Jews have been accused of harming and murdering non-Jews since the twelfth century in England, when Jewish convert to Catholicism, Theobald of Cambridge, mendaciously announced that European Jews ritually slaughtered Christian children each year and drank their blood during Passover season.
That medieval blood libel, largely abandoned in the contemporary West, does, however, still appear as part of Arab world’s vilification of Jews—now transmogrified into a slander against Israel, the Jew of nations. But in the regular chorus of defamation against Israel by a world infected with Palestinianism, a new, more odious trend has begun to show itself: the blood libel has been revivified; however, to position Israel (and by extension Jews) as demonic agents in the community of nations, the primitive fantasies of the blood libel are now masked with a veneer of academic scholarship and published as politicized scientific study.
Just this month, for example, the British medical journal Lancet further degraded its academic respectability and credibility by publishing something entitled “An open letter for the people in Gaza,” signed by 24 doctors and scientists. In the language of propaganda and politics—as opposed to the reasoned language of science and academically-based inquiry—the signers had as their purpose “denouncing what we witness in the aggression of Gaza by Israel.” These doctors and scientists, none of whom has had to live under an unceasing barrage of more than 10,000 rockets and mortars launched from Gaza into Israel, nevertheless denounced what they see as “the perversity of [Israel’s] propaganda that justifies the creation of an emergency to masquerade a massacre, a so-called ‘defensive aggression.’” Instead, the signers believe there is no basis for Israel’s self-defense, that it is actually no more than “a ruthless assault of unlimited duration, extent, and intensity” and an “unacceptable pretext of Israel eradicating political parties and resistance to the occupation and siege they impose.”
“The massacre in Gaza spares no one,” the letter continued in its hyperbolic, not factual, tones, and, according to the signers, “these attacks aim to terrorise [sic], wound the soul and the body of the people, and make their life impossible in the future, as well as also demolishing their homes and prohibiting the means to rebuild.”
Of course, there is no mention of the Palestinian’s complicity in their own situation, no reference to the nine years of genocidal aggression by Hamas since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza, no examination of the failure of Palestinian leadership to even attempt to start building a civil society and functioning government. Every pathology and failure, including the health and well-being of the entire Gazan society, is the fault of Israel—as a result of its siege, its blockade, its oppression, and its current incursion to suppress Hamas rocket attacks.