Conspiracy theorists have been very busy since the start of the coronavirus outbreak with theories blaming a Wuhan lab for accidentally leaking the virus, China engineering it as a biological weapon and some theorists have even drawn attention to a connection between 5G towers and coronavirus.
Now, there's a new theory alleging that Jews are involved in the development of the virus that has claimed more than 265,000 lives around the world.
Jews spreading coronavirus intentionally?
Orthodox Jewish communities have been hit by the outbreak in Israel and other parts of the world, largely because they have ignored several guidelines issued by public health officials and government authorities on social distancing and other efforts to mitigate the deadly virus.
For instance, last month, thousands of Jews gathered for the funeral service of a Hasidic rabbi in Brooklyn, New York City, flouting social distancing norms. This has led many to believe that the Jews are intentionally spreading the virus. Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh, in a press conference on March 29, said that they had testimony that some Israeli soldiers were spreading the virus through the door handles of cars.
The accusation that Jews are deliberately spreading the disease is built on a long-standing rumour that dates back hundreds of years. When the Black Plague ravaged Europe in the middle of the 14th Century, killing roughly 50 percent of those infected and one-third of the continent's population at the time, rumours spread that Jewish people were poisoning wells to spread the disease, which ultimately led to the massacre of thousands of Jews in several waves of anti-Semitic persecutions.
Plan for world domination
As pointed out by Haaretz, anonymous posts on the dark web, notorious for being home to users who push the anti-Semitic rhetoric, have started cropping up claiming Jews created the virus not only to spread suffering and disease but to assert its dominance over the world.
A discussion on one of the dark web forums triggered by Trump's unproven theory that COVID-19 was leaked or created in a Chinese lab, led one user to point out "real" origin of the virus. "The kikes get the credit for that one. It was the kikes. It's ALWAYS the kikes."
Another anonymous user shared a cartoon illustrating an Orthodox Jew, rubbing his hands and bulging his eyes as he stares at a magnified coronavirus microbe. "Loots the treasury...martial law...plausible deniability for engineered economic collapse...never let a crisis go to waste!..." the text on the drawing reads, "It's not Chinese. It's the JEW FLU!"
Jews blamed for coronavirus pandemic
The accusations go beyond the dark side of the internet. During a recent protest in Ohio against the state's stay-at-home restrictions, a demonstrator was spotted holding a sign featuring the colours of the Israeli flag, a caricature of a rat and the caption, "the real plague."
Yemeni scholar Ibrahim al-Ubeidi said in a sermon last month that Jews had created the coronavirus pandemic to shut down the Islamic holy sites in Mecca and Medina, which he claims they've been plotting for centuries.
