At a time where all of us are learning to innovate digitally – much of it for good, as will be shown by today’s Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony – there are some who are trying an innovation of their own: to exploit fear and anxiety in a way that only sows hatred in society.
Sadly, this kind of innovation is being employed by individuals that would seek to disrespect, diminish or even deny the Holocaust and hurt Jewish people. This is particularly true when it comes to the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the extremes, we have seen far-Right activists call for the targeting of Jews with coronavirus. Sickeningly branded ‘the Holocough’, the command was to ‘spread the flu to every Jew’. However, online, the term spread chaotically and was interspersed with other conspiracies that blamed Jews for inventing the virus – whether or not the posters believed it to be real. In this way, age-old antisemitic tropes were repurposed for a social media crowd with potentially deadly consequences.
Blaming Jews for disease and pandemics is not new. Tens of thousands of Jewish people were falsely accused of poisoning wells in the mid-14th century, wrongly arrested, tortured and burned for supposedly causing the deaths of millions during the Black Death. In New York, in the 19th century, Jewish and Italian immigrants were blamed for tuberculosis, which was branded ‘the Jewish disease’. In the 20th century it was the Nazis blaming Jews for typhus and in 2019, Jews were blamed for a measles outbreak in New York.
These conspiracies, despite having no foundation in reality, do have real-life consequences. Writer Olivia Fletcher, herself Jewish, has recounted how she felt at seeing a sign displayed during a lockdown protest blaming the restrictions on the ‘Zionist Press’.
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