These blood libels are endangering Jews

We need to talk about the feverish pathology of Israelophobia. There is no calumny so preposterous, no rumour so unhinged, that it cannot be vomited up by those who have prostrated themselves before the maniacal hatred for the Jewish State. The latest lie is their sickest yet. It is this: that Israel has become such a hellish entity, so utterly the enemy of humanity, that it is training dogs to rape Palestinians.

None other than Francesca Albanese, the UN’s special rapporteur for the Palestinian territories, has given voice to this abominable slander. This week, she decried the unholy barbarism of the Jewish nation. They have ‘burned’ Palestinians, she said. They have tortured them and then amputated without anesthesia their limbs that were ravaged in that torture. And they have raped them. Both the soldiers of the Jewish State and their mutts are carrying out rapes, she said. Palestinian detainees have their faces forced into a toilet as ‘trained dogs’ violate them from behind, she said, with wide, demented eyes.

It is being lapped up in the swirling digital cesspit of Israelophobia. Israel is a ‘rapist state’, cry mobs of sun-starved haters. They are ‘demons’ and ‘animals’, wail the spreaders of the dog-rape libel. And still they expect us to believe they’re just ‘critics of Israel’ even as they brand its people a fiendish, diabolical stain on humanity, just as those mobs did 900 years ago before setting fire to a stake with a Jew on it.

There is not a scintilla of evidence for Albanese’s heinous tale of Israelis shoving men’s faces into toilets and then instructing dogs to rape them. She seems to have got it from Owen Jones of the Guardian, who has spent the past week mainstreaming this grotesque, evidence-free story. ‘Israel is raping Palestians with dogs’, says the headline to his piece, as he invites readers to think of this bigoted canard as absolute truth.

Yet as Honest Reporting says, the dog-rape libel – ‘among the vilest and most stomach-churning libels ever cooked up about Israel’ – is the bastard offspring of frothing, prejudicial hearsay. It points out that Jones relies heavily on Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor, a ‘grotesquely anti-Israel outfit’ that is responsible for various ‘deranged conspiracy theories’ about the Jewish homeland. Jones only quotes anonymous Palestinian detainees, meaning none of the claims can be verified. And his claim that ‘Israeli soldiers’ have verified reports of dog rape is a reference to the fact that an Israeli academic called Shaiel Ben-Ephraim says he spoke to IDF soldiers who had ‘heard about it’. That thing you can smell is bullshit.

There is not one mainstream media outlet that would give space to such a delirious, unfounded story. Even the Guardian, the bible of bourgeois anti-Zionists, would likely say: ‘Evidence, please.’ Perhaps that’s why Jones published his screed, with its wail about how ‘there are no limits to the depravity’ of the Zionist entity, on his personal website.

Isn’t it amazing that when Jones viewed Hamas’s self-filmed footage of its fascistic pogrom of 7 October 2023 – which included a clip of a murdered Jew with her underwear torn off – he said: ‘If there was rape and sexual violence committed, we don’t see this on the footage.’ Yet when known haters of Israel say dogs are raping Palestinians, he repeats it verbatim. The Jewish State is never believed; its sworn enemies always are. There’s a word for this: prejudice.

The leftist outlet Novara Media has also run with the dog-rape tale. It quotes a source saying IDF soliders brutishly rape Palestinians ‘with a dog or with a stick’ in order to make sure they will never again be able to ‘live their lives normally’. These beastly assaults by the trained canines of the Jewish nation are yet another brutish venting of Israel’s ‘genocidal intentions’, apparently.

Let us be clear: this is not journalism, it’s atrocity propaganda. It is not a search for the truth, but a wide-eyed embrace of lies that flatter one’s pre-existing view of Israel as a uniquely demonic entity. It is not reportage, it is slander. Journalism entails finding facts, checking facts, assessing the reliability of sources, and then exhaustively verifying the claims made by those sources. None of that has happened here. The dog-rape tale is nothing more than the repetition of bizarre rumours for the titillation of a global audience convinced that Israel is the wickedest state to ever exist.

Truth is not the intention here – demonisation is. You can tell this from the frenzied podcast Jones made to accompany his batshit article. Reading and writing about the ‘indescribably horrific’ crime of Israeli dog-rape was like ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’, he says. ‘You will rightly ask yourself’, he says to listeners waiting with lolling tongues for yet further confirmation of Israel’s wickedness, ‘how any human being could possibly imagine these crimes, let alone actually perpetrate them’.

This isn’t journalism. It’s certainly not anti-imperialism. It is nothing I would recognise as ‘progressive’ commentary. It is a medieval morality play, where the mob is invited to marvel and gag over the fathomless depravity of the Jewish State. It is of a piece with Jones’s religious mania over Israel, a nation he says is ‘uniquely murderous’ and in the grip of a ‘genocidal mania’. As for its ‘cheerleaders’, who have succumbed to ‘depravity’, he hopes they will be ‘haunted by the souls of the slaughtered Palestinians… until the end of time’. These are the ramblings of a mind rendered unstable by obsessive, one-eyed loathing for Israel.

The dog-rape tale leaves no doubt – ancient blood libels are being rehashed in the phoney langage of ‘criticism of Israel’. The Jewish people were once accused of lusting after the blood of Christian children – now the Jewish State is accused of intentionally murdering Palestinian children. The Jews were once said to be the secret puppetmasters of politics – now the Jewish nation is said to have the mighty West eating from the palm of its hand. Jews were once branded as agents of Satan, doing his diabolical work on Earth – now they are said to deploy dogs in their genocidal crimes and in the process are ‘opening a door to the darkest recesses of Hell’. Are we seriously expected to believe it is wholly coincidental that all the dangerous shit that was once said about Jews is now said about the Jewish State? Yeah, I’m not buying it. To me, it feels like medieval calumnies are being reanimated on the altar of a deranged loathing for the world’s only Jewish nation.

That Francesca Albanese is spreading the dog-rape story takes the blood-libel crisis to a whole new level. This is a UN official. These are dangerous times. There was a stabbing in Golders Green just today. History tells us that blood libels beget violence. Burnings and pogroms followed the medieval myths about Jews being child-killers and well-poisoners. In the past year, we’ve seen Jews in England be violently attacked and stabbed by people calling them baby-killers. How long before the knife is wielded by monsters calling them rapist dogs, too?

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.