Blood Libel / Black Libel

A "Black Libel," against Haitians, has been added to the ancient arsenal of White Supremacists and Anti-Semites: The "Blood Libel" against, and scapegoating of, the Jews.

(Fascist publications like ‘Der Sturmer’ (left) were responsible for fanning the flames of the centuries old “Blood Libel” that Jews were killing Christian babies and using their blood for ritualistic purposes—lies that resulted in the scapegoating of, and the mass murder of millions of Jews. For more than 200 years, Haitians have been the target of a “Black Libel,” falsely accusing them of everything from voodoo and animal sacrifice, to the spread of AIDS. (right).

Donald Trump, JD Vance, and their blood-thirsty, bigoted white supremacist sic(sic)-o-phants expose their full-throated, fundamentalist hatreds each time they open their mouths:  Blacks & Jews, they howl, should be blamed for our evils.

The misogynistic MAGA monsters also can’t stand strong, independent women—who refuse to be humble handmaidens of their hate--have repeatedly demonstrated over decades of pushing policies aimed at keeping women subservient, pregnant & poor, particularly in the area of women’s health and reproductive rights why Kamala Harris’ candidacy drives them crazy: she refuses to be shackled by the white, male supremacists’ centuries long campaigns of shame & subjugation.

Yet, the real red flag of Harris’ candidacy to these bigoted bullies, is not just that she’s a woman, but that she’s multi-racial, with one of her parents being from the Caribbean—an exotic, erotic place of mystery and Black independence history-- and is happily married to a successful & confident white Jewish man.     In one single sweep, a charismatic new American persona--Kamala Harris--represents all of the crazed, conspiracies these haters have harbored, and acted upon, going back centuries.  Despite—or perhaps because of-- her obvious joy, likeability, and deep professionalism, Harris is the worst nightmare of White Supremacists, sexual oppressors, and anti-Semites.

Their virulent attacks by Trump, Laura Loomer, JD Vance, Mark Robinson, and other Far Right extremists, against American Jews who don’t support authoritarianism, and upon the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, are only the latest eruptions of their dangerous bile, hate speech and group libel.  In the past, such relentless campaigns of hate and dehumanization against Jews and non-Whites, have yielded deadly results.

Jews of every political persuasion have been subjected to “Blood Libels” against them going back to the 12^th Century, according to “A History of the Jewish People,” an 1100-page encyclopedic work edited by H.H. Ben Sasson, and published by Harvard University Press in 1976.  That “Blood Libel,” first surfaced in England, when the Jews of Norwich, were “accused of having murdered a Christian child.”   It’s get subtly resurrected each time a Christian Nationalist, or proponent of Project 2025, refers to the United States as a “Christian Nation.”

The anti-Semitic “Blood Libel & Ritual Murder” is defined by early Jew-haters, as, “once the Jews had crucified Christ (a lie), they thirsted for pure and innocent blood (another lie.) Since the formerly incarnate God was now in “heaven,” the grotesque lie continued that, “the Jews aspired to the blood of the most innocent believers, i.e., the children, the tender Christians.”  (Page 482, History of the Jewish People).

Dangerously, millions of Christians believed those early “blood libels” to be true, resulting in large numbers of Jews being burned at the stake.   A full century after the Jews had been expelled from England, Geoffrey Chaucer, the English poet, wrote The Canterbury Tales in 1387.   In the “Prioress’ Tale”, “an innocent Christian child was walking through the ‘Street of the Jews’ singing songs in praise of Mary, mother of Jesus.  The Jews seized and murdered him.  The crime was miraculously revealed, and the whole community of Jews was put to death.”  (Page 483, History of the Jewish People)

Jewish history is replete with such repulsive smears and crusades against an entire people from the murderous lies and 15^th century treachery of John of Capistrano (latter canonized into Sainthood by the Catholic Church), and the Libel of Trent (1475) where Franciscan monks preached that Jews in that German town were responsible for the disappearance of a 2-year old boy.  Without any evidence at all, the entire Jewish community was arrested, tortured, and expelled from the region. 

Nearly 500 years—and the murders of millions of Jews--later (1965), the Catholic Church officially “acknowledged that a judicial error had been committed against the Jews of Trent…” (Page 580, History of the Jewish People).

Sadly, the Jew Haters were just beginning to hone their horrific lies.  During the Spanish Inquisition, witchcraft and crucifixion were added to the fictional charges of “blood libel” and “ritual murder,” against the Jews, along with the utterly insane charge that Jews used the heart and blood of a crucified boy to “spread rabies among all Christians.”   Despite there being no factual foundation for any of the charges, all Jews merely accused of the crime were burned at the stake, with Christians ready to believe any evil of anyone who was Jewish.

In the 16^th Century, the founder of Lutheranism, the German conservative Martin Luther, was savagely anti-Semitic, spelling out detailed methods of how to destroy the Jewish population, many of which were updated and perniciously put into practice by Adolf Hitler 400 years later, resulting in the torture and annihilation of six million Jews, one million of whom were children.

But, Hitler was not alone. At the same time Hitler and the embryonic Nazi movement were rising in Germany, the KKK was at the peak of its power in the United States, getting 30,000 of its robed followers to March on Washington in 1925—the same year “Mein Kampf” was published.   The year before, the KKK was instrumental in crafting the virulent anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant Immigration Act of 1924—the basis for the present day Trump/Stephen Miller immigration policy.

Such actions  “normalized” how the KKK operated.  Teaming up with other White Supremacists across the US, the KKK—while continuing to lynch thousands of Black Americans for the sole “crime” of being Black-- passed Jim Crow laws in some 30 American states.  Those Jim Crow Laws, according to Princeton Professor and legal scholar James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, served as the basis for Nazi lawyers in drafting the Nuremberg Laws against the Jews, forever linking legislated hatred and state-sponsored discrimination against Blacks, with legislated hatred, discrimination and state-sponsored murder against the Jews. (See https://open.substack.com/pub/villano/p/dictating-hate-jim-crow-white-supremacy?r=cveu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web).

In fact, it was during the tumultuous, anti-immigrant 1920’s in the United States, when not only were Italian immigrants Sacco & Vanzetti executed (1927) for a murder that was not proven they committed, but, the following year, a well-documented case of “Blood Libel” against Jews occurred in Massena, New York, a small town in St. Lawrence County, just across from the Canadian border.

In his book, The Accusation:  Blood Libel in an American Town, NYU History professor Edward Berenson—a native of Massena, N.Y.—documents a “Blood Libel” against local Jews in an upstate N.Y. town at a time (1928) when anti-immigrant fervor was at a fever pitch in the United States, the KKK was at the peak of its political power, and the first Catholic candidate—New York’s Governor Al Smith, with Irish and Italian ancestors—was running for President of the United States.

 The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) described this “modern blood libel” as:  

“When a four-year-old girl went missing from her home, and a rumor spread that local Jews had kidnapped and killed her. Crowds gathered outside Massena’s police station, where the town’s rabbi had been summoned. A state trooper questioned the rabbi, and asked him whether Jews offered human sacrifices or used blood in rituals. The girl was eventually found alive and unharmed.”

In the Massena case, the young girl, named Barbara, had gotten lost in the local woods—very dense around that North Country community—and returned home the next day, unharmed.  However, despite the direct evidence of Barbara’s safety, the accusations of “Jewish rituals” persisted in the local and national press for weeks.

The ADL, in its’ Global Anti-Semitism resource material from 2016, goes on to detail the wild stories and lies of blood libels against Jews throughout 1,000 years of history, resulting in the massacres of entire Jewish communities: 

“Some Christians believed that the four cups of wine that Jews drink at the Passover Seder celebrations were actually blood, or that Jews mixed blood into hamantaschen, sweet pastries eaten on the Jewish holiday of Purim. Others claimed that Jews used Christian blood as a medicine or even as an aphrodisiac.”

Professor Berenson told the New York University News’ in September, 2019, that he believed the Massena “Blood Libel” occurred during the cultural backdrop of:

“…mass immigration, which by the 1920s was three and a half decades old. Before that… the United States was overwhelmingly a Protestant country; after the 1880s, you had a huge influx of Catholics and Jews, and it really changed the country…

So in the 1920s—and this will have echoes for the present—there were an awful lot of people who were not so happy about this new demographic situation, and one of the main organizations that opposed it was a revived Ku Klux Klan. There’s some evidence that there were several members of the volunteer fire company in Massena who were members of the Klan. And there were essentially no African Americans who lived up there, so most of the Klan’s hostility was directed against Catholics and Jews, and people who were seen to be connected to immigration in one way or the other.”

Professor Berenson went on to point out in his interview with NYU News:

“Religious venom surrounded this campaign (of 1928).  There was horrible hostility to Catholics because Al Smith was the first Catholic candidate ever for the presidency. And some of Al Smith’s top advisors were Jews, and everybody knew that they were Jewish. So this election kind of brought together all of these themes that were percolating in the 1920s.”

Fast forward to today, nearly 100 years later, to the Presidential Election of 2024, when the candidate of one major party, Donald Trump, has a well-documented record of racism toward Blacks, deep anti-immigrant animus upon which he has campaigned and enacted policy, and Jew-blaming, when it suits his purposes, as it did recently when a purported address on “Anti-Semitism” by Trump turned into an all out attack on Jews who don’t support him, whom he preemptively blamed for his defeat, should he lose the election to Kamala Harris.   Multiple news sources and commentators noted Trump’s new “Blame the Jews” strategy of scapegoating the very people who have been similarly scapegoated for centuries, with horrific consequences. To Trump and many of his supporters, the perverse and dangerous irony of scapegoating Jews at a conference on Anti-Semitism, meant nothing.

Vice President Harris, for her part, is the first US Presidential candidate in American history who is a female, mixed race daughter of immigrants—one of whom is a Caribbean Black—and who is married to a Jew.  In one highly qualified and enormously charismatic candidate, White Supremacists, Anti-Semites and Xenophobes have been blinded by their own rage— the same effect the Democratic, Catholic son of immigrants Al Smith had upon the KKK and other bigots in 1928.

With immigration as a similar lightening rod political issue today as it was in 1924 & 1928--it was inevitable that at least one particular group of immigrants would be targeted for discrimination and vilification during the 2024 election.  What was also not surprising was that the group targeted by Trump and his supporters—would not be Latino, as they were for Trump’s entire political career—but  Haitian legal immigrants, a persistent target of White Supremacists going back over 200 years, at precisely the same time when the Democrats nominated a Black woman with ancestors from the Caribbean.   Had the Haitians become Trump’s Willie Horton?

Even with local public officials and the Governors of each state pointing out how much Haitian immigrants have helped build the local economies of Springfield, Ohio and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, Trump has doubled down on the blatant blanket of lies and hate spread by himself and his running mate JD Vance-- by telling 67 million Americans during a Presidential debate that the Haitians of Springfield, Ohio, were “eating the dogs, the people that came in; they’re eating the cats; they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.” 

Before the Democratic Presidential candidate was a women with Caribbean ancestry, Trump’s running mate Vance—A US Senator from Ohio for the past two years—never once identified any reports of pet eating by anyone in the Ohio city of approximately 60,000 people, despite an in-migration of some 20,000 Haitians to Springfield over the past 4 years.  Was this “Black Libel” created out of thin air specifically because a Black woman was now running against Trump?

The fact that this group of immigrants were Haitian was irresistible for vitriolic attacks from White Supremacist, anti-immigrant extremists.  After all, it was Haitians who were falsely accused of another “Black Libel” 40 years ago-- of being the source of the HIV/AIDS epidemic during the early 1980’s, despite evidence that the disease was brought to Port-O-Prince, Haiti, by white American, non-Haitian tourists.  The brilliant infectious disease doctor and medical anthropologist Dr. Paul Farmer—who spent years delivering health care services to Haiti--wrote a meticulously researched book entitled AIDS and Accusation:  Haiti and the Geography of Blame, smashing the negative stereotypes against Haitians.

Even in New York City, Haitians were targeted for HIV-related hate crimes in the 1980’s where Farmer writes, “ In Brooklyn, walls on the margins of a predominantly Caribbean neighborhood were spray-painted with the words “Haitians=N_____S with AIDS.”  This followed a classification by the CDC during the Reagan Administration of Haitians as a “high risk group.”  Subsequently, Haitian children in Brooklyn were beaten up and shot; Haitian store owners in Brooklyn went bankrupt and Haitian families in Brooklyn were evicted from their homes, regardless of whether they tested negative for HIV.  Let that sink in, in light of the newest “Black Libel” being pedaled today by Trump and JD Vance, of Haitians eating household pets.  Vance continued to spread the lie even after being presented with clear evidence that it was not true, simply to spread anti-immigrant fears and the newest Black Libel.

In AIDS and Accusations, Paul Farmer wrote:  “A social service organization in South Florida reported that, following the inclusion of Haitians on the CDC listing, it was unable to find job placements for a majority of its clients. That same organization also received hate mail which conveyed such slogans as, ‘ Hire a Haitian—Help Spread AIDS,” and, “There were (sic) no AIDS in the USA until the illegal Haitian Dogs came.”

Farmer noted that the effect of these wild speculations and lies about Haitians were disastrous:  “The burden of the new syndrome (HIV/AIDS) was not apparent before 1983—after all, 40 AIDS cases did not add up to much against a background of tuberculosis, typhoid, malaria, malnutrition and political repression.  But the effect of AIDS-related discrimination would be instantly palpable.”

Over the past 40 years of baseless accusations against them of spreading disease, or practicing voodoo, or witchcraft, or ritual sacrifices or divination—similar to what Jews have been historically accused of--White Supremacist, Haitian haters have moved from accusing legal Haitian immigrants of being “illegal Haitian Dogs,” to spreading lies that Haitians were actually eating dogs.

While not the same as the historic and genocidal “blood libel” against the Jews, dating back over 1,000 years, the “Black Libel” against Haitians almost always involved blood (HIV/AIDS in the bloodstream) or the eating of animal blood, and their skin color—all carefully chosen attacks designed to rhetorically and racially herd Haitians back centuries to a primitive status, before Haiti became the first country in the New World to eliminate  slavery, some 60 years before the United States did.

The wealthy, white slaveholders of the Confederacy were terrified that the success of the “free the slaves” movement in Haiti, while the US was in its infancy—and within the Constitution’s 10-year timetable for reconsidering Slavery which expired in 1808-- would spread to the United States, only 700 miles away, and destroy their profitable “slave economy” of the US.

Now, the very same forces of White Supremacy and human oppression are terrified of an organic “Democracy movement” in the United States today, personified, not by a Haitian, but by an immigrant daughter of the Caribbean, married to a proud Jew.  These fanatic voices of viciousness and hate, have demonstrated they will resurrect any baseless “Blood Libel” or “Black Libel” from the past, along with any racist, or anti-Semitic slurs or conspiracy theories they can concoct, to preserve inequality and choke off any semblance of social or political change.

 And, if they fail to hold back the future, as they will, they’ve already lined up some familiar scapegoats to blame for their own failures.

That’s what’s at stake in the Election of 2024.