Daily Briefing: ANTISEMITISM SPIKES DURING THE CORONAVIRUS CRISIS (April 23,2020)

The Coronavirus (COVID-19) first appeared in the Chinese city of Wuhan. Experts from the American Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), the World Health Organisation (WHO) and other research organisations associated the first infections to a live animal market in Wuhan. It is estimated that the virus first appeared in November 2019, with official Chinese statements confirming the outbreak in December. COVID-19 is a type of coronaviruses which causes disease in animals. Seven of them, including the new one, have made the jump from animals to humans. Previous outbreaks included SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) in 2002 and MERS (Middle East Respiratory Syndrome) in 2012. According to experts, live markets such as the one in Wuhan pose a heightened risk as live animals’ consumption is difficult to monitor.

Despite these facts being clear, some began associating the virus to the Jews and to the state of Israel. Some Turkish and Iranian politicians and officials blamed the US and Israel for spreading the virus for strategic reasons, while jihadists accused the Jews of an anti-Muslim conspiracy and white supremacists blamed the Jews for spreading the virus to further their global dominance and financial gains. Antisemitic conspiracy theories began spreading even more quickly than the disease itself, on some official media outlets, as well as the regular internet and on the dark web.[1]

This matters, of course, because antisemitic conspiracies can in time lead to a rise in violence against Jews.[2] Moreover, on an international level, according to the Tallinn Manual on the International Law Applicable to Cyber Operations, the spread of false information is not illegal, so countries that seek to oppose the spread of conspiracy theories cannot easily and legally act against them.[3] These lies may be ‘authenticated’ by those consumers for whom traditional media platforms and official statements are distrusted.[4] All these trends are spreading antisemitism and embedding it deeper among marginalised social groups.[5]

Throughout history, Jews have often been treated as scapegoats, accused of being the cause of society’s problems, perceived as being diseased or as a group deliberately spreading disease among non-Jews. Greek leaders used many negative adjectives to describe Jews in the 4th and 5th centuries. The eastern Roman Emperors Theodosius II and Justinian described Jews with words such as ‘perversity,’ ‘contagion,’ ‘pollution,’ ‘a plague’, and ‘contamination’.[6] During the Black Death pandemic of the Middle Ages (1347-61) Jews were accused of ‘poisoning the wells’.[7] The Nazi ideology framed all Jews as a bio-threat.[8] After the establishment of Israel, some hostile Arab officials blamed Israel and the Jews for spreading AIDS among Arab leaders and officials.[9] Terror organisations such as Hamas have spread the lie that the Zionists use AIDS-infected women to lure Arab leaders to their doom. Islamists and white supremacists are associating COVID-19 with Jews though, typically, they are using the more acceptable dog-whistle code word ‘Zionist’ as a stand-in for ‘Jew’. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Avi Benlolo: The Coronavirus Pandemic is Bringing with it a New Level of Anti-Semitism
Avi Benlolo
National Post, Mar. 28, 2020

Even while the world grapples with the most pressing health issue of our time, there are those who are using the coronavirus pandemic as another excuse to attack the Jewish people, a phenomenon I am calling “coronasemitism.”
This week, the FBI warned that white supremacist groups are targeting police and Jewish people by planning to expose them to coronavirus. If their members contract the virus, they are being encouraged to use themselves as bio-weapons, to infect synagogues, marketplaces and areas where Jewish people might congregate.

Behind the COVID-19 headlines, it was reported yesterday that the FBI foiled a neo-Nazi plot to blow up a packed hospital in Missouri. The suspect behind the plot was a white supremacist who was shot and killed by a joint terrorism task force. While under surveillance, he considered bombing a school with a large number of African-American students, a mosque and a synagogue, before settling on a local hospital filled with coronavirus patients. In an online post, he claimed that “this whole thing (the virus) was engineered by Jews as a power grab.”

This sickening hate-motivated behaviour is consistent with the general growth of anti-Semitism worldwide. In recent years, we have seen attacks on a Pittsburgh synagogue, which killed 11 worshippers, and a shul in Poway, Calif., where one person died. More recently, a man stabbed five Orthodox Jews in Monsey, N.Y., and a Jersey City kosher market was attacked, leaving four dead, including a police officer.

And just this week, a New York car dealership was accused of discrimination after a Hasidic Jew was denied a pre-scheduled service appointment on the alleged grounds that he was “spreading” the coronavirus. It’s being reported that when he arrived at his appointment, he was turned away, despite the fact that the dealership was continuing to see customers.

Throughout history, anti-Semites have attempted to link viruses to Jewish communities, in order to marginalize and oppress them. The coronavirus is no exception. In the 14th century, Jews were falsely accused of poisoning wells and spreading the bubonic plague. This accusation had the desired effect: Jewish communities were massacred throughout Europe. Sound familiar?

Fast forward some 600-plus years, when Adolf Hitler accused the Jews of being a virus to humanity itself. In 1920, he said that, “For us, it is a problem of whether our nation can ever recover its health, whether the Jewish spirit can ever really be eradicated. Don’t be misled into thinking you can fight a disease without killing the carrier, without destroying the bacillus. Don’t think you can fight racial tuberculosis without taking care to rid the nation of the carrier of that racial tuberculosis. This Jewish contamination will not subside, this poisoning of the nation will not end, until the carrier himself, the Jew, has been banished from our midst.” … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Deadly New Virus Intersects with History’s Oldest Hate: Report & Analysis
Harold Brackman
Simon Wiesenthal Center, April 2020

INTRODUCTION

By now everyone is painfully aware that the twenty-first century lacks immunity to not only contagious diseases but ancient ideological plagues like anti-Semitism. The current moment is particularly dangerous because of new efforts to harm Jews by exploiting well-founded concerns about the Coronavirus. This essay puts under the microscope current examples of the threatening conjunction of anxieties about this new virus with thousand-year-old prejudices demonizing Jews not just as Christ killers and Shylocks but as disease purveyors. COVID-19 is a novel virus, for which there is still no vaccine like that invented by Dr. Jonas Salk to end the scourge of polio; but the manipulation of such pandemics by anti-Semites has historical roots going back millennia. Our focus will be the highly-relevant history of what might be called “medicalized” anti-Semitism.

THE HISTORICAL RECORD:
Prelude from The World War I Era: Spanish Influenza

Before delving back 1000 years, let’s revisit just a century ago. That was when the so-called Spanish Influenza that arose at the end of World War I took at least 50 million lives internationally and 670,000 in the U.S. In Goldsboro, North Carolina, one resident recalled, “We were actually almost afraid to breathe. . . .You were afraid even to go out . . .The fear was so great people were actually afraid to leave their homes . . . afraid to talk to one another.” Babe Ruth was put out of action by the Spanish flu for two weeks. At 1919’s Paris Peace Conference, President Wilson suffered symptoms that may have undermined his diplomatic effectiveness.

Just before the virus hit, Russell Dunne, an Irish immigrant, became notorious among New York Jews for attacking them on street corners as “kikes” and “long-nosed greasy vermin.” The twentieth century’s genocidal metaphor— the equation of Jews with “vermin”—was already in the air.

After a tirade at Madison Square Garden, Dunne was charged with inciting a riot. A Russian Jew, Judge Leonard Snitken, sentenced him to a month’s hard labor. Yet not Dunne but Snitken suffered the consequences when two men beat him severely in a stairwell of the court house.

The post-Spanish Flu Decade—the fabled Jazz Age—favored the Dunnes rather than the Snitkens. Jewish as well as Italian American soldiers were stereotyped as dirty, diseased, and stupid during and after World War I. Hundreds of thousands of Klansmen marched on Washington, D.C., during the 1920s. Racist immigration laws were enacted. The decade’s leading novelists like Ernest Hemingway demeaned Jews in their fiction. And Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler formed a virtual trans-Atlantic mutual admiration society during the decade.

A decade defaced by prejudice had its start after the world was ravaged by a killer virus that looked both forward to COVID-19 and backward to the medieval Black Death. … [To read the full report, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Hiding in Lockdown with My Family During the Shoah
Manfred Gerstenfeld
Arutz Sheva, Apr. 22, 2020

Usually in the days before Yom Hashoah, I recall my year and a half in hiding during the Holocaust. During this time I was holed up in a small apartment in Amsterdam with my parents. Until today I do not understand where they found the mental and emotional strength to withstand this situation. As a child of 6 and 7 years of age, I did not grasp the full importance or the risks involved. I now know that somewhere between 30-40% of the Jews in hiding were betrayed to the German occupiers, mainly by Dutchmen.

My parents had rented an apartment in the center of Amsterdam in the name of an unmarried mother. I know now that this apartment was about a kilometer from where Anne Frank and her family were hiding. This was the place we intended to go into once it became clear that Dutch Jews were being transported to the transition camp, Westerbork. We did not know that trains were departing every week to the east from there. Those people who were sent to Sobibor were murdered upon arrival. Some of those on the trains sent to Auschwitz/Birkenau were gassed immediately. Other Dutch Jews had a small chance of survival there if they were put to work. Most of them died from the horrible conditions in the camps.

The apartment we hid in had three rooms. The woman in whose name the apartment was rented occupied the front room. Her son was a mariner who rarely visited. The middle room was very small without windows. This is where I slept. We lived in the back room during the day and my parents slept there at night. Below us was a shop selling typewriters. The people who worked there knew that there was a single woman living above them who went out to work during the day. We were therefore barely able to move or make a sound during shop hours.

The courageous resistance organization supplied us with food stamps. Without this the woman would have been unable to purchase food for us. A cousin of my father, himself in hiding, supplied us with the money to pay the rent and buy basic necessities. Under usual local circumstances we would not have had electricity. However, someone from the resistance linked us up to the electricity from a shoe store a few houses further away owned by Dutch Nazi collaborators. Radios at that time were fairly large and depended on electricity.  It was illegal to own a radio, but then again, we ourselves were illegal.

Many Jews in hiding were traumatized for their entire life from that period. The isolation period had a huge lasting psychological impact on them. Yet the isolation influenced my father in the opposite way. In hiding he made a vow that if he survived the war, he would devote the rest of his life to helping Jewish survivors.

That is indeed what he did. After the war, he established a social and pastoral department at the Amsterdam Ashkenazi community. This organization assisted survivors in a variety of ways. Even though a Jewish umbrella body had been created to help people out with financial problems, my father’s department also helped many poor people. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]

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For Further Reference:

Annual Report Reveals Coronavirus Crisis Is Stoking Anti-Semitism Worldwide:  NY Post, Apr. 20, 2020 — The coronavirus crisis is stirring anti-Semitism around the world, fuelled by centuries-old lies that Jews are spreading infection, researchers in Israel said on Monday.

Coronavirus: ‘Huge Spike’ in Brooklyn Hasidic Community:  Liam Stack and Nate Schweber, NYTimes, Mar. 18, 2020 — Health officials expressed growing alarm on Wednesday that the coronavirus is spreading quickly in tightly knit Hasidic Jewish communities in Brooklyn, saying that they are investigating a spike in confirmed cases in recent days.

Orthodox Jews are Donating Plasma by the Thousands to Fight Covid-19:  Ari Feldman, Forward, Apr. 22, 2020 — Well before the rest of the world was talking about blood plasma and its use in fighting coronavirus, Dr. Shmuel Shoham knew all about it — and where he could probably get a lot of it.

Germany warns of spike in anti-Semitism linked to coronavirus:  Thelocal, Apr. 7, 2020 — “There are direct links between the current spread of the coronavirus and that of anti-Semitism,” Felix Klein said in Berlin at the launch of a new government research project into the issue.

Rabbi Cooper Demands Telegram, Other Social Media Remove Coronavirus Posts To ‘Kill Jews’:  Caleb ParkeBy Caleb Parke,  Fox News, Apr. 3, 2020 — A leading Jewish human rights group is calling on social media platforms to root out posts using the coronavirus pandemic as an opportunity for anti-Semitism.