Dispatch #2: The Cycle of Libel
How anti-Jewish accusation becomes a self-perpetuating pattern of civilization
Before We Begin
The Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) exposes the genealogy, history, and contemporary expressions of antizionism.
If you are new to this project, we encourage you to begin with Dispatch No. 1, which introduces our purpose and the framework through which we examine antizionism and its deeper historical roots.
In this dispatch, we examine the cycle of libel—the recurring pattern through which anti-Jewish hatred renews itself. We trace how this cycle functions as ideological abuse, illustrate it through a contemporary case, and outline steps for moral and intellectual action.
I. Defining Anti-Jewish Libel
Two thousand years of hostility toward the Jewish people can be distilled into a single word: libel.
Before understanding how anti-Jewish libel operates, it is important to distinguish it from legal libel.
Legal libel refers to a specific false statement—something that can be proven true or false, tested by evidence, and settled through established legal processes. It presupposes a shared moral and factual framework in which truth can still be verified and accuracy still carries consequence.
Anti-Jewish libel belongs to a different moral universe. It is a web of obsessively repeated accusations, transmitted across generations, that reactivates an ancient civilizational reflex to expel Jews from society and, ultimately, to destroy them as an act of moral purification. Unlike legal libel, an anti-Jewish libel cannot be disproved, because its purpose is not to seek truth but to incite hatred. It functions as a shape-shifting narrative of blame, mutating whenever it is challenged. When one accusation collapses, another rises in its place. Contradictions coexist without friction: Jews are accused of being both capitalist exploiters and communist subversives, rootless cosmopolitans and insular nationalists, powerless victims and secret masters of history.
The content of the accusations may change, but the underlying pattern does not. Across centuries, anti-Jewish libel has served one enduring function: to rationalize violence and to sanctify hatred as a moral duty.
II. The Cycle of Libel
To understand the persistence of Jew-hatred, we must stop viewing anti-Jewish history as a sequence of isolated catastrophes—the Inquisition, the pogroms, the Holocaust, October 7. Rather, it unfolds in recurring cycles of libel, a kind of civilizational epilepsy. Each eruption may subside, yet the underlying disorder endures, latent but intact, awaiting its next trigger.
This cycle has four stages: libel, stigma, violence, and denial. Together, they form the mechanism through which anti-Jewish hatred renews itself across eras and civilizations.
1. Libel — The Invention of Collective Guilt
The cycle begins with an accusation. In medieval Europe, towns blamed Jews for poisoned wells when plague spread through the streets; in Tsarist Russia, a murdered child became “proof” of ritual blood sacrifice; in the twentieth century, financial panics were blamed on a hidden Jewish cabal; today, images of war are recast as evidence of “genocide.” The charge may be fabricated, distorted, or drawn from fragments of reality, but it always serves the same purpose: to transform the acts of individuals or the misfortunes of history into moral admonition against the Jewish collective. Repeated often enough—in sermons, newspapers, classrooms, and social media—the accusation solidifies into “common sense.”
2. Stigma — The Codification of Suspicion
Once the accusation has taken hold, it hardens into custom and policy. Governments issue decrees, churches preach segregation, and universities embed suspicion in their syllabi. In medieval cities, badges and ghettos marked Jews as impure; in the twentieth century, professional bans and quotas sealed that exclusion into law. Today, the same logic reemerges in boycotts, blacklist campaigns, and institutional resolutions that cast Jews and Israelis as moral contaminants. Stigma transforms imagination into infrastructure: it gives prejudice a home in the social order.
3. Violence — The Ritual of Purification
When accusation and stigma saturate a culture, violence follows with grim predictability. Mobs storm marketplaces, loot and burn homes, and turn synagogues into pyres. Each eruption presents itself as defense; the mob believes it is protecting the community from corruption. Today, the same impulse drives public confrontations with Jews, shootings, Molotov attacks, and even rape, torture, and abductions. The perpetrators do not believe they are committing murder; they believe they are cleansing the world. Violence becomes a ritual through which a society reaffirms its imagined innocence.
4. Denial — The Erasure of Memory
When the violence ends, denial begins. Authorities downplay the scale of destruction or blame it on “uncontrollable passions.” Textbooks omit the details, monuments crumble, and descendants insist that “it was a different time.” Denial can also take subtler forms: moral equivalence, false balance, or the suggestion that Jews deserved what befell them, or are exaggerated their suffering. Each gesture serves the same end—to quiet conscience and restore the illusion of normality. Denial completes the cycle, burying the evidence while ensuring that the next accusation can rise again from the rubble of forgetting.
III. But What If It’s True?
The endurance of anti-Jewish libel often draws strength from a familiar deflection: “But what if it’s true?” This question misunderstands the nature of the phenomenon. The moral problem is not whether any individual accusation contains a fragment of truth; it is the structure of obsession that transforms such fragments into instruments of collective humiliation and harm. Even if every allegation were literally true, the manner in which it is deployed—the repetition, the fixation, the moral indictment of an entire people—would still constitute abuse.
The dynamic can be understood through the psychology of domestic violence. Imagine a husband who follows his wife from room to room, shouting at her about her flaws: you’ve gained fifteen pounds; you forgot the dishes on Wednesday; you were late picking up the children. He does this day after day, until one day he kills her.
Each accusation may be true, but the purpose of the accusation is not correction but domination. The repetition of criticism becomes a form of control, eroding the victim’s sense of safety and self. His final act of violence is not an anomaly; it is the logical culmination of years of sanctioned abuse.
So too with anti-Jewish libel. Societies rehearse the same accusations—of greed, duplicity, domination, or brutality—across generations. Each may find some anecdotal echo in the real world, as all stereotypes do, but the libel’s power lies not in evidence but in fixation. The purpose is not to inform or reform but to degrade and exclude, to convert scrutiny into persecution. The obsessive repetition of accusation, the refusal to release the target from moral suspicion, constitutes an abusive relationship—one that prepares the ground for expulsion or annihilation.
To confront this dynamic, it is not enough to rebut each individual libel on factual grounds, as if the relationship were built on misunderstanding. Responding, “I gained only five pounds,” or “But I did the dishes on Tuesday,” accepts the premise of the abuse. The moral task is to reverse the frame—to name the behavior for what it is. The appropriate response is not a rebuttal of facts, but setting a healthy boundary: stop abusing me.
Understanding Jew-hatred in this light requires a shift from argument to diagnosis. The problem is the social addiction to blaming Jews for the world’s disorder. Only by identifying the relationship as abusive can the cycle of libel be broken.
Antizionism in the Wild
On the eve of the anniversary of Kristallnacht, a chilling video surfaced showing a masked mob of antizionists approaching the home of a Jewish woman in Toronto, accusing her of being a land thief and hurling slurs such as “baby killer” and “Zionist Karen.” The mob appeared emboldened by rhetoric from Toronto’s mayor, Olivia Chow, who has spread the genocide libel against Israel. The incident illustrates how unchallenged libels sustain a cycle of stigma and aggression that, as history warns, can escalate from harassment and intimidation to organized violence.
Take Action
Countering antizionism begins with education—helping others recognize anti-Jewish libel as a recurring mechanism of ideological abuse. Constructive discourse depends on clarifying facts, concepts, and moral frameworks.
You can:
Educate friends and colleagues about anti-Jewish libel—how it differs from legal libel, and how the cycle of accusation and violence has repeated across history.
Engage with the Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ) on Instagram for ongoing educational materials and analysis.
Join our upcoming sticker campaign to help raise public awareness in your community. To participate, contact us at exec@maazaction.org.
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With appreciation,
The Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ)
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