Jews as child killers: antisemitic incitement from the Middle Ages to Ali Abunimah (Petra Marquardt-Bigman)

Ali Abunimah and his Electronic Intifada colleague Asa Winstanley marked last week’s International Women’s Day by denouncing a Reuters report that described “Israel’s women combat soldiers” as being “on [the] frontline of battle for equality.” As far as the Electronic Intifada crew was concerned, this was a “Pathetic Reuters propaganda piece for Israel’s occupying killers” because these Israeli women should be condemned as having joined a “battle for equal rights to murder Palestinian babies.” Judging from the 90 re-tweets and 66 “hearts” the tweet garnered, many of their fans appreciated this view.

Since accusing Jews of murdering babies has been a favorite of Jew-haters since the Middle Ages, I thought it was perhaps time to document that Abunimah is one of the foremost purveyors of this age-old calumny in our time. The slideshow below offers just a glimpse of the numerous examples that can be found in Abunimah’s Twitter output, reflecting his ceaseless efforts to demonize the world’s only Jewish state in pretty much the same terms that Jew-haters from the Middle Ages to the Nazi “Third Reich” found so useful.

Let me just add a few relevant points that are useful to keep in mind when you watch the slideshow. While Abunimah relentlessly accuses Israel of wantonly murdering Palestinian children, he himself glorifies terror groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad – that are only too happy when they succeed in murdering Israeli children – as noble “resistance,” or as the “Palestinian defense forces.” And Abunimah has nothing to say about the obscene glorification of killers – including the killers of Israeli children – by Palestinian and Arab society. The most recent example is from today’s news about the hero’s welcome prepared for the Jordanian soldier who was just released from prison after serving a 20 year sentence for killing seven Israeli school girls on March 13, 1997, during a school field trip to the “Island of Peace,” a joint Israeli-Jordanian tourist resort. But given Abunimah’s open admiration for groups like Hamas and Islamic Jihad, it seems fair to assume that as the son of a high-ranking Jordanian diplomat, he may well warmly sympathize with the glorification of this killer by his fellow-Jordanians.