Thursday 25 June 2020

Wave of Covid Brings Worldwide Wave of Anti-semitism

Image courtesy of AndresHerutJaim, public domain.




Joel Kontinen


The tragic and shocking killing of Afro-American George Floyd by a white policeman in Minneapolis, a new stage has emerged where some anti-Israel activists inject anti-Semitic themes into valid civil rights protests. They claimt that the slave traders who brought Africans to America were Jews; police forces in the US are brutal and racist because they are trained by the Israel Police; and that African- Americans and Palestinians share the same cruel fate.

The controversy is not limited to the USA, In Europe, and the Near East, the covid-19 pandemic has created a unique way of anti-Semitism.

"It partly reiterates classic antisemitic themes, includes conspiracy theories alongside medieval blood libels, now renewed in a 21st century format. An Oxford University study revealed that 19.1% of the British public believe that the Jews caused the pandemic."
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Dr. Giovanni Quer, an Italian researcher at the Kantor center, which collected data for the study, said: “Universal disasters have been attributed to the Jews and Israel before, giving rise to anti-Semitic discourse such as conspiracy theories blaming Israel for 9/11 or false reports accusing Israeli soldiers of harvesting organs from the bodies of dead Palestinians. The current wave of antisemitism is unprecedented, however, because, spreading very swiftly through the social media, it focused at first on the COVID-19 crisis and then quickly moved on because of social and political changes,” he said.

Islamists describe Israel as the COVID-1948 virus – after the year in which the Jewish state was established.

In Israel, Israel and the Israel Defense Forces are constantly accused of spreading the coronavirus by force among Palestinians, especially inmates in Israeli prisons. This claim, however, completely ignores the facts: So far only one person has died of coronavirus in the Palestinian Authority and Gaza.

Source

Itzkovich, Judy Siege, 2020. Worldwide Wave of Covid Brings Worldwide Wave of Anti-semitism Israeli Study Reveals. Breaking Israel News 23 June.