Jonathan Cook – jonathan-cook.net Aug 8, 2025
The more depraved Israel’s actions, the more antisemitic it is to point out the truth. The painful reality is that, through Israel, the West can dress up boilerplate colonialism as a ‘Jewish’ project
There’s a dangerous paradox that helps to dissuade people, especially public figures, from speaking up even as Israel’s genocide in Gaza grows more horrifying by the day. Let us call it the “blood libel” paradox.
It works like this. In Medieval times, Jews were accused of murdering non-Jews, particularly children, to use their blood in the performance of religious rituals. Every time a Jew is accused of murdering a non-Jew, so the thinking goes, this endangers Jews by fuelling the very kind of antisemitism that ultimately led to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.
Responsible people, or at least those with a reputation to protect, therefore avoid making any statements that might contribute to the impression that Jews – or in this case, the soldiers of the Jewish state of Israel – are killing non-Jews.
If such criticisms are made, they must be carefully couched by western politicians, the media and public figures in language that makes the killing of non-Jews – in this case, Muslim and Christian Palestinians – appear reasonable.
Israel is simply “defending itself” in killing and maiming 100,000s of civilians in Gaza after Hamas’ one-day attack on 7 October 2023.
The enclave’s masses of dead innocents are just the unfortunate price paid to secure the “return of Israeli hostages” held by Hamas.
Israel’s active, months-long starvation of Gaza’s children is a “humanitarian crisis”, not a crime against humanity.
Anyone who dissents from this narrative is denounced as an antisemite, whether they be millions of ordinary people; every respected human rights organisation in the world, including the Israeli group B’Tselem; the World Health Organisation; the International Criminal Court; genocide scholars like Omer Bartov, himself an Israeli; and so on.
It is the perfect, self-reinforcing loop, one entirely divorced from the reality being live-streamed to us daily.
Aid death traps
The outrageous consequences of the “blood libel” paradox were highlighted a year into Israel’s genocide in Gaza by the Jewish writer Howard Jacobson.
Writing in the Observer newspaper, he accused the western media of a “blood libel” for reporting the fact that children were dying in enormous numbers in Gaza – even though that same media had been keen to minimise the death toll; implicitly questioned its truthfulness by attributing the number to the “Hamas-run Gaza health ministry”; and constantly rationalised the killings as part of Israeli military operations to “defeat Hamas”.
Jacobson, like other fervent apologists for genocide, wanted more. He demanded the media avert its eyes from the slaughter entirely.
Since then, Israel’s crimes against the people of Gaza have become ever more shocking, hard though that was to imagine nearly a year ago.
Israel has stopped food from reaching Gaza except through a mercenary force it has set up with the US, misnamed the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation”.
Its job, as whistleblowing Israeli soldiers have told us, is to lure the ablest from among the starving masses – mainly young Palestinian men – into death traps with the promise of food. Once there, Israel carries out what Doctors without Borders calls “orchestrated killing” by shooting at them.
Israel has armed and hired as its Gaza goons a criminal gang under the leadership of ISIS supporter Yasser Abu Shabab. Their job has been to loot aid trucks that try to operate outside the GHF set-up and steal aid from ordinary people, sowing further terror and chaos and allowing Israel to blame Hamas for Gaza’s starvation.
Far-right Israelis – that is, the people who elected the Netanyahu government – have been filmed stopping aid trucks trying to transport from Jordan food supposed to reach Gaza’s people, even as children are regularly dying from malnutrition.
And eminent western doctors such as Nick Maynard are returning from Gaza with the same horror stories: that they see Israeli soldiers using Palestinian children as target practice. One day the gunshot wounds in the children arriving at hospital are clustered in the head. The next day in the chest. The next day in the abdomen. The next day in the genitals.
The “blood libel” paradox means that Israel can act with ever more brazen depravity – of the kind documented above – and western leaders and media continue to ignore, or downplay, or rationalise these horrors.
It is the ultimate “get out of jail” card.
Phoney ‘fog of war’
There are several points to be made about why this is such a dangerous response to the Gaza genocide – but one, equally, that is all too useful for western capitals.
First, and most obviously. Israel is not “the Jews”. It is a state. Not just that, but it was founded as a very specific kind of state: one that is the last exemplar of a long and very ignoble tradition of western-sponsored settler-colonialism.
Settler-colonialism seeks to replace a native population with western-aligned immigrants through extreme ethnic-based violence. Think the United States, Canada, Australia and South Africa. They all committed appalling crimes against their indigenous populations.
Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians is not unusual. It is the all-too-familiar, logical consequence of a racist colonial replacement ideology. We have been here many times before in modern history. If it wasn’t a blood libel in those earlier cases – but rather an established historical fact – why should Israel’s genocide be viewed any differently?
Second, this genocide is not Israel’s. It is the West’s. This is utterly a western co-production. Israel could have done none of the destruction of Gaza, the mass slaughter, the starvation of the population, without western assistance every step of the way.
It has been US and German bombs dropped on Gaza. It is British spy flights over Gaza from RAF base Akrotiri on Cyprus that have been providing intelligence to Israel. It is western capitals that have been repressing protest and making it a terror offence to try to stop the genocide.
It is the US and Britain that have been sanctioning and threatening the International Criminal Court to force it to reverse its decision to seek Netanyahu’s arrest for starving Gaza’s population. It has been western capitals staying silent as their citizens have been taken hostage by Israel illegally in international waters for trying to bring aid to Gaza.
And it is the western media that first lamely accepted its exclusion from Gaza by Israel, then barely reported Israel’s unprecedented mass murder of Gaza’s local journalists, and now eagerly conscripts its exclusion as the excuse for failing to scrutinise Israel’s actions amid a supposed “fog of war”.
New research shows Israel’s slaughter in Gaza has killed more journalists than the US Civil War, World Wars 1 and 2, the Korean War, the Vietnam war, the Yugoslav Wars, the Afghanistan War and the Ukraine War COMBINED.
More: https://t.co/YJi8bdIm9Y pic.twitter.com/p8XJSZpj3a
— Jonathan Cook (@Jonathan_K_Cook) April 1, 2025
If noting that a genocide is taking place in Gaza amounts to a “blood libel”, then every western government is implicated in that libel. Are they all to be let off the hook? They very much hope that you will think that way.
Insurance policy
And third, it would be astonishing if Israel weren’t committing a genocide in Gaza, given that its every crime against the Palestinians has been supported decade after decade by the West.Israel has grown emboldened. The “blood libel” paradox has been its insurance policy against scrutiny and criticism.
The West has given Israel a permanent licence to brutalise the Palestinians, to ethnically cleanse them, to steal their land, and to kill them. The worse it behaves, the more the “blood libel” kicks in to shut down criticism. The more depraved Israel’s actions are, the more antisemitic it becomes to point out the truth.
For more than a century, generation after generation of western leaders have been backing Israel to the hilt. Why would Israel not conclude that there are no red lines, that it can do as it pleases and that the West will still arm it and still justify its crimes as “defence” and “counter-terrorism”?
The “blood libel” doesn’t protect Jews from another genocide. It licences Israel to destroy the Palestinian people, and to savagely bomb its neighbours, with utter impunity, while western leaders remain tight-lipped in a way they would never do were it Russia, China or Iran committing far less egregious atrocities.
Which, of course, is exactly what encourages antisemitism. Utterly baffled by this state of affairs, some observers are fooled into imagining that the only possible reason is that Israel controls the West; that it has special, unseen powers to intimidate the US, the strongest, most militarised state in history; and that behind all this, Jews and Jewish money are what pulls the levers in western capitals.
That assumption is a flight from a far more difficult, painful reality: that Israel is the bastard child of the West. It is nothing exceptional or extraordinary. It is white, western, colonial, genocidal racism, repackaged as a supposedly “Jewish” project.
Israel can carry out its crimes in the promotion of western control over the oil-rich Middle East, and the West knows that any criticism of its imperial control and pillage can be dismissed as antisemitism.
It’s win-win for colonialism. It’s lose-lose for our humanity.
there is no antisemitismus like the
antigermanismus/antiwhitism ,
antiamalek/antigoyism of the jews !
GOYIM STAND UP !
christians, moslems, atheists stand up !
CALL NO MAN
HAPPY TILL HE IS
DEAD, A PLANET
IN CHAOS, AND
THE INNOCENT
ARE BLED,
ALL ROADS LEAD
TO CHAOS THIS
WORLD IS CONDEMNED
MISERY ABOUNDS AND
IT NEVER ENDS
Blood Libel now is it and not antisemitism?
Haven’t read article yet, but quickly scrolled through it.
I can see ‘Blood Libel’ is in it in a few different places.
What chutzpah coming from the Jews
The Israeli-Palestinian psyop must go on for the mush-brained whites. Keep the white West focused on Israel all the time & some fantasy wog ‘genocide’. Takes the heat off & attention away from the reality of western Jews orchestrating the destruction of Westworld via their 7-8 billion wog invader army.
“…fueling the very kind of antisemitism that ultimately led to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.”??? – Jonathan Cook. Is this guy a Jew? Jews always use Jon instead of John, lest they be misidentified as a Gentile.
I’m surprised at all the writers today who apparently still believe in the Holohoax, which has been debunked x10. There’s zero doubt it was a Jew construct that didn’t hit come out ’till 1967!
Also, the “Blood Libel” accusation is 100% TRUE! And it’s STILL happening!
The Protocols are also 100% TRUE. Jewry is an Insane, Satanic Death Cult masquerading as a religion and the all-time scum of the earth. Devils incarnate. The biggest threat to Humanity & peace on earth. Jewry must be dealt with!
In Gaza, Israel has written its history in stone. No amount of washing will clean its bloody hands. The world will not forget the deeds of these murderous beggars of our sympathies.
“Israel is not the Jews”, which is the same trick used by Koestler and Benjamin Freedman, except that their excuse was a special one. Somehow a country does something and only Jews are allowed to live there, but it’s not the Jews doing it. A Left-winger simply has to blame Whitey
Commie CIA-KGB Cook wants us to believe that Israel is simply some colonial outpost of the ‘white governed’ West , instead of the reality that Jews control all these western ‘nations’..lol. Shitrag also claims Jews are ‘white’. When did negroidal mongrels (Semites) become ‘white’?
The unfortunate thing about Gaza is that innocent people are being murdered, and the survivors are being cleared off of their land. Last I heard that kind of conduct was simply “evil”. As for “blood libel”, in light of what is going on in Gaza and views of most Jews theses says, it may not have been libel at all. Yet, in looking at our own histories, it is all appears very “American” or “British” and even “Biblical” to slaughter and replace rival peoples or groups for the advancement of one’s own kind. However, is that not the history of the world and the main reason for conversion to a different idea of “blood” and the primacy of genealogical and biological blood lines?
In the writings of the ancient Hebrews, the extermination of rival peoples was justified and even blessed for a variety of reasons, but it all really came down to the advancement and exclusivity of their own genealogy and blood lines. When their Messiah finally came along a goodly portion of them chose to follow him and let his most pure, entitled and divine blood flow to all people, Jew and Gentile alike. However, most of those of the Hebrew faith rejected him, and in a very literal sense, they became the “anti Christ”, and right down to this day, doing their best to wipe Christianity off of the face of the earth, despite the fact that it is the universal blood and fellowship of Christ extended to all people who will accept him, whose teachings, moral restraints and inclusiveness is the only real basis of their own protection and survival reaming to this day. If fact, they are proving that if they have the right to kill and harm one group or kind of people in their power, they have to right to kill and harm any group or kind in their power. Consequently, they are saying that any group of kind of people more powerful than themselves has a right to exterminate their own kind.
You can cite the history of persecutions and pogroms against the Jews occurring in the past in so-called “Christian” nations and communities, but all of those historical evils, on analysis, have been a result of the same rejection of the true Messiah as the Jews have practiced since his coming. However, it does not make it right for anyone to do to their rivals what their rivals would do to them. In Christian teaching, other than real self-defence, it makes the persecutions and pogroms wrong.
The problem is that unless you have universal standards in which the true power of God, which is grace, is open to flow to all peoples regardless of bloodlines, you really do not have any moral standards with sufficient force or motivation to condemn let alone to prevent any great evil such as genocide.
The reason why Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox “Christians” are so cowed, lax and weak in condemning the slaughter of the Palestinians to make way for the Jews, is because their “faith” professes a false blood, which is not the blood of Christ. They look back to the sins of their own forefathers in the various land clearances which made way for them and their own prosperity, and they immediately become neutralized. They fail to realize that there was always a minority of true Christians who opposed the very idea of exterminating the unwanted in their midst and in the way of their interests, just as there are only a minority of Christians today who oppose abortion.
In considering the Nazi state of Germany in the 1930’s and 40’s, which was set upon cleansing their entire society from all so-called “inferior” bloods, we see a nation in which those who were able to seize the reins of power, were as amoral, ruthless and exclusive as the communists and Jews they condemned. In fact, Hitler and his bunch had rejected Christianity entirely, and most certainly they rejected as do the Jews any idea of the blood of their covenants with God being a universal outpouring to all peoples for their reconciliation to God. If anything, Hitler and his inner circle were throwbacks to pre-Christian times in which there was no such light. They embraced as their guide the rejection of conscience to make way for the “will to power” as well as many other sick ideas which came from the twisted anti-Christian and anti-Socratic mind of Friedrich Nietzsche. In effect, and by virtue of the support of all of those in that dire movement, and the same as all of those who have supported the purges by the communists of dissidents in their power, they belonged as much to the anti-Christ and the devil as the majority of the Jews who are supporting the holocaust of the Palestinians.
The point is that when you look at our histories together with all of the weak, lifeless and powerless secular principles indented to curtail our evils and protect people, all we see is the shedding of innocent blood and all to no avail. Unjust wars and ethnic cleansing operations are all entirely Kosher if you have the power to get away with them. The overwhelming majority of the people in the West and in the rest of the world really could care less about the slaughter of Palestinians, Syrians or Ukrainians to make way for what the “major powers” want. If they did they would lock down their own governments for their silence and compliance to all of the gross evils, even the ones allegedly committed on their benefit.
In fact, we are all sleepwalking to our own demise and deaths, which come anyway- all eventually we go to the deep sleep – with most of the people wagering that death is finality for them and all that matters is either a good time in this life and/or the advancement of their own exclusive kind. Yet, that finality is a fixity to the Christian mind, or ought to be, such that all they believe and do in this life they realize has eternal consequences, which view is the only real power to banish the rule that and belief that might makes right, which is the mark of the anti-Christ.
The facts are that the Jews have not changed for the better since the time of Christ, and in rejecting him they have become even more exclusive, turned in on themselves, and away from God in their steadfast rejection of his universal divine fellowship, extending to all who will accept him.
As for the West which has undergone only a superficial conversion, not even the truth will save it. First of all, we appear only to be interested in truths which serve our interests, and secondly, when we have no real interest in God, and eternal ends, the result is that we become fixed to the temporal order, which makes for a great deal of competition, evil and exploitation visited on any outsiders too weak to defend themselves.
There are still real heights in the realm of the TRUTH for the Jews who choose Christ.
“The Universe Had a Beginning: Why That Shook Einstein”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl0HRrElzGw
antiJHWH:
“there is no antisemitismus like the
antigermanismus/antiwhitism ,
antiamalek/antigoyism of the jews !”
And not to forget; antiiranianism and antirussianism. The none-semittic Jews can’t get over that it was the Russians together with Vikings and Persians who crushed their Satanic Khazaria some time after the Khazarians had converted to Talmudism in 740 AD.
You are absolutely right. The Jews even have the world’s only racist ‘religion’ – Judaism, and even worse; Talmudism, to lead them.
spread the pictures of Gazas rubble/ruins + the
pictures of mutilated, injured children to the
ends of the world ! that the whole world sees
israhells atrocities (Irak/Kuwait atrocities did
not exist, jew ly) : but now the fotos exist + they
are not AIgenerated like some here want to tell.
John Eight Fortyfour on August 10, 2025 at 11:45 pm
‘… their Satanic Khazaria …’
Perhaps my research has been inadequate, but I have not been able to find a historic basis for the concept ‘Khazaria’. Frankly, I have thought of it as Arthur Koestler’s theory/sophism/hoax. John, I should be grateful for any light you might shed on this,