From Blood Libel to Genocide: How Antisemitic Propaganda Weaponizes Intent

“Israel burns children alive.” “Israel beheads babies.” “Israel bombs hospitals.”

In most wars, civilian deaths, however tragic, are recognized as collateral to military objectives. But when it comes to Israel, the deaths of children are not presented as the devastating consequence of urban warfare, but as its purpose. Headlines and slogans claim that Israel “burns children,” not that children died in an airstrike. This linguistic move shifts the narrative from effect to intent, painting Israel not just as reckless, but as sadistic. It suggests to the audience that the deaths of innocents are the goal, rather than a horrific outcome of urban warfare against an enemy that embeds itself among civilians precisely to manufacture such casualties. In today’s discourse, as in centuries past, Jews are not merely blamed for suffering. They are imagined to will it, to revel in it, to pursue it with unique malice. What we are witnessing is not only misinformation. It is the modern return of the blood libel.

At its core is the belief that Jews, uniquely, possess a malevolent intent to harm the innocent, especially children. Though the language has evolved from religious sacrilege, to racial impurity, to human rights discourse, the underlying fantasy of sadistic Jewish intent persists, immune to evidence and driven by emotional reflex.

From the medieval accusation that Jews murdered Christian children for ritual purposes or poisoned village wells during the Black Plague, to Nazi propaganda portraying Jews as sadistic predators of the Aryan race, to Soviet campaigns framing “Zionists” as Nazis and “baby-killers,” to modern claims in Arab media that Jews use Muslim children’s blood for matzah, and to today’s accusations that Israel deliberately targets children, kills for sport, or commits genocide. The horror of the accusation made denial seem suspicious. The absence of proof became proof of concealment. Jewish communities were forced to defend themselves against charges never grounded in fact, but in moral outrage. What use was truth, evidence, legal arguments in the face of a dead child?

That is the self-perpetuating nature of this kind of propaganda. Once intent is assigned, once the Jew becomes the presumed sadist, the infanticide, the defiler, then any counter-evidence is cast as evasion or manipulation. Today, Jews are again asked to “turn out their pockets,” to prove that their defense against terrorism is not in fact a genocidal campaign. And when they do, the evidence is dismissed as propaganda, their grief ignored, their dead dehumanized.

What makes the modern accusation of genocide against Israel so particularly potent, and so dangerously familiar, is that it fuses the language of international law with the emotional architecture of the ancient blood libel. Genocide, by definition, is not simply mass killing. It is distinguished from the broader horrors of war by a singular legal threshold: the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a particular group. The crime lies not in the scale of death but in the purpose behind it. That is what gives genocide its moral gravity.

This is precisely where the accusation against Israel falls apart. The available evidence shows that the civilian suffering in Gaza is immense and heartbreaking, and indeed, that certain military decisions are worthy of scrutiny. But if this were genocide, it would be unlike any genocide in history, one in which the supposed perpetrators repeatedly warned civilians before striking, took documented steps to reduce harm, coordinated the delivery of humanitarian aid, and urged evacuations to safe zones.

The charge of genocide is not grounded in evidence, but in the same logic that animated the blood libel for centuries: the projection of a unique and sadistic intent onto Jews as a people. The absence of evidence is not a flaw in the logic of the blood libel, it is central to its function. The accusation presents itself not as a claim to be proven, but as a moral proposition so emotionally compelling that it bypasses the need for evidence entirely. The proposition fits perfectly into the receptacle of ancient unconscious bias, such that simply raising the question of Jewish sadism is treated as its own answer. The charge is designed to feel true before it is ever examined, and to remain true even after it is disproven.

We see the impact of this rhetoric not just in online discourse, but spray-painted on the walls of synagogues, defacing Holocaust memorials, and printed on protest signs that read “baby-killers” and “genocide-enablers.” Just ask Governor Josh Shapiro if this is a matter of policy critique. Shapiro, one of the most vocal critics of Israel’s current government, but also a Jew, became the target of a campaign that labeled him “Genocide Josh.” His criticism of Netanyahu wasn’t enough to shield him, because in this worldview, Jewish identity alone is evidence of complicity in blood sport.

This propaganda pattern has a still deeper dimension. It is a classic propaganda strategy called “accusation in a mirror.” It describes the tactic of accusing your enemy of the very atrocities you have committed or plan to commit, as a way to justify violence. It was used by the Nazis, by genocidaires in Rwanda, and today by Hamas and its defenders. The atrocities Hamas intentionally filmed itself committing on October 7—rape, arson, child murder, beheading—are projected onto Israel, using identical language.

This is not confusion. It is strategy. By accusing Israel of the very crimes it suffered, without credible evidence, propagandists invert the moral field.

Recognizing this pattern does not negate the truth of the horrors of this war. It is not an attempt to silence grief or dismiss suffering. It is about preserving the moral clarity that underpins any just society. The ability to distinguish between an act committed with intent and one with tragic consequence is not a legal technicality, it is a moral foundation. Our systems of justice, our ethical frameworks, and our very sense of right and wrong depend on that distinction. When we abandon it, especially in the face of propaganda, we don’t just lose the ability to tell truth from falsehood, we risk eroding the very principles that hold our societies together.

We must be able to hold two truths at once. This war is horrific. The civilian suffering is immense. It deserves our moral attention and our grief. But that grief must not be manipulated into justification for hatred. That truth does not require us to assign false intent or to demonize in ways that abandon facts. In fact, doing so serves an entirely different purpose. That purpose is what you have witnessed in Washington and Colorado over the last two weeks.

The moment we move from mourning the death of a child to insisting that Jews intended that death, without evidence apart from a subjective sense of outrage, we have crossed a line from criticism into conspiracy, from politics into propaganda, from truth into the oldest lies. The language may be modern, but the instinct is medieval. The blood libel has returned, not in church sermons or pogroms, but in hashtags and headlines, dressed in the language of justice but speaking in an ancient and familiar voice.