The Dark Ages

Once in a great while, Alex Jones says something so offensive, so absurd, so wrong that I actually feel unclean after hearing it. My stomach lurches and I think, "Gawd, that's so evil I don't even want to blog about it." The most recent examples are his assertion that the Anti-Defamation League was probably behind the Holocaust Museum shooting*, and that people who suffer schizophrenia aren't mentally ill, they're demons.**

But even those two statements, appalling and untrue as they are, don't quite match up to what Jones said on last Thursday's broadcast. He was talking again about human sacrifice, and this time - to his credit - he actually mentioned Caucasian forms of the practice (Druidic, Nordic, etc). Then he added, "The Jews were constantly turning back to human sacrifice."

Excuse me? Are we in the Middle Ages? First he attributes mental illness to the supernatural, then he dusts off one of the worst anti-semitic slurs of history; that the Jews have practiced ritual sacrifice.

I would like to give Jones the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he's simply confusing Jews with the Molech-worshipping Ammonites and Canaanites of the Bible, who allegedly sacrificed children to their god. He may think that when the Jews turned to worshiping a golden calf during the Exodus, they must have embraced human sacrifice as well. However, that doesn't alter the fact that human sacrifice was repeatedly proscribed in the Old Testament. It has always been reviled by Jews and Christians.

Of course, that didn't stop Christians from accusing Jews of ritually slaughtering Christian children at Passover. Desperate to separate themselves from the religious tradition of which they were only a minor sect, and eager to consolidate their power over the peoples of Europe, Medieval Christians routinely leveled charges of murder and cannibalism at the continent's Jewish population. Most commonly, Jewish men would be accused of abducting Christian, pre-adolescent boys and killing them in hidden chambers beneath synagogues, draining their blood to be baked into their matza. Catholics venerated the relics of these so-called child martyrs. The first, and most famous, was William of Norwich, a 12-year-old tanner's apprentice murdered in 1144. The crime was never solved, but blame fell on the Jews of Norwich. Anti-semitism was already rife throughout England, and the tensions in Norwich came to a bloody end in 1190 - the entire Jewish population of the town was slaughtered.

The blood libel continued long past the Middle Ages. In 1911, a young Ukrainian boy named Andrei Yushchinsky was killed and a Jewish man, Menachem Mendel Beiliss, was charged with murdering him. The lead detective in the case was fired for refusing to hew to the ritual murder theory of the crime. Investigating on his own, he learned that a criminal gang with which Andrei was associated was probably responsible. They had feared the boy would rat on them.
One of the state's expert witnesses was Professor Ivan Sikorsky, a psychologist at Kiev State University (and father to the man who developed the first helicopter). Sikorsky gave his opinion that Andrei's death was, indeed, a ritual murder committed by a gang of Jews.
Beiliss was acquitted in 1913.

In 1928, a four-year-old girl named Barbara Griffiths wandered away from her home in the village of Massena, New York. Because Yom Kippur was two days away, some locals immediately leapt to the conclusion that the village's small Jewish community had abducted her for a ritual sacrifice. The police began questioning Jews, including the rabbi, in the belief that this was entirely possible.
One day later, little Barbara was found in the woods - alive and well. She had simply gotten lost.

In 1986, Syria's completely insane defense minister, Mustafa Tlass, published a book entitled The Matzoh of Zion. You can guess what it was about.

I would love to say that Christians and Muslims finally smartened up and stopped spreading this horseshit, but the sad fact is the blood libel persists to this day in certain quarters. The Yushchinsky murder is still cited by anti-semites and religious supremacists, who claim it was covered up and that the prosecuting attorney in the case, G.G. Zamyslovsky, was put to death for writing a book about it. Recently, someone erected a sign on Andrei's gravestone: "Ritually murdered by Jews in 1911". Other instances:

• In 1955, a retarded bitch Chicago woman named Lyrl Clark Van Hyning (publisher of Eustace Mullins) attributed the brutal murders of three young boys to a Jewish ritual. Brothers John and Anton Schuessler Jr., along with their friend Bobby Peterson, had disappeared en route to a movie matinee. They were found a short time later, strangled and beaten to death. Frau Van Hyning believed that details in a Chicago Sun Times article were indicative of Judaic human sacrifice: an unidentified grain was found on the bodies (flour for the blood matzo, founding John Bircher Revilo P. Oliver contended), and "Kabalistic symbols" were carved into the boys' flesh (though an entry in the ragingly anti-semitic Ziopedia referred to the patterns, correctly, as being caused by the floor mat of a car, "probably a Hewitt or some other luxury brand such as a rich Jew might possess". Actually, it was a Packard.) The ritual murder theorists insisted that Anton Schuessler, Sr., was also murdered by the city's Jewish community, specifically a psychiatrist. Mr. Schuessler did die during electroshock treatment administered for his crippling depression, but the stories of his widow being paid off by Jews are unfounded. Nearly 40 years later, the Schuessler-Peterson murders were found to be the work of Kenneth Hansen, a pedophile who belonged to the local "Horse Mafia", the same group of cons and crooks responsible for the disappearance of candy heiress Helen Brach. Though the leader, Silas Jayne, bore a slight resemblance to Norman Mailer, not one of these men was Jewish. Sadly, though, when you Google "1955 Chicago murders", most of the top hits involve "Jewish ritual murder".
• If you search for "ritual abuse" on YouTube, one of the first vids you'll find is a clip from an 1989 Oprah show about Satanic ritual abuse. A heavyset, thirtyish woman called "Rachel" (real name Vicki Polin) explains that her outwardly Jewish family has practiced Satanism since the seventeenth century. Like all SRA victims of the '80s, Vicki was sexually assaulted and forced to participate in human sacrifice from a tender age. Some of the women in her family, being overweight, were able to successfully hide pregnancies - enabling them to be "breeders" for the cult. Their infants were born in secret, then ritually sacrificed. Vicki was impregnated by her own father five times, and forced to have abortions. But like most SRA victims of the '80s, Vicki had no idea that everyone in her family worshipped Satan. She really thought they were nice, middle-class Jews living in the Midwest. Then, as an adult, she recovered her repressed memories. Unlike the average '80s SRA victim, Vicki is still telling her story. She moved to Baltimore, became a therapist, and established The Awareness Center Inc. A bio of her that appeared on Henry Makow's website last year provides additional information: Vicki's family was part of the Illuminati, which evolved from the Frankist movement of the 18th century. (I guess Makow missed the part about Vicki's family practicing Satanism in the 17th century, but that's understandable. I'm pretty sure a guy who calls his website "Save the Males" doesn't watch Oprah often.) All of this is in complete contradiction to what Vicki's therapist, Tina Grossman, said on Oprah in '89. Grossman related Jewish/Satanic ritual abuse to pre-Judaic Paganism that incorporated human sacrifice. In 2004, Vicki told a rabbi that many rabbis imported "Sabbatean Satanism" to the U.S. from Europe, and her family's rabbi was a member of the cult. She was sexually abused on top of Torah scrolls laid on the floor of the synagogue.
• In 2005, 500 Russian clerics, Duma members, and intellectuals supposedly signed a petition calling for the government to outlaw all Jewish organizations. The signatories believe that all Jewish groups are "hate groups", and in support of this contention the petition cited an 1884 work incorrectly attributed to Dr. Vladimir Ivanovich Dal: “Criminal investigation into the murder by Jews of Christian infants and the use of their blood". The same year, Russian anti-semites fingered Jews in the still-unsolved murders of five young boys and demanded that the authorities begin searching bakeries that produce matzo.
  
• Every year, Catholics in the village of Rinn, Austria, still trot out the preserved remains of a 3-year-old boy named Andreas Oxner. He apparently died in 1462, but it was not until 1642 that his death was openly blamed on Jews.
  

Among all these absurd and implausible allegations, you will fail to find one very important thing: Evidence. There is simply no evidence. There is no reason to believe that Jews practiced human sacrifice at any time in the history of Judaism. Whether you're talking about Hebrews in ancient Egypt or baby-killers in Chicago, it just didn't happen.


*If you hate the Anti-Defamation League as much as Jones does, you should consider blaming anti-semites for its existence. It was created in response to the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank, president of the Atlanta chapter of B'nai Brith. He had been falsely convicted of murdering Mary Phagan, a young girl who worked in his uncle's pencil factory. When locals learned that his death sentence had been overturned, a mob stormed the jail and lynched Frank.
**If schizophrenics are demons, then demons spend a great deal of their time embroidering tea towels and taking in stray cats and watching game shows, because my grandmother is schizophrenic.