History’s most lethal conspiracy theory is trending again.

The blood libel is alive and well — and, with a Wi-Fi upgrade, it’s going viral.

As baseless accusations of genocide grow louder, so does the belief that Jews deserve to be shunned or punished. (photo: Patrick Perkins/Unsplash)

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This is a guest essay by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.

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One of the last things Yaron Lischinsky shared before he was gunned down in Washington, D.C. was a warning, calling out the viral claim that “14,000 babies would die in Gaza within 48 hours” as a modern blood libel.

The figure, lifted from a misrepresented United Nations interview, was swiftly debunked, but not before it was amplified by major outlets and set social media ablaze.

Days later, Lischinsky and his girlfriend were murdered at the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. by a man reportedly shouting “Free Palestine!” — as if punishing him for the very lie others had just finished spreading.

The original blood libel refers to the false accusation that Jews murder non-Jewish children to use their blood in religious rituals. This myth emerged in medieval Europe and was used for centuries to justify pogroms, expulsions, and mass killings.

Today, the term applies to any narrative that frames Jews as secretly plotting harm against innocents, whether through myths of spreading plagues, claims of global control, or accusations of profiting from endless wars. The pattern is always the same: to cast Jews as the hidden enemy of society.

Does that mean you can’t criticise Israel or care about children caught in war? Of course not. But if you’re sharing a photo of a sick child, cropped to hide his healthy sibling, to claim Israel is deliberately starving children, or reposting an unverified image of a child from war-torn Yemen to accuse the Jewish state of “genocide,” then yes, you are spreading a modern blood libel.

The faster these narratives spread in our hyper-connected world, the more righteous the outrage feels and the more an ancient hatred is reawakened. As baseless accusations of child-killing, starvation, and genocide grow louder, so does the belief that Jews (and even those associated with them) deserve to be shunned or punished. The digital age has only sped up what used to take years. The gap between digital slander and real-world violence is closing fast.

No other group is collectively punished for a state’s actions like Jews are. Not even regimes that starve or slaughter far more people, including children, face this treatment. No one hurls blood-soaked accusations at Russians, Iranians, or Sudanese and then turns on their diaspora communities, burning places of worship, harassing families, or demanding public loyalty tests.

Every morning feels like waking up in a psych ward where the patients are in charge, parading their Jew-hatred in plain sight while swearing it isn’t, and cheered on by millions who’ve lost their grip in the exact same way.

People I’ve known for years — kind, thoughtful, even rational — now seem completely unhinged the moment the topic turns to the Jewish state. And always, without fail, comes the ritual disclaimer that it’s only “Zionists” they oppose. Sure, Becky, just a coincidence all your accusations sound exactly like blood libels of the past.

It’s not just individuals; it’s institutions, governments, courts, universities, NGOs, humanitarian agencies. The very bodies once trusted to uphold human rights and champion moral clarity now seem to be on a systemic witch-hunt against Israel.

“They’re all lying?” people ask, as if the majority is always right. But believing civil society could never collectively turn on Jews is, frankly, historically illiterate.

Over the centuries, Jews have been put on trial for crimes they did not commit. These blood libels were embraced by civil society, with courts, churches, schools, and the press all joining the frenzy. In the 1930s, the legal system itself became a weapon, fabricating charges to legitimise persecution. The Holocaust didn’t begin with gas chambers; it began with courtrooms, pulpits, newspapers, and classrooms all amplifying the same ancient lies.

So why haven’t we passed this knowledge down? Why do we teach “Never Again” like it’s a museum exhibit instead of a warning? Rising antisemitism is a sign that a society is rotting from within. Jews are history’s canary in the coal mine. When accusations against them become common rather than conspiracy, societal ruin is never far behind. History shows that societies which feast on blood libels always end up choking on their own collapse.

The mainstream press today has become little more than a loudspeaker for the same old libels, no longer anchored to truth. This time, the internet ensures that disinformation spreads instantly. Outlets that once held power to account now amplify unverified claims, out-of-context footage, and AI-generated images that go viral long before any fact-checker gets involved. By the time corrections appear, they are buried. And by then, no one believes the truth anyway.

At the root of all this is antisemitism. You can dress it up as “anti-Zionism” all you want, but it behaves exactly the same.

Today’s antisemitism isn’t the old-school, infamous kind with swastikas and sieg heils. It comes wrapped in social justice slogans, reposting 1930s conspiracy theories, and drowning in jihadist PR without even realising it. And yes, jihadism has a direct pipeline from Nazism, but that’s a post for another day.

Famed novelist and poet George Orwell said antisemitism makes people believe things that couldn’t possibly be true. He didn’t know the half of it. If only he could see the internet now.

I’ve watched otherwise intelligent people believe things that make zero sense. That Jews are colonisers in Judea. That Israel, a country with Arab judges, gay pride parades, and Ethiopian Jews in parliament, is an “apartheid” state. That one tiny Hebrew-speaking nation is expansionist, not the 50 Muslim-majority countries or dozens of Christian ones. That a genocide is happening, yet the accusation requires redefining the word itself.

We’ve been targeted by a coordinated, decades-long disinformation campaign of industrial scale. It is systematic, relentless, and designed to invert reality. The Soviet KGB spent decades seeding anti-Israel narratives into international institutions and media. Today’s “woke” activists chanting about “freeing Palestine” are not grassroots rebels, but the end product of a psychological operation that has been running for decades.

Its success feeds on several things: It flatters the West’s obsession with victimhood, hooks into the addictive rush of moral outrage, and taps the oldest hatred in human history. Few people bother to question what they’re told. Facts, logic, and history are useless against those who don’t want to understand. If people cared to learn what happened in 1948, or even what a blood libel is, they would. But most would rather not.

The blood libel was the original psychological operation, a manufactured narrative crafted to bypass reason and justify violence. What began as medieval child murder accusations has evolved into today’s polished propaganda campaigns, but the formula is timeless: invent a monstrous lie, repeat it until it feels true, and let the mob do the rest.

Centuries later, the mob is still mobbing, only now it’s in my social feed.

I couldn’t scroll past a woman I’ve known for years, posting a steady stream of skeletal children to her thousands of followers. “Israel is starving them,” she wrote.

Several of the images weren’t from Gaza at all. A quick reverse image search showed that Yemen’s biggest export to Gaza isn’t just Houthi-fired missiles, but mislabelled photos of their own starving children — more than a million of whom are suffering from acute malnutrition. I pointed this out, foolishly thinking the truth might still matter.

What I got back was screaming. Rage. Accusations that I didn’t care about children. That I was defending “genocide.” That it didn’t matter that a few images weren’t accurate, because it didn’t change that children were starving.

I tried to steer the conversation back to reality. I acknowledged there was starvation in Gaza (it’s a war after all), and that Israel should do everything in its power to address it. But I also pointed out that Hamas has a long record of looting aid and exploiting suffering children for propaganda. By spreading these images without question, I warned, we are boosting Hamas’ PR machine and prolonging the war.

Her fury only deepened: “Why are you bringing up Hamas?! This has nothing to do with Hamas!”

Sorry, what? How can you understand this war without mentioning Hamas? That’s like discussing lung cancer and being told not to mention cigarettes. If you still haven’t realised this is a propaganda war, where Hamas uses starvation and suffering as a weapon, you shouldn’t be weighing in.

Case in point: Hamas recently released a propaganda video of Israeli hostage Evyatar David, emaciated, bruised, and forced to say he was digging his own grave. It was a grotesque display of psychological torture, filmed and posted online with full confidence that Western media, human rights groups, and influencers would largely ignore it. This is how Hamas mocks us. They know their atrocities won’t be amplified by the same outlets that rush to share every unverified image of a starving child in Gaza.

Meanwhile, footage has surfaced of Hamas fighters dining underground in their tunnel networks, enjoying food that never reaches Gaza’s civilians. But those images don’t go viral, because they don’t feed the blood libel the world still wants to believe.

And yet, you still want to talk about this war without mentioning Hamas. You don’t get to erase them and pretend Israel is randomly bombing civilians when, by Hamas’ own numbers, more bombs have been dropped than people killed. You don’t get to ignore that this war began with the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

While she went on to accuse Israel of war crimes (tragic realities in every war), she conveniently ignored that everything Hamas does is a war crime by design. Disguising fighters as civilians. Using human shields. Taking hostages. And making sure the cameras are rolling. Hamas doesn’t care if every child in Gaza starves, as long as it plays well online. It’s grotesque, and almost no one calls it out.

She also shared the image of a skeletal toddler held up as proof of Israeli-induced starvation. This photo had already gone viral, featured by the BBC, The Guardian, Metro, The Australian. The child, Muhammad Zakariya Ayyoub al-Matouq, was later revealed to suffer from serious medical conditions, including a muscle disorder, cerebral palsy, and hypoxemia. His brother, shown in other photos, is healthy and well-fed.

Getty Images: Ahmed Jihad Ibrahim Al-arini/Anadolu

The New York Times published the image on its front page and across its main digital platforms, reaching tens of millions of readers. Their correction was quietly posted on a much smaller PR account with a fraction of the reach. Some outlets issued similar clarifications, but by then the damage was done. The viral omission had already cemented itself in public consciousness, while the retraction was hidden in the fine print.

Then there’s Osama al-Raqab, whose photo was also widely circulated by major outlets such as the BBC, Al Jazeera, CNN, and others, prompting accusations that his image was used as proof of Israeli cruelty. He is not malnourished due to famine, but is living with cystic fibrosis, a genetic condition that can result in severe weight loss. Israel coordinated his evacuation to Italy for treatment.

Of course, much of the nuance gets lost. Food shortages, lack of medical care, and the brutal realities of war can worsen the conditions of vulnerable children, especially those with pre-existing disorders. Of course not every image is fake, and there is real suffering in Gaza. But false or misleading images are deliberately selected to go viral. In a propaganda war, that’s the strategy. And it is amplified by the very media outlets entrusted to uphold truth.

It is staggering to watch institutions like the New York Times, BBC, and The Guardian broadcast inflammatory images without basic verification or context. They are the so-called arbiters of truth, pumping out disinformation to millions while abandoning the most elementary principles of journalism. It is systemic, widespread, and profoundly irresponsible.

Children deserve protection, not exploitation. Their suffering should never be weaponised. A starving child is not a political tool. A child with a medical condition is not a photo op. Reducing them to propaganda dehumanises them all over again.

I’m not pretending Israel is above propaganda, either. Every country engages in it. In the age of AI and digital warfare, a nation that doesn’t will lose. But only when it comes to Israel are these tactics weaponised into collective moral indictments that reach the front page of the New York Times and treated as definitive proof of genocide.

If there is starvation in Gaza (and I am not denying that there is), why are we being shown children with congenital disorders while their healthy siblings are cropped out? Why are images lifted from Yemen, Syria, and Turkey passed off as current events? Why are AI-generated photos of civilians begging for food with two right hands being broadcast as fact? Why are mainstream tabloids flooding feeds with unverified footage stripped of context? And why are we so eager to suspend even the bare minimum of scepticism when it comes to anything that incriminates Jews?

These narratives don’t just stay within activist circles or media headlines; they seep into the culture. They’re channelled into viral infographics, TikTok soundbites, and propaganda memes designed to look like activism.

For example, this cartoon that popped up in my feed earlier today revives classic antisemitic tropes under the guise of political critique. The Jewish (or “Zionist”) politician is shown with blood on her hands, an unmistakable nod to the medieval blood libel, and portrayed as wielding outsized power to suppress dissent, control government, and silence uncomfortable truths.

These aren’t even the obvious caricatures like the hooked-nose Zionist with a greedy grin and money clenched in his fists. Though those still circulate. This is the subtler kind, shared by people who genuinely believe they are not antisemitic. Every share, every slander disguised as activism, every time good people stay silent, it normalises real-world violence, just as the blood libel always has.

I don’t know how to break the spell. I’ve tried logic. I’ve tried empathy. I’ve tried facts. But for those infected by this mind-virus, any challenge to the narrative is treated as heresy.

I used to wonder how it happened in the 1930s. How decent people turned on their neighbours. How the slow drip of dehumanisation gave way to open hatred. How entire societies convinced themselves they were on the side of virtue while participating in something monstrous.

I don’t wonder anymore.

The scariest part is, these people still think they’re the good guys. They believe they’re standing for justice, for truth, for the oppressed, while parroting blood libels ripped straight out of a Nazi pamphlet or a Stalinist show trial.

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