Anti-Zionist activists stage blood libel display near White House

Anti-Zionist activists stage a blood libel display in Washington, DC, on Thursday, according to videos the activists posted on social media.

The blood libel is an age-old antisemitic conspiracy that has caused repeated mass violence against Jews for centuries. It falsely claims that Jews murder non-Jewish children to consume their blood for ritual use.

In the display, actors at a table wore masks of Jeffrey Epstein, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump.

The actors tore apart and devoured a blood baby and drank mock blood from wine glasses.

The characters wore Israeli flags and an Israeli flag was draped on the table in front of the Epstein character.

Signs on the table said “Satanic elite” and “Zionist World Plan.” A framed image showed Satan, according to the videos.

A menu said, “Israel’s pedophile blackmail dinner,” and the appetizer was listed as a “cannibalism special” serving “dismembered baby intestines.”

Another placard on the table accused “satanic ‘Israel’” of “organ theft.”

The display took place on Pennsylvania Avenue, near the White House.

The videos were shared by the anti-Zionist activists Hazami Barmada and Atefeh Rokhvand, who staged a similar blood libel display in the city in November. Barmada is a Harvard graduate and former UN staffer, according to LinkedIn.

“At the White House, exposing Epstein’s ties to the Zionist establishment,” Barmada said in the video posted on Thursday.

Echoes of the blood libel have previously surfaced among anti-Zionist activists, who often levy unfounded accusations that Israel harvests Palestinian organs.

Late last year, a university researcher in the UK taught a blood libel to students during a lecture.

Anti-Zionists sometimes recycle age-old anti-Jewish tropes, with Israel, Zionists or Zionism taking the historical place of Jews.

The libel is one of the most notorious antisemitic falsehoods and has caused repeated violence to Jews in Europe and elsewhere.

The myth took on a central role in the persecution of Jews in Europe with accusations against the Jewish community in Norwich, England, in 1144.

The false accusation spread through Europe, causing outbreaks of anti-Jewish violence in medieval France, Spain, Italy and Germany.

The libel continued into the 20th century, igniting pogroms in Eastern Europe before and after the Holocaust, and becoming a motif in Nazi propaganda.

The blood libel has appeared elsewhere, including in Syria and Iran.

The libel is most often associated with the persecution of Jews in Europe, but it also has a history in the US.

The Puritan clergyman and Harvard University president Increase Mather first introduced the blood libel into the US in the mid-1600s, the historian Pamela S. Nadell wrote in her recent book, “Antisemitism, an American Tradition.”

“The Jews lie under the guilt of blood and murder. Some have laid a most hideous fact to the charge of the Jews, that they have been wont once a year to steal Christian children, and to put them to death by crucifying,” Mather wrote in a 1669 tract.

A blood libel in Damascus in 1840 was a formative moment for the small American Jewish community as it mobilized a response, pushing the US government to help free the Jews who were imprisoned and tortured over the libel, Nadell wrote.

The most significant blood libel in the US took place when 4-year-old Barbara Griffiths disappeared in Massena, in upstate New York, in 1928.

As town members searched for the girl, rumors circulated that the local Jews had kidnapped and murdered her for ritual purposes.

The town’s Jews were interrogated, their shops searched for the body, and a mob blamed the rabbi for sacrificing Griffiths, who was found after being lost in the woods.