THERE WILL BE BLOOD (LIBEL)

THE WORLD INVERTS VICTIM AND PERP BECAUSE WE VIEW THIS CONFLICT THROUGH A PRISM OF 2,000 YEARS OF MYTHOLOGY ABOUT JEWISH BLOODTHIRST.

And to think I almost forgot.

In my previous post, I wrote about the blood libel — the vampiric lie that Jews crave the blood of non-Jews. This libel has led to violence and catastrophe for Jews across history.

Blood is a recurring theme in antisemitism and in other creepy non-Jewish approaches to Jews. The New Testament Gospel verse “His blood be on us and on our children” has been used by haters across history to promote the idea that Jews are eternally guilty of deicide and spiritually stained with the blood of Jesus. This has, obviously, resulted in two millennia of Jew-hatred and vilification. But the blood motif has seeped into a vast range of language and imagery — and it has only increased, not diminished, with time. Blood imagery is as central to contemporary antisemitism — and, importantly, for my point, to anti-Zionism — as it was to its medieval antecedents.

Medieval and early modern beliefs held that Jewish men menstruate as a divine punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus (and as a feminizing weapon by misogynistic societies, about which I will write more soon).

Jews have been accused (by the Nazis and many others) of defiling “pure bloodlines” and the Nazis used blood imagery to paint Jews as parasites feeding off “Aryan” society.

Jews are accused of “sucking the lifeblood” out of the Christian world, economies, or nations.

During the Depression and at other times of financial crisis, antisemites have used lines such as “Jewish bankers bleeding the nation dry,” which mix economic antisemitism with blood imagery.

Today, Israelis are accused of having “blood on their hands,” of “bloodletting” in Gaza, and anti-Israel (and undeniably antisemitic) posters all over the world show blood dripping from Israelis and Jews.

It degrades us to contest despicable defamations on their merits. By refuting them, we risk legitimizing them, when reasonable people should reject them outright. And yet dismissing them has not defeated them. For 2,000 years, Jews have been accused of blood-related crimes — yet credulous mobs have been the ones to swallow the bloody lies voraciously.

So let’s refute.

Jewish law forbids consumption of blood. Kosher regulations require the draining of blood from meat and even the meticulous assurance that eggs do not contain a speck of blood before consumption. So accusing Jews of consuming blood — human blood — is not only a loathsome smear. It is a particularly conniving form of racism that takes what is held sacred by Jews and accuses Jews of defiling it. (Another nauseating tactic I will write about soon.)

The irony and hypocrisy should be obvious. Consider the range of theological duplicity around Christian antisemitism: They accuse Jews of killing Jesus, but Christians have no compunction about benefiting from that Jew’s death on the cross by unloading their sins on him. In fact, that is the central tenet of their faith.

They accuse Jews of eating the blood of Christian children but then they figuratively (or, depending on the religious interpretations, literally) gobble down the body and blood of Jesus every Sunday.

As is so often the case, racism (in this case, antisemitism) is a projection. It is not Jews who consume blood — emphatically not — but Christians, through the Eucharist. But anyways.

Christians and Muslims through history have denounced Jews for rejecting (from the Christian and Muslim perspectives) the very God Jews themselves introduced to the world.

And then there is the imagery employed by the “pro-Palestine” cranks.

An Australian Muslim clergyperson, Imam Ahmad Zoud, said during a sermon: “The most important trait of Jews is that they are bloodthirsty.”

In that vein (pun intended) cast your bloodthirsty eyes on some of the “cartoons” from across the Arab world.

Yeah, not antisemitic at all.

The literal definition of “demonization.”

Such incisive wit these satirists have. So subtly subversive.

Nice shovel. So much for “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism.” Also, what’s with the beak?

College-educated urban sophisticates imagine we could not possibly descend to the debased level of racism and medieval superstition our ancestors in dirt huts believed about Jews (or that the “artists” of these cartoons do). But every time the world reacts with anything but revulsion and condemnation to images like these, we are reminded that we have not advanced as far as we may have thought.

It sometimes seems that the entire world is blaming the victim in the current conflict. Palestinian jihadists invaded Israel, raped, beheaded, immolated, kidnapped and mass murdered civilians. Then, when Israel defends itself and seeks to eradicate the evil force that could perpetrate these atrocities, the world — only then — cries bloodbath.

This astonishing contradiction speaks to the power of this ancient symbolism.

When people utter the facile phrase “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” it betrays a profound ignorance of the way these factors play out in psyches and societies. As I have been banging on about for more than a year in this space, the problem is not something so obvious as “We hate Jews, therefore we hate Israel.” The role of antisemitism in anti-Zionism is a far more insidious, deep-seated prejudice that predates the state of Israel and the anti-Zionist movement by, oh, about 1,900 years.

That is what we mean when we talk about antisemitism in the context of the world’s approach to Israel. And yet the bigots who shriek “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” unwaveringly refuse to engage in the self-reflection they emphatically undertake at the faintest hint of prejudice regarding any other group. This should be the surest confirmation we need of the rampant, unchecked prejudice driving the world’s response to Israel and this conflict.

All evidence around who is the perpetrator and who is the target can be discarded, and the roles reversed, because of a baked-in default in our civilizational DNA that sees Jews as wantonly violent, disrespectful of the life (“lifeblood”) of non-Jews and inclined to a literal and figurative bloodthirst.

Despite all the bloody-soaked evidence — evidence that the perpetrators proudly livestreamed but which plenty of Western “pro-Palestinian” activists deny — the world chooses to see the beheaders, rapists, kidnappers and mass murderers as the righteous “resistance” and the victims in this story. Because we are programmed to see Jews as the ones who seek blood.

Once you have embedded this susceptibility in the human imagination — and it has been embedded in Western civilization for 2,000 years — it becomes easy to recast any narrative in conventional ways. This is why the “pro-Palestinian” movement has been so successful in casting the victims as the perpetrators and the perpetrators as the victims.

That is just one, tiny example of how antisemitism works. The “Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism” crowd takes the rhetorical weapon that has worked wonders for millennia of antisemites and repurposes it in the fight against Zionism. They accuse Israelis, as our ancestors accused Jews, of craving the blood of non-Jews.

And the world, uncritically, declares, Yes, that seems about right.