DDuring the Middle Ages, Jews were accused of poisoning the wells to spread the Black Death. A new report by Dr Rakib Ehsan of the Henry Jackson Society’s Centre on Radicalisation and Terrorism shows how similar anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the coronavirus, are now circulating online from far-right actors such as the UK’s British National Socialist Movement (BNSM) and the US’s National Socialist Movement (NSM).
Accusing Jews of using national lockdowns to “steal everything”; pictures of religious Jews dancing wearing masks with the caption “Satan celebrating the coronavirus”; and suggesting that COVID-19 is part of a Jewish plot to replace the ‘white’ population of Europe, are just some of the tropes being produced and shared in the far-right anti-Semitic online space.
The claim that the ventilators were given by a Jewish health agency, on the grounds that they would only be used for Jewish patients, just shows the kind of anti-Semitic poison which contaminates the online space. That particular claim was made by an American website which had previously expressed solidarity with former British Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn. There is a very thin line between far-left and far-right antisemitic ideology. Indeed, the COVID-19 global pandemic has its very own “One Ring of Racism” – where far-right, far-left and Islamist conspiracists are finding common ground over their belief in the Jewish exploitation of the coronavirus outbreak.
Research in Britain by the Community Security Trust (CST), the country’s leading antisemitism monitoring agency, and in the US by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, shows that anti-Semitic hate crime is on a steadily upward trajectory on both sides of the Atlantic.
Create a free account to keep reading.
