Blood, money and Jews

Op-ed: Muslim, Western states fund modern-day blood libels against the Jewish state
Giulio Meotti, YNET

The global atmosphere has been poisoned by an ocean of oily, bloody money that feeds those who incite anti-Jewish riots, promote divestments from Israel and spread blood libels under the guise of “objective journalism.”

Some academic careers are funded by those who believe Jews have no right to exist. Saudi Arabia spent one hundred billion dollars to spread Wahhabism in the West, the most anti-Semitic version of Islam (the Soviet Union during the Cold War invested much less for its propaganda.)

Currently there are 17 federally funded centers on American campuses devoted to Middle Eastern studies: All of these support pro-Islamist and anti-Israel ideas. Stephen Schwartz, director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, just summarized these in a report for the Middle East Forum. Georgetown, the oldest Catholic university in the US, received 40 million dollars from the Saudis.

Also on the list of Riyadh’s “beneficiaries” is Harvard, the jewel of the Ivy League, with about 30 million dollars. Meanwhile, some 20 million dollars were donated to the Middle East Studies Center at the University of Arkansas; 5 million dollars to the Center for Middle East Studies at Berkeley; 11 million to Cornell University, and the list goes on.

The Arabs are also exporting hatred in Europe. St. Andrews University, the cradle of British royal nobility, got hundred of thousands of pounds from Damascus to fund a center for “Syrian studies” there. The London School of Economics, one of the world’s best known universities, on Saif al-Islam Gaddafi, the son of the former Libyan dictator, who then donated half a million pounds to the school.

European money
Elsewhere, Oxford has a research center funded by Iran, while at Cambridge the funds come from Saudi Arabia, Oman and Iran. Eight universities, including Oxford and Cambridge, have accepted more than 233.5 million pounds sterling from Muslim sources since 1995.

The NGOs involved in de-legitimization of Jews are funded not only by these Arab states. NGOs get money from Europe to legally and politically put the State of Israel on trial: Addameer ($207,000 from Sweden); Al Haq ($426,000 from Holland, $88,000 from the economically-struggling Ireland and $156,000 from Norway); this list also goes on, and on.

The stereotype that connects Jews and money goes back to early Christianity, where the story of Jesus confronting the money changers became a symbol for the nefarious role of Jews in greedy financial pursuits. Demagogues like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and former Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad also accused Jews of controlling the world’s finances. Shakespeare’s Shylock and his pound of flesh have caused shudders in many generations of Jews.

Now, by financing anti-Semitism and working as the money laundering mechanism of Islamist hatred, Muslim and Western states are helping to create new blood libels worldwide.

Giulio Meotti, a journalist with Il Foglio, is the author of the book A New Shoah: The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism