A chilling video circulating online shows a young woman being pinned against the floor of an airport as Spanish police place her in handcuffs, manhandling her in the process.
The video has drawn condemnation not only because of what it shows, but also because of what led to the incident: the removal of 44 French Jewish teenagers the woman was supervising from a European flight, allegedly for the crime of speaking Hebrew.
The children and their 21-year-old supervisor were part of Club Kineret, a Jewish summer camp hosted in Valencia, Spain. On July 23, 2025, the campers were seated aboard a flight operated by the Spanish economy airline Vueling to return to Paris, France, from Spain.
According to the airline, “A group of teenagers engaged in disruptive behaviour and adopted a very confrontational attitude.” Vueling alleged that the children “mishandled emergency equipment and actively disrupted the mandatory safety demonstration,” ignoring multiple warnings. Yet, the airline has not produced evidence that such disruptions took place.
The Spanish police subsequently removed the children and their camp supervisor from the plane. When the supervisor insisted on reboarding with the children, the police restrained her.
In a statement, Vueling denied that the decision to remove the young teens was an act of antisemitism. But that’s not the story others are telling.
One passenger, unaffiliated with the group, told a French news outlet that he “didn’t hear any noise or screams. No one really understood what was going on. I was expecting to see someone drunk standing up, but no. Nothing.”
Another passenger, also independent of the group, confirmed the assessment: “No one on the plane understood what was happening, because the group got on the plane normally, without shouting—which is rare in teenagers. I insist that they behaved well for teenagers.”
Samson, a 17-year-old camper on the flight, said the incident began when one of the campers sang in Hebrew. “One of my friends shouted a word in Hebrew because he was still a bit in holiday-camp mood,” he told French media. “Perhaps he said it too loudly. . . . We immediately stopped making noise,” he added.
Another camper on the flight corroborated the boy’s story. In a video shared to X, she said the campers played a game in which one person would sing a Hebrew word and the rest of the group would sing another back.
And then, one kid in the plane, he said loudly, ‘lilmod’ [“learn”]. And it lasted two seconds. But the staff heard that we were Jewish. And they started to get really mad. They started to shout at us. And after the silence returned . . . the police started to arrive and forced us to leave.
. . . When we got out of the plane, outside, they wanted to take our phones because there were some who had filmed the scene, including me, so I had to delete all the videos. And our director stepped in; and because she intervened, she got hit.
The campers and their supervisor were stranded in Spain before eventually making their way back to France. Multiple voices, both inside and outside the Jewish community, have called for an in-depth investigation.
Jim Berk, CEO of the Simon Wiesenthal Center, an organization calling for the investigation, stated, “If Jewish children singing in Hebrew now triggers law enforcement and handcuffs, then something is broken, not just in the airline’s policy but in society.”
Ty Perry is the Director of North American Ministries for The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry and a contributor to Harbinger’s Daily.
Editor’s Note: ‘Irrational And Demonic’
Antisemitism expert Olivier Melnick has frequently underscored that the definition of antisemitism is incomplete without acknowledging the spiritual battle bubbling under the surface.
“The definition that I have arrived at, after more than two decades in that field, is as follows: ‘Antisemitism is the irrational and demonic hatred of Israel and the Jewish people, characterized by thoughts, words, and/or deeds against them,’” he noted. “It was satisfactory to me for quite a long time until a few years ago, when I decided to add two words that have become critical to that definition: irrational and demonic.”
“In all the volumes I own on that topic (more than 400), I have found almost no scholar or theologian mentioning a spiritual component to antisemitism,” Melnick underscored. “I have learned much over the years about the history, geography, sociology, and morphing of the oldest hatred, but I extremely rarely see the spiritual aspect of it all being addressed. Yet, we have to recognize that antisemitism is very irrational, and that is because it is from Satan himself.”
