could soon discover that the AI boom is generating plenty of revenue without nearly enough profit.

Indeed, in Marxist terms, this huge rise in capital investment leads to a rise in the organic composition of capital (the ratio of investment in means of production to the cost of employing workers). That would drive down profitability.  So far this has been counteracted by the rise in the rate of exploitation of workers. So corporate profitability (profit per capital invested) is up, if not nearly as much as corporate profits. Since the pandemic, US corporate profitability has risen over 20%, but is still well below the level achieved in the 2010-14 recovery from the Great Recession (but note Q2 2026 profitability data are not available yet).  And see Brian Green’s estimates.

Source: Federal Reserve, author calculation.

So the jury is still out on the success of the AI boom; and the likelihood of an AI stock market bust remains high.  Nevertheless, optismism prevails, not only among AI companies; hyperscalers and stock market investors, but also among the international powers that be. Indeed, according to Kristalina Georgieva, the head of the IMF, the boom in AI investment is spreading from the US to power the world economy, and is likely to boost global growth this year. “What started out as a US phenomenon with AI is now becoming a growth engine for the global economy, with other countries ramping up construction of data centres and other infrastructure.” Other countries were now “plugged into the supply chain” and exporting AI hardware to the US.

It’s true that global corporate profits (my estimates) have risen sharply since the beginning of 2025 as the AI boom has gathered strength.

But US real GDP growth slowed to 2.1% yoy in Q2 from 2.7% yoy in Q1 and inflation is rising at over 4% a year, with forecasts suggesting it could reach 5% by year end if the Iran war is not resolved.  If the Federal Reserve decides to raise its policy interest rate to try and curb inflation, that could trigger a sharp drop in borrowing and a stock market ‘correction’.

Let me end by quoting Ed Zitron on the wider AI picture. “Everyone seems so obsessed with sinking billions of dollars into the theoretical chance that machine learning might be able to replace human beings, and that more money makes it “smarter” and “better” at tasks. Surely investing real money in actual workers — making their lives better, improving their working conditions, teaching them new things, sharpening their existing skills, rewarding them for their hard work, and so on — would have better effects than fastballing hundreds of billions of dollars into a machine that does an impression of work?”

Book Review: Here Where We Live is Our Country. The Story of the Jewish Bund

The Jewish Labor Bund occupied a huge place in European Jewish history as an anti-Zionist, secular, socialist organization. But this history is almost unknown to young Israeli's. I have been told that it's not even taught in Israeli schools. Sharing here from LaborHub.org.uk for the interest of our readers. FFWP Admin

                  

Order this book

                      

AUGUST 31, 2026

A History of the Jewish Labour Bund

Michael Hindley reviews Here Where We Live Is Our Country, by Molly Crabapple, published by Bloomsbury, the story of the forgotten and suppressed history of the Jewish, Socialist, Anti-Zionist Party.

An estimated eight to ten million Jews worldwide can trace their origins to the long past Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which lasted from 1569 to 1795. The Common-wealth provided a safe haven for Jews, who fled or were driven from other less enlightened and tolerant parts of Europe.

The Commonwealth had an elected King, who extended his royal protection to Jews. But the Commonwealth had a weak central government, which tempted its more aggressive, expansionist neighbours, who made substantial inroads into Common-wealth territory, culminating in the Commonwealth’s total collapse and annexation in 1795. The spoils were divided between Austria, Prussia and Russia in 1795. Poland and Lithuania were expunged from the political map of Europe only to re-emerge as independent states between the two World Wars.

Imperial Russia proved the most oppressive occupier. A joke in Isaac Babel’s Odessa Stories runs that even God can make mistakes, for example: “He put the Jews in Russia and not Switzerland.”

The situation became decidedly worse for the Jews of the Pale after the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, a mild reformer who had freed the Russian serfs. He was succeeded by his son, Alexander III, a reactionary anti-Semite, and a wave a political suppression was unleashed. Jews were again targeted and with increased severity. This in turn led to the mass exodus of Jews from the Pale, mainly to the USA but also to Britain, in the next decades. Their arrival in Britain prompted to Westminster’s first ‘immigration laws’.

The demand for ‘nation states’ had grown in mid- to late-nineteenth century Europe and the demand for a Jewish state arose too, resulting in the founding of the World Zionism Congress in 1895 in Basel, Switzerland. Much lesser known, is that two years later (1897), a secular, socialist political party was founded within the Pale in Vilna (now Vilnius in Lithuania), namely the “Jewish Labour Bund”, generally known simply as “The Bund”.

It is the heroic tale of the Bund, which Molly Crabapple traces with admirably diligent research and passion. She even learnt Yiddish to gain access to primary sources.

The very title Here Where We Live Is Our Country expresses the essence of the Bund and is in itself an explicit rejection of Zionism. The Bundists wanted to live in safety where they were born, lived and wished to continuing to live. The Bund was internationalist and chose to identify and express solidarity with socialists and workers’ movements in the Pale and beyond. The Bund believed that for Jews to live safely, the rest of society also needed safety and social and economic justice.

This meant that the Bund became enmeshed in the international Socialist movements and particularly in pre-revolutionary Russia. They took part in the whirlwind of activities, conferences, disputes, arguments and rivalries in the prelude to the Russian Revolution of 1917. The Bund found itself in a minority, numerically and ideologically, under the ruthless rise and seizure of power by the Bolsheviks.

The Paris Peace Conference (1919) to settle the post-war WWI world created a new European order based on the nation states, which emerged from the collapse of the Great European Empires, Austro-Hungarian, German and Russian. The Bolshevik regime had made their own peace with Germany during the war and did not attend the Paris talks. The old Jewish Pale was divided into the new states of Poland and the tiny Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. In these states any hope of democracy was swept aside in the interwar decades by a tide of authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism.

The new Poland inherited the largest Jewish population.

Molly Crabapple composes her history well, moving chronologically and inserting the biographies of key characters into the narrative of the Bund.

Like many central European socialist and social-democratic movements, the Bund organized social and sports clubs, set up cooperatives, education classes and, as antisemitist violence was ever-present, the Bund organised self-defence units.

Molly Crabapple’s starting point is the tale of her own great-grandfather, from whom she inherits her artistic talent. Her great-grandfather, an early Bundist, found refuge in the USA and pursued a career of mixed fortune as an artist. His life story is told with marked affection.

The Bund, in Molly Crabapple’s words, did not fail, but was defeated by stronger forces in the maelstrom of revolutions and wars, which dominated Europe in the first half of the twentieth century.

The interwar years were horrific for the Bund. The rivalry between the Bund and the Zionists was bitter and spread from ideological differences to outright hostility and street fights.

The Bund was assailed from several directions politically and physically. The Stalinist Communists regarded the Bund as dangerous heretics, the Polish government wanted to expel Jews and the Catholic Church joined the call to boycott Jewish business. The Bund’s only constant ally was the Polish Socialist Party, they too being victims of Stalin’s paranoia.

If the interwar years were horrific, World War II was catastrophic. The Nazi occupation witnessed Jews being driven into ghettos throughout Poland, as elsewhere. The largest and most infamous one was in Warsaw, which had the second largest Jewish population in the world after New York. The Bund ran courier services, underground supply lines with the rest of Warsaw beyond the ghetto and even managed to produce newsletters. Their heroic resistance, joined by some Zionists, reached its apogee in the ghetto rising and ultimate destruction in April 1943. The uprising was the largest Jewish revolt against Nazism.

The Polish “Home Army”, the resistance under the command of the Polish government in exile in London, cooperated with the Bund, but needed weapons themselves and had few arms and ammunition to spare for the Bund.

Throughout the book there are intriguing references to the Jewish mafia’s protective actions for fellow Jews in peace and war. (The Jewish mafia also make an appearance in Isaac Babel’s writings. Isaak Babel was a Jewish writer and correspondent in the Russian Civil War, who was murdered in Stalin’s purges in 1940. His wry tales of Jewish life, are told in Odessa Stories. In his days Odessa was in the Soviet Union, now in Ukraine).

The end of the war brought little relief. Though there were many acts of kindness and protection by Poles, surviving and returning Jews still found a hostile reception from their former neighbours, some of whom had seized Jewish property.

Many European Jews had neither energy nor confidence that they could claim their rightful place in Europe. Nor was there trust that Jews could find a home “where we live now”. After the Holocaust, Zionist Israel was a convincing safer option.

The post-war settlement changed Eastern Europe beyond all recognition from multicultural societies into mainly monocultural ones. And Stalin’s satraps were ruling Poland and Europe beyond the Iron Curtain.

Internationally the Holocaust had convinced the world’s dominant powers that a national homeland for Jews was inevitable.

In her conclusion, Molly Crabapple asserts that the Bund did not “fail” but was defeated by shattering violent upheavals beyond its power to resist.

The Bund had always taken the view that a Jewish homeland in Palestine could only become a reality at the expense of the rights of the local population.

In 1933 one of the Bund leaders, Henryk Erlich, argued with Casandra-like prescience that “if an appropriate opportunity arose, Jewish nationalism would show its sharp teeth and nails no less than the nationalisms of other nations… no, we are not a chosen people. Our nationalism is just as ugly, just as harmful… and has the same inclination to fascist debauchery as the nationalisms of all the other nations.”

It’s a chilling and accurate prediction, which is validated as we witness daily the murderous actions of the Israeli government in Gaza and the West Bank.

But the Bund’s legacy has survived in spirt and reality. A Jewish, secular, progressive, anti-Zionist view of the world remains. It is a rational and pragmatic choice, which many Jews worldwide have taken, namely that “their home is where they are”. It is a commitment, which my Jewish friends and Jews worldwide still hold dearly, whatever their families’ history and fate has brought them.

You can order Molly Crabapple’s excellent book from your local lending library or an independent bookseller.

Michael Hindley is a former Member of the European Parliament (MEP) and is now freelance writer and lecturer on international politics. He is the author of The Semi- Detached European, a history of UK/Europe relations since 1945. He posts on: @hindleylancs.bsky.social. This article originally appeared on his substackhere. 

The British state has lost the argument, even as it rigs the trials of genocide opponents

The UK isn’t a dispassionate arbiter of justice in prosecuting anti-genocide activists. It has been aggressively colluding in Israeli crimes. That huge conflict of interest is the elephant in the room

Johnathan Cook  Aug 29th 2026

The British state rigged the trial of Tony Greenstein, a secular Jewish socialist and peace activist, to get him locked up for as much as 14 years – supposedly for “inviting support for Hamas”. 

Fearful that the judge would punish his barrister for delivering a closing speech that properly defended him, Greenstein instead spoke directly to the jury.

For half an hour, he picked apart sham charges relating to three social media posts and a blog article he wrote against Israel’s genocide in Gaza. In doing so, he exposed the proceedings as a political show trial – one of a growing number, designed to silence opposition both to Israel’s genocide in Gaza and to the British state’s complicity in it.

In summing up, Judge Sarah Plaschkes said she had considered referring Greenstein for contempt of court. But instead she dismissed his eloquent, damning address to the jury as a “rambling speech delivered by an old man”. At that point, presumably, she had no idea what impact Greenstein’s words would have on the jury. 

In a stinging rebuke to the judge, the jury members unanimously acquitted him after just two hours of deliberation. As it turned out, it was not Greenstein on trial; it was British justice. 

Once given a chance to hear all the facts, not just the ones curated by the Crown, the jury accepted Greenstein’s arguments, including his accusation that the judiciary were readily conniving in the growing authoritarianism unleashed by the UK state’s complicity in genocide.

Which may explain why Greenstein’s landmark victory in a case with huge implications for free speech – and the right to speak out on the British state’s partnership in Israel’s genocide – was almost entirely ignored by the establishment media. 

Had the jury found against him, you can be sure that same media would have covered the matter extensively, playing its part in sending a message to audiences that they should to keep their heads down and avoid showing any solidarity with the Palestinian people or risk sharing Greenstein’s fate. 

His acquittal, and the British state’s humiliation, was not a message the state – or the billionaire-owned media – wanted publicised. 

What Greenstein’s closing speech managed to do was introduce something the British state and its judiciary have been carefully trying to strip out of the current wave of show trials of anti-genocide activists: important context.

Greenstein had to dismiss his barrister for the closing speech because, had the barrister spoken to the jury as Greenstein himself did, he would have most likely shared the fate of another distinguished lawyer, Rajiv Menon KC. 

Jonathan Cook 2mo The judge in the Palestine Action trial is having a second go at trying to jail the respected defence barrister Rajiv Menon for contempt of court. Here is the section of his closing speech, citing a 350-year-old legal precedent, that offended the judge: https://jonathancook.substack.com/p/barristers-powerful-speech-at-filton 200 5 93

Menon is facing contempt of court proceedings over his masterful closing speech in the trial of six Palestine Action defendants, who were charged with multiple and serious crimes over their efforts to destroy killer-drones produced at a factory in Bristol operated by Israel’s biggest arms maker, Elbit Systems. 

As a result of Menon’s speech – you can read the most important passages here – the jury refused to convict any of the defendants of any of the offences for which the state had put them on trial. 

The judge in that case, Jeremy Johnson, was so eager to make an example of Menon – and intimidate other lawyers so they would be dissuaded from giving other Palestine solidarity activists a proper defence – that he managed to abuse the established legal procedure specifically designed for contempt of court referrals. 

The Court of Appeal had to overturn his decision, though it allowed him to reapply for contempt proceedings against Menon, this time using the proper channels. Johnson did so. 

The point is that judges like Johnson and Plaschkes – faithful servants not of justice but of the British state – know that no jury will convict activists trying to to stop a genocide if it is framed in those terms. So these judges must rig these trials to keep the jury as ignorant as possible of the relevant context: that the British state is persecuting peace activists for embarrassing it over its collusion in genocide. 

That fact was, once again, only too evident during Greenstein’s trial. 

Plaschkes was angry throughout the proceedings at Greenstein’s efforts to introduce context to the case. Were the prosecution to succeed, she needed the jury to ignore many relevant things about Greenstein’s supposedly “Hamas-supporting” comment about a “ghetto uprising” in Gaza : 

• the context that he was referring to the fact that the one-day break-out from Gaza on 7 October 2023 was a direct response to Israel’s preceding 16-year blockade of Gaza, denying its 2.3 million-strong population the essentials of life and turning the enclave effectively into a concentration camp; 

• the context that, following the October 2023 breakout, Israel immediately launched a genocidal campaign of destruction against the enclave’s infrastructure and its civilian population;

• the context that, as a secular socialist, Greenstein has been a long-time critic of Hamas, as proven by a stream of articles he had written over more than a decade and that he cited to the jury;

• the context that, as the son of Holocaust survivors, he is deeply opposed to one people systematically oppressing another – all the more so given that Jewish Zionists have exploited their people’s historic victimhood to justify Israel committing contemporary crimes against Palestinians;

• the context of international law, which states that a people under occupation, the Palestinians, have a right to resist their oppression by Israel, including through the use of violence; 

• the context that Greenstein made no mention of Hamas, or indicated any support for it – only his support for the right in law for Palestinians to resist Israeli crimes; 

• the context that the British government proscribed the political wing of Hamas under the UK’s terrorism laws only in 2021, not based any new “terror” behaviour – in fact, four years earlier Hamas had rewritten its charter, showing a strong willingness to make concessions to Israel. No, the purpose of proscription was specifically to advance Israel’s goal of intimidating popular, international solidarity with the people of Gaza; 

• the context that, in prosecuting Greenstein, the British government is destroying the very basis of the right to free speech, all to advance the interests of the demonstrably genocidal state of Israel;

• the context that the British state is not some dispassionate arbiter of justice in these prosecutions: it is aggressively colluding in Israel’s crimes. Its huge conflict of interest in silencing critics is the elephant in the room. 

Greenstein told the jury: 

Your [verdict] will not stay in this room. If these three posts are terrorism, then the word has a new meaning for everyone in this country. Every student who shares an article. Every pensioner who retweets the wrong opinion. Every writer, every blogger, every one of your neighbours with a social media account and a view about a war. 

Can it really be the law of England that any of them – that any of you – will be condemned to 14 years of prison for a tweet? You have the power, today, to answer that question. Whatever your answer is, it will be remembered long after this trial is forgotten.

The whole speech is a masterclass in how to speak over the head of a complicit judiciary and prick the conscience of people who have a moral backbone. I recommend you read it in full here: 

The British government desperately wanted the scalp of a Jewish activist to show that no one is safe from the state’s long arm of persecution. It failed, which should be cause for relief and celebration among every person who opposes authoritarianism. 

The defeats being handed to the British state by juries who hear the actual evidence are adding to the pressures on officials to find new ways to bypass the ancient right of trial by jury. 

The government of Keir Starmer was determined to establish the precedent of scrapping jury trials. Faced with the unpopularity of such a move, his successor Andy Burnham has sounded hesitant about advancing the measure. But pledges he made while seeking the Labour leadership – and prime ministership – are proving to be worth little now that he is in office. 

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Meanwhile, courtier-judges like Johnson are finding ways to get round the reluctance of juries to convict anti-genocide activists of serious crimes. 

Juries that convict activists of a relatively minor charge of criminal damage for smashing up killer-drones, assuming the defendants will get a few months in prison, are learning that they are thereby handing the judges in these trials unlimited powers, in violation of the most basic principles of justice. 

After the verdict, judges like Johnson are choosing to rewrite the charge sheet, adding retrospectively what they are bogusly calling a “terrorism connection”. That means they can sentence the defendants as “terrorists”, leading to far longer jail sentences and destroying the defendants’ lives in perpetuity. 

This is the mark of a justice system that no longer cares about evidence, fairness or jury verdicts. It cares only about visible punishment, about spreading terror through the courtroom. 

We can fight back. Juries appear to be growing increasingly wary of these highly politicised trials the British state is staging to exonerate itself of its criminal activities and lock up its critics. As judges increasingly abuse the justice system to get the jail sentences demanded by the state, juries are likely to become much less willing to serve as an alibi for state repression. 

This is no longer a struggle simply for the Palestinian people’s survival. It is a struggle for ourselves, for our right to have a voice, to have some say in how our societies are run and for whose benefit. It is a struggle to keep the forces of darkness at bay a little while longer. 

And it is a battle none of us can afford to lose.

Canada: Campus Antisemitism Report Hid a Key Finding that Turns the Results Upside Down

Republished from The Grind Magazine

                                                 PHOTO: MCMASTER UNIVERSITY

OPINION

Campus Antisemitism Report Hid a Key Finding that Turns the Results Upside Down

BY JOSHUA SEALY-HARRINGTON

AUGUST 28, 2026

In early August, mainstream outlets repeated the findings of a flawed report describing alarming levels of antisemitism on university campuses. Two weeks later, the authors stated that 92 per cent of anti-Zionist Jewish respondents found campuses safe and inclusive.

In early August, the Canadian government released a report on the “alarming prevalence of campus antisemitism” at postsecondary institutions. The mainstream media was quick to uncritically parrot the report’s findings, despite early alarm bells raised by independent organizations about the report’s methodology.

After the initial news articles, there was a slew of opinion writing. On Aug. 18, for example, the Globe and Mail’s editorial board ran a column largely based on the report claiming that, on Canadian campuses, “Jewish students are not safe, not even in the classroom.”

However, closer scrutiny of the report — known as the Campus Antisemitism and Student Experience, or CASE, report — reveals both glaring bias and several methodological flaws that misrepresent the state of safety on campuses, while dangerously conflating anti-Zionist speech with antisemitism. The result has fed into a moral panic that has for several years now been used to clamp down on the pro-Palestine movement.

What’s wrong with the CASE report?

The CASE report was written by the tightly-connected Association for Canadian Studies and Metropolis Institute, based together in Montreal. The report was published by Canadian Heritage, where Marc Miller is the minister responsible. 

The report claims to describe “[w]hat Jewish students experience,” but its methodology belies this.

First, the report is based on an online survey that lacked proper screening. For example, Dr. El Jones—an Associate Professor in political and cultural studies who is neither a student nor Jewish—was able tocomplete the survey, twice. 

Second, the survey’s recruitment process, which prioritized explicitly Zionist organizations such as Hillel and Chabad, resulted in a clearly pro-Zionist bias: the report found that 86.8% of the survey respondents indicated that “Zionism” is very or somewhat important to them, despite the fact that a 2024 survey found that only half of Canadian Jews identify as Zionist. 

Moreover, the report’s authors failed to consult with anti-Zionist Jewish organizations, such as Independent Jewish Voices, who could have shared the survey with its hundreds of student members. (The survey only included 900 respondents.) Indeed, the report itself admits it cannot be relied on as a representative sample of Jewish student experiences, noting that “[t]he Jewish survey is not weighted,” such that the results can only be “interpreted descriptively rather than as precise population estimates.”

Despite these glaring issues, mainstream media outlets were largely uncritical in their reporting. CBC, for example, initially reported in their article subheading that “95.7% of Jewish students say they saw or experienced antisemitism in 2025.” After the report was criticized, the article subheading was changed to “95.7% of surveyed Jewish students say… .” 

The above methodological concerns, however, are amplified by a rhetoricalconcern, obscured by what one might call the CASE report’s “rolling disclosure” — an opaque process by which the report’s findings are slowly and partially revealed over time, rather than all at once. This complicates the ability for readers to scrutinize the report’s raw data, as well as its author’s interpretation of that data. 

When the CASE report was first released on Aug. 5, it exclusively highlighted the experience of Zionist Jewish respondents, while making zero reference to the experience of those anti-Zionist students who participated in the survey. 

Later, following a slew of serious methodological critique, the report’s creators responded on a Canadian Jewish News podcast episode released Aug. 14 (see 9:49-10:14) by selectively disclosing unpublished data from the report. Unsurprisingly, this previously suppressed data undermines the report’s exaggerated conclusions.

Then, writing in the National Post on Aug. 17, two of the report’s authors and one of its advisors noted that only 11 per cent of anti-Zionist Jewish respondents agreed with the statement that antisemitism was “a serious problem on campus.” When Zionist Jewish survey respondents answered that same question, that figure skyrocketed to 95 per cent. 

Put differently, it is not simply “Jewish students” who consider antisemitism a serious problem on campus, but, more precisely, Zionist Jewish respondents that do. 

In stark contrast, amongst anti-Zionist Jewish respondents, a whopping 92 per cent said their campuses were safe and inclusive for Jewish students. In the National Post column, the authors try to write off the anti-Zionist data as a “psychological or social” phenomenon rooted in “a desire for social acceptance.” 

The reality seems much simpler: Zionist Jewish students conflate hostility towards Israel with hostility towards Jews, whereas anti-Zionist Jewish students do not.

Conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism

As the Jewish Faculty Network has observed, the report’s misrepresentation of antisemitism “attempts to turn a legitimate political position [i.e., anti-Zionism] into a synonym for hatred before a single survey question is even asked.”

And this misrepresentation is apparent in the report’s many frivolous examples: a student’s subjective claim of “encountering course content […] that portrayed […] Israel […] in [a] biased way” is called a “toxic classroom dynamic”; a professor “showing Al Jazeera videos” and wearing “pro-Palestine […] earrings” is labelled “classroom bias”; the report calls “antizionist indoctrination […] among the most worrying” of its findings. This is unserious.

Even the report’s examples of actual antisemitism are misleadingly presented by its authors. One appendix provides what the report itself calls “a selected sample” of comments from survey respondents, including various pro-Nazi references. But the report egregiously frames these references as representative of “the pro-Palestine movement”, which, according to one anonymous quote, “very loudly and publicly sympathize[s] with Hitler.” The report fails to provide a single example of this supposed “loud” and “public” sympathy from the avowedly left-wingmovement to decolonize Palestine. And the report obscures how Nazi sympathies are ideologically associated with the political right. In this way, the report crudely lumps right-wing discourse with left-wing activism to discredit Israel’s decolonial critics.

Indeed, the report is so dedicated to defending Israel and Zionism that it, while claiming to document antisemitism on Canadian campuses, includes a gratuitous reference denying the genocide in Gaza. The report states: “No court, international or otherwise has determined that the War in Gaza is a genocide.” This omits, however, that there is a virtual consensus amongst relevant scholars (including hundreds of international law academics), United Nations findings (including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights), and Non-Governmental Organizations (including Amnesty International) that Israel is, indeed, committing a genocide in Gaza, a finding the Israeli NGO B’Tselem has confirmed.

The report relies on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which is widely discredited for conflating criticism of Israel with antisemitism. The government of Canada adopted the IHRA definition in 2019, despite its rejection by over 400 scholars of Antisemitism Studies and related fields, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (which represents 75,000 academic staff), and even one of the definition’s main authors, who now recognizes that it has been “weaponize[d]” by “rightwing Jewish groups.” The report does not acknowledge, let alone refute, this overwhelming critique. 

Instead, the CASE report affirms IHRA by citing a non-peer-reviewed essay in Tablet magazine — a magazine so right-wing that the largest scholarly association in Jewish Studies stopped advertising in it. The frivolous examples above speak for themselves: despite claiming to be a report on “antisemitism,” the authors cast watermelon earrings, Peabody Award-winning journalism, and peace activism as intolerable campus expression. 

The CASE report does not accurately document antisemitism; it perpetuates anti-Palestinian racism. That the Canadian government would characterize righteous dissent as “antisemitism” to discipline political discourse is an affront to our democratic principles and academic freedom. And that Canadian media would parrot such jejune propaganda is an affront to the accuracy and impartiality of our press.

The Association for Canadian Studies and Metropolis Institute acknowledged receipt of The Grind’s requests for comment but did not respond before publication. The article will be updated if they send comment.

Joshua Sealy-Harrington is an Associate Professor and the Chair in Palestinian Human Rights in Canada at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law.