About

"I Bet The Jews Did This" is an ironic catchphrase used to mock anti-semitic conspiracy theorists and trolls who blame the people of Jewish descent for their own personal woes and misfortunes. The phrase, along with its snowclone variants, is often featured in a series of reaction images based on a stock photo of a middle-aged man struggling to untangle a messy cluster of Christmas decoration lights, in a similar vein to the combination of infomercial FAIL GIFs and the phrase Thanks, Obama!.

Origin

The original image macro (pictured below) is based on a stock photograph of an angry looking man holding tangled Christmas lights^[4]. On May 28th, 2009, the earliest known instance of the captioned image macro was posted to 4chan's /b/ (random) board.^[1]

Spread

On October 5th, 2012, Redditor banned_from_all_subs uploaded an animated GIF (pictured below, left) of famous Portuguese soccer player Cristiano Ronaldo in which he appears to be mouthing "the Jews did this" with the said caption underneath^[2] in the style reminiscent of Bad Lip Reading parody videos. As of May 2015, the post had garnered 829 upvotes. On March 27th, 2013, another gif in a similar vein, featuring Cristiano Ronaldo with a caption "COME ON, JEWS!", was posted on Imgur^[3].

On April 9th, 2013, Redditor Wizuhd submitted on /r/thankspatriarchy an edited version of the original picture featuring Anita Sarkeesian's face and the caption "I bet the patriarchy did this!"^[5] In two years, the post received over 100 upvotes.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References