A few weeks ago, a commentator on a Turkish television network associated with the country’s president stated that “Jews [and] Zionists have organized and engineered the coronavirus as a biological weapon just like bird flu.” Such accusations are reminiscent of 14th-century claims that Jews deliberately spread the Black Death, and of more recent libels, like the Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas’s claim in a 2016 speech to the European parliament that a rabbi had tried to convince the Israeli government to poison Palestinians’ drinking water. (The speech received a standing ovation.) David Patrikarakos comments:
The Algerian news outlet Al Masdar recently published an article titled, “A Zionist Organization Is behind the Coronavirus and the Zionist Entity Claims to Have Found the Vaccine.” In a recent sermon, the Gazan imam Jamil al-Mutawa praised the virus as sent by Allah to kill Westerners and Jews.
And the attacks come from all sides. In the United States, the far-right conspiracy theorist and pastor Rick Wiles claims that God is spreading the coronavirus in synagogues because he is “dealing with those who oppose his son, Jesus Christ.” Meanwhile, [other members of] the far-right, in online forums like Reddit and Gab, peddle claims that Israel’s Mossad “invented” the coronavirus and that it is a bioweapon funded by the Holocaust survivor and philanthropist George Soros.
It is easy to dismiss all this as nonsense. I would suggest that this is an error. The coronavirus has shrunk the world’s attention to a degree previously unseen in our lifetimes. People are looking for answers—and once again, scapegoats. This will continue long after we come out of isolation and even after a vaccine is found (should those dates be different). Narratives of Jewish or Zionist culpability now threaten in ways they previously did not. Across the Middle East and in pockets of the West these ideas are the epistemological backdrop to everyday life: their hatred is leavened by their banality. If these societies suffer mass deaths the hatred will remain, the banality will not.
Read more on Spectator: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/jews-have-always-been-blamed-for-plagues---coronavirus-is-no-different