2020-08-14 – Like many people, I my understanding of the right-wing nut-job conspiracy movement called QAnon has been limited. But you’ve probably heard some of their fanatical rants without the QAnon label. I certainly have. And my first reaction was that this “movement” is just a high-tech version of the type of antisemitism that was rife in Eastern Europe over a hundred years ago when my Jewish grandparents fled. Not all Jews in Europe were so lucky to escape.

It was called the “blood libel” and had a long history in Europe. The blood libel accused Jews of ritually slaughtering Christian children and using their blood to make matzos for Passover, which they ate to celebrate the crucifixion of Jesus. This nonsense was used to spark pogroms in the shtetls of Europe.

Another aspect of European antisemitism was the claim that wealthy Jews (often centered on the Rothschild family) had a secret cabal bent on controlling the world. This bobbe-meiseh was elaborated in a forged text called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This too was ammunition for the anti-Semites of the world.

So, you may read of a cannibalistic pedophile ring, centered on Jewish Hollywood and a Washington, DC pizza restaurant (flat bread like matzahs drenched in blood?) engaged in human trafficking. Or you may read about George Sororos and (yes) the Rothschilds bankrolling a “deep state” that controls the United States and out to control the world. And the means of expanding its power is through contagion.

It’s the same old story.

Do the people following QAnon know this? Do the people spreading the QAnon story know this? My guess is that some do (and relish it) and some don’t. You could get caught up in their web simply out of a concern for children and not even recognize the antisemitic roots of the story. But anti-Semites through hundreds of years of persecution relied on the stories of child killing to gain recruits.

Even without the antisemitism QAnon spreads dangerous stories that are particularly rife in this pandemic: stories about the source and direction of the current pandemic that demonize normal public health measures; stories that COVID was manufactured to gain control of the population; stories that vaccines will contain microchips that will somehow control our minds.

It’s simple fear mongering, and it’s embraced by Donald Trump because QAnon has made him its hero.

In the words of the nineteenth century prayer of the shtetl: “May God bless and keep the czar . . . far away from us!”

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NOTE: I am not the only one to see the similarities between QAnon and age-old antisemitism. Wikipedia reports stories on the linkage written by the Washington Post, the Forward, and the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. The Anti-Defamation League has also called it “troubling.” (If you follow this link, you will come to the “Role of anti-Semitism” section of a larger story on QAnon. Here are links to Wikipedia stories on: the blood libel and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

I am also not saying this movement is exclusively antisemitic. It is definitely part of a larger racism.

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