You've Got to be Kidding Me

Blood libels against the Jews in Europe were quite common for close to a millennia. The first recorded blood libel occurred in Alexandria, first century CE. For those of you who aren’t clear on what this is, Christians would claim that the Jews had murdered a Christian child in order to use his (it was usually a boy) blood for making Passover matza or that the Jews would drink the blood of Christian children in order to take on a Christian appearance. The instigators would murder a Christian child or dig up a freshly buried corpse, plant it in the home of a prominent Jewish family, gather up a howling mob, raid the house, find the body, and Voila! Instant reason to perpetrate a massacre of hundreds or thousands of Jews. The last known blood libel occurred in Kielce, Poland on July 4th, 1946. The 46 victims were all Holocaust survivors, living in a community center, trying to rebuild their lives.

Now, why do I bring this up? Let me tell you…. For the past few years, I have read, often with mirth tinged with sadness, of many of the ludicrous accusations made against the Jews/Israel by the Palestinians, Syria, Iraq, Iran, etc. Today’s remark was yet another which made me snort, yet frustrates me with the stupidity and true danger which lies behind those remarks.

Here are a few gems - the Palestinians claimed Israel was dropping poisoned candies over Palestinian cities and then that Israel had murdered Yasser Arafat by directing a long-distance laser beam at him over a protracted period of time. The Saudi’s claim that the Jews were behind 9/11(must have been due to the high rate of Jews flying planes into buildings), someone else’s claim that Israel was partly responsible for the tsunami, which they claim was caused by deep-sea nuclear testing done by India, America and Israel.

Today’s doozy is from Syria, who claims that Israel is responsible for the bird flu, and that we invented it “with the intent to harm the genes of our Arab neighbors”. I read this and roll my eyes, thinking what unbelievable crap it is, but know that there are millions who do believe it. It’s all seems like a big conspiracy plot that one would need a serious amount of alcohol and mind altering drugs to come up with, but most the people living in the countries surrounding us, as well as many others who are biased and uneducated around the world, will read this and say to themselves, “Those lousy Jews are at it again…”. I know that our allies and the majority of the Western world knows better than to even give it a moments consideration, but accusations like this pop up regularly in the Arab world. Many in the West consider Israel as an obstacle to world peace, but it’s theories like this, alive and well, which threaten mankind as a whole.