Anti-Semitism is not called the ‘world’s oldest hatred’ for nothing. Worse than that, though, it’s most certainly the world’s most stubbornly persistent. It’s the golden staph of mind viruses.
It’s also the most puzzlingly irrational. As George Orwell wrote in 1945, when people accuse Jews of specific offences, “it is obvious that these accusations merely rationalize some deep-rooted prejudice. To attempt to counter them with facts and statistics is useless, and may sometimes be worse than useless.”
Right-wing anti-Semites who accuse Jews of ‘undermining the West’ conveniently ignore the roughly 50 per cent of Anglo-Saxon whites who vote for exactly the same left-wing policies as ‘(((them)))’. Left-wing anti-Semites who screech ‘genocide’ slurs at Jews conveniently ignore the openly stated genocidal vows of the ‘Palestinians’. Christians who vilify Jews conveniently ignore that Jesus himself, all of the Apostles and St Paul the founder of Christianity as we know it, were all Jews, too.
But, as Orwell said, facts don’t matter to the anti-Semite. I once had a groyper type screech at me that Jews have contributed nothing to science. Never mind that Jews, with just 0.2 per cent of the world’s population, have won 25 per cent of Nobel Prizes. Or such towering names in science as Albert Einstein, Robert Oppenheimer, Richard Feynman, John von Neumann (quite possibly the smartest human to ever live), Carl Sagan, Jonas Salk and even Hedy Lamarr were all Jewish. At least, I suspect, science was very much a closed book to said groyper.
The most odious, bizarre and unfathomable of all anti-Semitic tropes, though, is the blood libel.
Like our science-ignorant groyper, at least the mediaeval pogrommers had the poor excuse of ignorance and superstition. The persistence of Judaism in the face of Christ’s revelation was an existential embarrassment to the early and mediaeval church. If Christianity was such an obvious revelation, how could the Jews continue to refuse to believe it, unless they were inherently wicked?
Weirdly inverting the fact that Christianity began as a Jewish heresy, Judaism became the heresy – and heresy was a genuinely existential threat to the mediaeval mindset. After all, heresy risked withdrawing God’s favour from the entire community. So, at least mediaeval anti-Semitism had a twisted kind of logic to it.
Where’s the logic in the modern perpetuation of the blood libel? As it happens, it’s being largely supercharged by a very mediaeval mindset in the modern world: Islam.
At University College London (UCL) this week, a lecture was given in which it was allegedly suggested that Jews murder Gentiles and use their blood in perverse rituals. The comments were made by Samar Maqusi, a US academic. She was speaking with UCL’s Students for Justice in Palestine. Some of what she allegedly said was positively mediaeval.
Like the odious, lunar grifter, Candace Owens, Maqusi claimed to ‘bring the receipts’: which, like Owens’, turn out to be just so much fraudulent taradiddle.
She reportedly regaled her audience with the story of the Damascus Affair. This involved the disappearance of a monk called Father Thomas in 1840. Jews were blamed. They were said to have kidnapped Father Thomas and used his blood to make bread for a religious feast. The Jews of Syria suffered unimaginable persecution on the back of these allegations.
What Ms Maqusi failed to tell the students is that the Damascus Affair was a rancid lie. Instead, she encouraged them to ‘investigate’ and ‘draw your own narrative’. It is believed, she allegedly said, that Jews require ‘drops of blood from someone who’s not Jewish’ to be ‘mixed in [their] bread’. And Father Thomas possibly fell victim to this mad bloodlust. He might have been seized, she said, so that Jews could get ‘drops of blood’ for ‘the holy bread’.
Yet, even the 19th-century Islamic rulers knew it was a lie and publicly said so.
The then Sultan of Damascus decreed that it was fuelled by ‘pure calumnies’. We must never allow ‘the Jewish nation…to be vexed and tormented upon accusations which have not the least foundation in truth’, he said. How remarkable, how horrifying, that a murderous lie that was slammed by a sultan almost 200 years ago has discovered a new lease of life at a university in 21st-century Britain.
Well, import mediaeval Islamic dogmatism and what do you expect?
But what’s the excuse of Owens? Nick Fuentes? Tucker Carlson? The gibbering ‘pro-Palestine’ left?
[Maqusi] only said more frankly what others in the anti-Israel lobby prefer to say with euphemism – namely, that the Jewish nation is a uniquely bloodlusting entity.
The truth is that echoes of the blood libel can be heard across the activist class today. Their feverish animus for the world’s only Jewish state is riddled with blood obsession. They speak of Israel’s ‘bloodletting’ in Gaza. They are maniacally convinced that the Jewish state intentionally murders children. ‘Baby killers!’, they scream in the faces of British Jews who support Israel.
Earlier this year there was a march in Essex at which ‘pro-Palestine’ activists carried dolls in bloodied shrouds and hollered ‘Stop killing babies!’.
That’s nothing, ‘pro-Palestine’ activists in Melbourne screamed their hate while throwing blood-smeared dolls at Jewish survivors of October 7. That’s right: people who’d literally witnessed babies being butchered and burned alive by laughing Hamas monsters, were forced to endure the disgusting blood-libel antics of Jew-hating activists, dressing their hate up as supposedly ‘principled’ politics.
These people are as grotesque as they are stupid, ignorant and hateful.
