Palestinian newspaper doubles down on blood libel

Yesterday I posted about a blood libel accusation given in Hamas-affiliated newspaper Al Resalah.

MEMRI independently found the same article and translated it, and the news was published in a number of Israeli papers.

Now Al Resalah is doubling down on the accusation. After writing about the reactions to its story, it says "It is worth mentioning that the Jewish historian known as Ariel Toaff talked about "blood libel", saying that the fact that unknown to many people that Ashkenazi Jews used human blood in the Passover festival in the Middle Ages."

How many times have we seen antisemites use idiotic Jews to shield themselves from charges of antisemitism?

Ariel Toaff is a Bar-Ilan professor who wrote a supremely idiotic book in 2007 with the purposefully inflammatory title "Passovers of Blood." After he was widely criticized for this book -

A second edition of the book appeared in February, 2008. In an afterword to this edition in defence of his book, Toaff responded to his critics. To forestall possible misinterpretations, he said that the idea that Jews practiced ritual murder is a slanderous stereotype, and that ritual homicide or infanticide was a myth. That said, the possibility existed that:

certain criminal acts, disguised as crude rituals, were indeed committed by extremist groups or by individuals demented by religious mania and blinded by desire for revenge against those considered responsible for their people’s sorrows and tragedies.

The evidence supporting this hypothesis draws on confessions extracted under torture. His book examines the strong documentary evidence in medieval medical handbooks that dried human blood, traded by both Jewish and Christian merchants, was thought to be medicinally efficacious. Under the stress of forced conversions, expulsions and massacres, Toaff thinks it possible that in certain Ashkenazi groups dried human blood came to play a magical role in calling down God's vengeance on Christians, the historic persecutors of the Jews, and that this reaction may have affected certain forms of ritual practice among a restricted number of Ashkenazi Jews during Passover.

In other words, Toaff now denies that Jews ritually murdered anyone, but claims - without any smidgen of proof beyond his own often very far-fetched conjecture and "confessions" made under torture - - that it is possible that some Jews used dried blood in medical and mystical rituals. (He bizarrely uses proofs from 17th century Kabbalistic use of animal blood to prove 14th century "magical" use of human blood. )

Toaff instantly became a celebrity among antisemites, few of whom bothered to actually read his book.

Naturally, Arabs now use Toaff to justify their antisemitism as well.