With pretentious and obscure rhetoric dressing up anti-Western sentiment and Jew-hatred as “culture,” Spanish newspaper ABC’s April 2, 2026, “The West against the East,” is difficult reading. Its placement in the prestigious “Tercera” section, the opinions feature showcasing prominent public figures and intellectuals, does not make the bigotry any more palatable.
Pitting a supposedly warmongering and morally corrupt West against a peaceful and idealized East, author Martín-Miguel Rubio Esteban employs a mixture of classical philosophy, theology, and geopolitics to argue that the Western bloc has abandoned its humanistic essence in favor of a militaristic nihilism.
“The moral climate of the West is warlike par excellence; hence its ‘political success,'” he maintains.
It is, at the very least, curious that a man of evident erudition overlooked the countless wars and atrocities that do not involve the West. However, the article is not intended to be a serious historical analysis; rather, it is a fierce anti-Western diatribe—and a deeply antisemitic one to boot.
Channeling traditional anti-Judaism, Rubio Esteban contrasts the “universal war of the Old Testament” with the “universal love of the New.” He pontificates: “Today, the West raises its sacred, stained banner, hidden in the pigeonhole or lair of Epstein—the perfect capitalist antithesis—for the moral pleasure and honor of the Western Baals who dominate and sodomize us.”
The author cites Jeffrey Epstein as a symbol of the West’s purported corruption and domination by hidden elites. Later he asks, “What human values are we going to contribute to the East today? Those of Epstein’s friends?”
Like Rothschild, Epstein serves as a dog whistle—a coded message which signals a subtext while avoiding explicit mention of a specific ethnic or religious group. The mere mention of the name evokes the trope of a global conspiracy involving alleged Jewish elites and sexual corruption.
Antisemitic poster shown at the Grand Anti-Masonic Exhibition in Belgrade in 1941 depicts the Jewish puppeteer manipulating military and political figures (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Collection, Gift of the Katz Family)
Lest any reader miss the “between-the lines” anti-Jewish references, Rubio Esteban later clarifies that Western violence is the fruit of an “aggressive religiosity, with a very clear furor judaicus [Jewish fury]” seeking the “true conquest and extermination of the Other.” (Emphasis added).
The imagery is so grotesquely cartoonish that it resembles the “altar-and-throne” antisemitism of a distant past. Yet, the author leaps from an outdated religious hatred to a more modern nationalistic one, describing “a West cloistered in the dangerous and Jehovah-like exterminating Anglo-Zionist globalist womb,” displaying a particular talent for targeting both Zionism and the biblical God in the same breath.
The entire text is a collection of hatred and contempt for “the sacrosanct ruthless chosen ones, Jehovah’s exterminators.”
Along the way, the bizarre text throws barbs at France and criticizes the very nature of Western man: “The man who thinks in Indo-European languages is not universal at all.” One wonders if the author is aware that the Persians—to whom he grants a sort of spiritual superiority—also speak an Indo-European language.
Ultimately, there is no logic to be found in a conspiracy-laden, neo-baroque style that peaks with praise for a “Latin America that, in seeking itself, will redeem and resurrect us, and which is complementary to the Russia of Alexander Dugin.”
When Alexander Dugin—the ideologue of Neo-Eurasianism and a promoter of Russian military expansion—is presented as a peaceful, redemptive figure, the reader understands exactly where they are: in the orbit of pro-Putin conspiracy theories.
That ABC, a conservative benchmark of the Spanish media landscape whose name refers to the paper’s ambition to be the ABC of information, would use its highly regarding opinion section to publish a discourse that transcends political criticism to become a catalog of Jew-hatred is deeply concerning.