Why is anti-Semitism so central to conspiracy theories?

We’ve noted before that a virulent strain of anti-Semitism has been a consistent thread running through the Hampstead Satanic ritual abuse hoax.

Abraham Christie’s early claims of a global conspiracy of “Talmudic Satanic Sodomites” were only the beginning. We’ve heard anti-Semitic rants and slurs from most of the Hoaxtead mobsters, including but not limited to Araya Soma, Sabine McNeill, Charlotte Alton Ward, Drifloud, Angela Power-Disney, John Paterson, Alan Alanson, the late Patrick Cullinane, Kev Baker, Chris Everard, Wesley Hall, Deborah Mahmoudieh….the list goes on and on.

We’ve wondered about this in the past: why does anti-Jewish sentiment seem so deeply embedded in the troofer community in general, and the Hoaxtead mob in particular?

Talking about a (French) revolution

Part of the answer may stretch back in history, to the days of the French Revolution. According to Scott Wood, writing in Little Atoms,

Modern conspiracy theory began in Paris. Many in Europe were horrified by the French Revolution and found satisfaction in finding an organised hidden group guilty of orchestrating events. The culprits were secret societies such as the Bavarian Illuminati, the Freemasons and the Knights Templars. Then in 1791 the new French National Assembly ended all legal restrictions on France’s Jews, suggesting to future conspiracy pundits that, through the logic of cui bono, the revolution was a Jewish plot.  The Anti-Semitic League of France, founded in 1889, made its central claim that Jews seized power in the French Revolution. After the founding of Israel, the supposed Jewish conspiracy changed to an Israeli one, but it is still the shadowy plot that harks back to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Europe’s long history of anti-Semitic suspicion.

Not only did the French National Assembly recognise Jews as full citizens in 1789, but the secular nature of the Revolution led to the Catholic Church in France being dispossessed of its wealth, and later, to laws requiring that all overt signs of Christianity must be removed.

It’s not difficult to understand how someone looking at the Revolution and its outcomes might put two and two together and come up with 43. If Jews were now actual citizens, but Christians were not allowed to display signs of their religion, it stood to reason that the Jews must have orchestrated the whole thing for their own benefit, right?

Well, wrong.

But that didn’t stop a growing number of conspiracy theorists from speculating that the Jews—whose manner of dress, language, cultural practices, and religion differentiated them from their Christian neighbours—were an evil hidden force in society. The basis of anti-Semitic racism is the belief that Jews are not normal citizens going about their business, but rather represent a secretive, poisonous, powerful cabal.

In the minds of troofers, the Illuminati is responsible for things like assassinations, currency manipulation, false flag events, psy ops, and Rihanna. Its end goal is to establish a New World Order, a one-world authoritarian government where people will be forced to have microchips implanted in their brains. Or something.

Modern anti-Semitic conspiracy theories which depict an elaborate secret hierarchy of controlling Jewish influences derive in large part from the 1903 tract The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which claimed to be the manual of a Jewish secret society whose intention was to eventually dominate the world. Although the tract, a classic in paranoid, racist literature, has been debunked as a fraud multiple times since 1921, it’s still in wide circulation and is quoted as “evidence” of the malevolent influence of the Jews by conspiracy theorists.

The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion stand alongside another popular anti-Semitic trope: the “blood libel”, the centuries-old myth that Jews murder Christian babies or children, and use their blood to make matzoh, the special unleavened bread which is eaten during Passover to commemorate the fact that the Jews fled Egypt before their bread had time to rise.

Anyone who has actually seen or eaten matzoh will attest that the “blood in matzoh” idea is arrant nonsense.

Matzoh is white. And bland. Seriously, it is blander than the blandest bland thing you can think of. It’s not called the “bread of affliction” for nothing.

But believe us: if there were even a drop of blood in it, it would be very noticeable. It might even give matzoh a flavour.

Anti-Semitism and the Illuminati

In 1991, fundamentalist Christian televangelist Pat Robertson wrote a book called The New World Order, which was influenced by a number of conspiracy theories. In Robertson’s view, the so-called world conspiracy could be traced back to a small Bavarian Freemason lodge founded in 1776 by the German Adam Weishaupt. This lodge was called the Illuminati.

According to Robertson’s book, the Illuminati were later infiltrated and taken over by Jewish bankers:

That same year, 1782, the headquarters of Illuminated Freemasonry moved to Frankfurt, a center controlled by the Rothschild family. It is reported that in Frankfurt, Jews for the first time were admitted to the order of Freemasons. If indeed members of the Rothschild family or their close associates were polluted by the occultism of Weishaupt’s Illuminated Freemasonry, we may have discovered the link between the occult and the world of finance. Remember, the Rothschilds financed Cecil Rhodes in Africa; Lord Rothschild was a member of the inner circle of Rhodes’s English Round Tables; and Paul Warburg, architect of the Federal Reserve System, was a Rothschild agent.

And thus, Jews and the Illuminati began to be linked in the minds of conspiracy theorists, particularly those who draw upon the fundamentalist/evangelical Christian tradition, Robertson’s prime audience.

Conspiracy theorists who believe that the affairs of the world are governed by secretive groups such as the Illuminati, the Freemasons, the New World Order, or the shape-shifting lizard people from outer space frequently conflate those groups with the Jews, who they accuse of being the driving force behind global financial affairs, governments, and so forth.

While some conspiracists will claim that they are not really anti-Semitic, they give themselves away via the use of terms such as “globalists”, “Zionists”, “international bankers”, “international monetary elite” and “financiers”, “Cultural Marxists”, and “cultural elites”.

Add the internet, stir, and serve with a garnish of paranoia.

Conspiracy theorists like to think of themselves as independent thinkers who don’t accept holus-bolus everything the powers that be tell them, and yet they mindlessly accept centuries-old anti-Semitic fables as literal truth. Conspiracism is inherently anti-democratic: those who believe that the world is in the clutches of an invisible cabal of Jews/Illuminati/Freemason/lizard people believe that citizens are essentially powerless, that there is no point in engaging in the democratic process, and that the only option which remains is to sit in front of computer screens hammering out anti-Semitic screeds which prove that the troofers are somehow superior to all the poor sheeple who just don’t get it.

Ultimately, though, it all boils down to one thing: troofers believe that someone other than them is profiting from the way the world is currently arranged…and it’s probably the Jews.

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This article was previously published on 3 December 2017.