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Sean Gannon is a freelance writer and researcher on Irish and Israeli affairs, specialising in the relationship between the two countries. He is currently preparing a book on this subject and writing the chapter on Ireland for a forthcoming study on the interplay between Anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and antisemitism in Europe since 9/11.
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By Sean Gannon
November 20, 2003
Scarcely a month now seems to go by without the resurrection or repackaging somewhere in the world of one classic anti-Semitic libel or another. First Mel Gibson dusted off of the ancient charge of deicide for presentation in his forthcoming film on the final hours of Christ. Then came Cardinal Oscar Andres Rodriguez Meridiaga, the Archbishop of Tegucigalpa, Honduras, with his crackpot claims about the 'Jewish-controlled' mass media and its Israeli-inspired "persecution" of the Catholic Church. This was followed in October by Mohammed Mahathir's notorious revival of the idea of an international Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination while, meanwhile in Germany, Martin Hohmann MP, gave a speech in which he dredged up that most overworked of twentieth century anti-Semitic canards - Jewish responsibility for Bolshevism and its crimes.
Then last week Chairman Arafat staked his claim for inclusion in this year's list of anti-Semites of international standing by giving another public outing to his favorite anti-Semitic libel, that of the 'poisoner-Jew.' Drawing on Black Death-era beliefs about Jews and disease, he told the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah on November 12th that the IDF was deliberately using depleted uranium and "gaseous bombs" in the territories, causing a precipitous rise in cancer and sterility rates amongst the Palestinian population. Just three days before his speech to the PLA, he had privately told a visiting French delegation that depleted uranium (DU) was responsible for a Palestinian cancer rate equivalent to that caused by the Hiroshima bomb.
This was not the first time that Arafat leveled this charge at Israel. In January 2001, he told the World Economic Forum at Davos that the IDF was poisoning the Palestinians with depleted uranium, noxious gases and weaponized toxic waste, an allegation he repeated at the Arab Summit in Beirut two months later. His mouthpiece, al-Hayat al-Jadidah, even suggested that DU was responsible for congenital deformities in dozens of babies at Shafaa hospital in Gaza. One year later and just two weeks after a British report on the substance warned of the possible ill-effects of contaminated water and soil on the health of local populations, Arafat told al-Jazeera that Israel's use of DU against the Palestinians had been confirmed by the United States.
Of course, Chairman Arafat is not alone in his use of the 'poisoner-Jew' libel to vilify Israel; indeed, it has been a mainstay of the Palestinian Authority's propaganda war against the Jewish state in recent years. In June 1997, for instance, the Palestinian Authority accused the IDF of "an organized plan and conspiracy ... to poison and harm the Palestinian population" by distributing poisoned food while, one month later, it alleged that Israel was flooding the West Bank with hundreds of tons of toxic chewing gum which "completely destroyed the genetic systems" of young boys and drove girls crazy with sexual desire, thus compromising their honor as Moslems.
Then, in December, the director of the PA Committee for Consumer Protection claimed that Israel was knowingly importing chocolate infected with Mad Cow Disease into Palestinian cities. Two years later, Arafat's wife, Suha, told an audience which included Hillary Clinton, of the "intensive daily use of poison gas by Israeli forces" and their poisoning of 80% of Arab water with carcinogenic "chemical materials." And, in May 2001, the official PA news agency, WAFA, reported that Israel had "started a new genocide against the Palestinian people by poisoning them, using poisoned candy bags dropped down from airplanes." Routinely reported also are the 'facts' that Israel deliberately infects Arab children with AIDS and sends HIV-positive prostitutes into Egypt to spread the disease there.
The sheer outlandishness of such accusations has not prevented their being taken seriously outside of the virulently anti-Semitic Arab and wider Islamic worlds. In the most notorious example, the Western world weighed in on the side of the Palestinians in March 1983 when they condemned what transpired to be an outbreak of mass hysteria amongst hundreds of schoolgirls on the West Bank as an Israeli attempt to sterilize them through mass poisoning. Not only was Israel denounced by the Arab League and the Organization of the Islamic Conference, but the Western media, particularly in Europe, reported that there existed evidence to support the charge. Israel was actually criticized for its supposed actions in the United Nations with even the U.S. delegate, Jean Kirkpatrick, inveighing against it in the Security Council.
Twenty years later, it is clear that the myth of the 'poisoner-Jew' still resonates in some supposedly more enlightened Western societies. For despite Israel's dismissal of them as "false and contemptible," Arafat's continuing claims about the use of poisons against the Palestinians, particularly those about depleted uranium and gas, are being given creeping credence abroad. They have been often uncritically reported in the media, presented as proven facts in online forums and been investigated by anti-Israel organizations such as the U.S.-based International Action Center.
Chairman Arafat is doing his best to capitalize on the world's willingness to believe. All foreign visitors to his Mukata compound are treated to a lecture on Israel's poisoning of his people and are presented with a dossier of 'proof' that the IDF is using DU against "the sons of our people."
Today, with most of his 'guests' hailing from a Europe disposed to believe any calumny directed against the government in Jerusalem, Arafat's 'poison' propaganda must be exposed for what it is - a calculated repackaging of a centuries-old slander, a modern anti-Zionist adaptation of a mediaeval anti-Semitic myth which seeks to delegitimize the Jewish state by demonizing the Jewish people.
In short, a naked example of the 'new anti-Semitism.'
Views expressed by the author do not
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