Covid, like plagues before will pass unlike the 2000-year-old persistent plague of antisemitism that defies antidotes

By David E. Kaplan

It was not some low life crazy but a founder and board chair of a Utah tech company Entrata that claimed in an email that the COVID-19 vaccine is part of a genocidal plot by “the Jews” to exterminate people.

David Bateman – who  had to resign his position after his online diatribe attacking the efficacy of the COVID-19 vaccine  – urged people not to get it as it would lead to the “systematic extermination of billions of people” and ultimately “consolidate all the countries in the world under a single flag with totalitarian rule.”

Bateman’s primary motivation for writing this lethal nonsense was:

“I believe the Jews are behind this.”

When faced with having to make an apology to safeguard the company’s brand and reputation, Bateman tried to extricate  himself on his Instagram account that he was not blaming “all” Jews who “I have a great love for” but more specifically a Jewish “secret society” for the genocidal conspiracy.

“My beef is with the khabbalist (sic) central banking, secret society Jews.”

To support his diabolical false accusation, he digs even deeper with further horrendous and odious lies:

 “No one is reporting on it, but the Hasidic Jews in the US instituted a law for their people that they are not to be vaccinated for any reason.”

Two decades earlier there were similar style allegations in the Arab media blaming the Jewish state for 9/11 couched in a question as to  why Jews suddenly did not pitch up for work in the Twin Towers that fateful day?

And then a century earlier, a far greater entrepreneur than Bateman disseminated similar notions. That man was Henry Ford and if Bateman was concerned that “no-one was reporting” on Jewish culpability, Ford made sure he was by acquiring in 1918 a struggling newspaper – the Dearborn Independent – to spread his brand of antisemitism.

Inflicted with the same malicious malady as Bateman, Ford believed that Jewish people had “international control over unions, banks and the media”, and that all were out to get him.

Wrong; Ford was out to get the Jews!

If Bateman’s abuse of the covid pandemic to attack Jews in the USA was an isolated incident – it would be partly digestible.

It’s not! It’s rife.

On a Sunday morning in early December 2021, Charles Kaufman, a resident in Austin Texas, found on his doorstep, a few feet away from his expected bundled-up daily newspaper, an unexpected small plastic bag containing some rocks and a folded flyer.

Like David Bateman’s diatribe in Utah, this flyer also blamed Jews for the new surge of the virus. However, this same flyer was not restricted to the recipient’s home state of Texas but has been disseminated across the country appearing on doorsteps  to homes  in the states of California, North Carolina and Maryland. The virus is spreading and we are not talking about covid!

“Maybe 100 or so people received it on my street, Jewish and non-Jewish,” said Kaufman.

The flyer was headed: “EVERY SINGLE ASPECT OF THE COVID AGENDA IS JEWISH” and goes on to list the names of Jews who although professionally associated with finding the solution to COVID-19, instead targets them for antisemitic abuse – verbal and physical.

In case there is any misunderstanding as to the role model of the flyer’s authors, the red and black logo mimicking a swastika makes it crystal clear.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, the group responsible, is a “loose network of individuals connected by their virulent antisemitism”. Founded in 2020, they also operate a video platform that streams antisemitic content to their thousands of followers.

The ADL warns that its “most zealous and visible actors” are in California, Colorado, Florida and New York.

According to the Deputy Regional Director of New York/New Jersey at the Anti-Defamation League, Alex Rosemberg, the COVID-19 pandemic has provided a perfect storm for antisemites to blame Jews, reminiscent of the Black Death of the Middle Ages that resulted in the massacre of Jews across Europe.

“It’s either the idea that the Jews generated the virus so that they can then generate the vaccine and create the profit as a result,” said Rosenberg, “or the other aspect of this is extremist groups using symbology from the Holocaust to protest mandates.”

This “duality”, he asserts, has historically been a recurring characteristic throughout history. No matter what side of a crisis, Jews can always be blamed and consequently condemned.

In the current scenario, “If you are a white supremacist, then Jews are a weak-link group of people that don’t deserve to be a part of general, strong society or on the flip side, if you are more of a left-wing individual, then Jews are this all-powerful group controlling the universe.”

From the bubonic plague to corona, “antisemitism is somehow always,” says Rosemberg, “at the end of the scapegoat route.”

Experiencing Rosemberg’s words first hand is Eli Steinberg an Orthodox Jewish resident of the rapidly growing Orthodox community of Lakewood in New Jersey with its Beth Medrash Govoha yeshiva, the largest in the US. “Anything that can be exploited to hate Jews will be used to hate Jews at this point,” says Steinberg.

That “anything” today is covid!

Many in Steinberg’s community have encountered antisemitism from their neighbours in person and online.

Following the ugly Europe trend, is it any wonder that antisemitism in the USA has shifted from rhetoric to violence!

Is it surprising that US Jews are feeling exposed?

While throughout history, Jews have always found themselves cast as evil villains especially during times of unrest and uncertainty, Chaskel Bennett, an Orthodox Jewish community leader in New York, says, “The latest COVID variant is just a continuing trend of this ugly time,” believing that antisemites are “the proverbial hammer in search of a nail”.

Whether its economic difficulties or a pandemic, “haters will always find any pretext to imprint and disseminate their hateful ideology on the more than willing masses.”

Well now into the twenty-first century, history has shown that while mankind will likely discover vaccines to contain contagious diseases, it is unlikely there will ever be a cure for the ancient plague of antisemitism.

At least today there is a haven – the Jewish state of Israel.

While the mission of Lay of the Land (LotL) is to provide a wide and diverse perspective of affairs in Israel, the Middle East and the Jewish world, the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints expressed by its various writers are not necessarily ones of the owners and management of LOTL but of the writers themselves.  LotL endeavours to the best of its ability to credit the use of all known photographs to the photographer and/or owner of such photographs (0&EO).