An intoxicated man in a bar is ranting that Zionists are dogs. He hears an offended voice behind him: “Hey, I resent that.” Without looking around, the drunk shouts, “Oh, so you’re a Zionist?” The answer comes back: “No. I’m a dog.”
The joke is harsh, but it captures something essential about the latest obscenity masquerading as political accusation: the grotesque allegation that Israel trains dogs to rape humans. Whatever one thinks about Israel’s conduct in war, this claim belongs to a different category. It is not an accusation of cruelty. It is a grotesque anthropomorphic fantasy, unsupported by credible evidence, that functions as a new blood libel.
The original libel accused Jews of murdering Christian children to use their blood for ritual purposes. It was absurd on its face. The Hebrew Bible repeatedly forbids the consumption of blood; Jewish law treats blood not as a sacramental ingredient, but as something to be removed and avoided.
Yet the very irrationality was a source of its power. The blood libel did not arise from evidence. It arose from the imagination of the accuser.
That is why projection remains one of the most useful ways to understand the bizarre persistence of antisemitic fantasy. The antisemite attributes to Jews precisely those impulses he cannot bear to recognize in himself: bloodlust, corruption, domination, sexual perversity, desecration. The Jew becomes the screen on which forbidden desires are projected and then hated.
This new libel follows the same pattern. It takes something physically and morally obscene, attaches it to Israel and to Jews, and then permits the accuser to experience his own disgust as moral clarity. The charge is not only false; it reveals the degraded imagination of those who find such accusations plausible or emotionally satisfying.
The deeper question is why Jews, who represent less than one-half of one percent of the world’s population, have become such an enduring obsession. Political and economic explanations are insufficient. At a more archaic level, Judaism represents a moral limit placed upon unbounded appetite. It teaches that desire must be elevated, not merely expressed; that the body is a vessel of holiness; that freedom without restraint is not liberation but degradation.
This is why Nazi antisemitism was never merely hatred of Jews as an ethnic minority. At its deepest level, it was hatred of Judaism as a standing rebuke to the Nazis’ retrogressive yearning for blood, appetite and power without moral limit.
Joseph Goebbels, who masterminded the German Nazi propaganda machine, revealed the logic when he wrote that the Jew had “corrupted our race” and “soiled our morals.”
From the Nazi perspective, Jewish morality appeared as contamination—contradicting the fantasy of a race freed from conscience. Hitler made the stakes explicit in his 1922 Munich speech, declaring that there could be “no compromise” between the victory of the Aryan and the victory of the Jew, intuiting that the Judeo-Christian moral inheritance was too potent a force to coexist with his program.
The imagined Jewish threat was not control of banks or governments, which were surface myths. The deeper threat was the Jewish distinction between good and evil, the introduction of conscience into history. The masses needed no knowledge of Jewish texts or customs, and had none. The ideologues did. Alfred Rosenberg and Julius Streicher, two of the most prominent ideologues of the Nazi regime, studied Jewish sources intending to distort them into shrewdly simplified emotional narratives—Jews as polluters, mutilators, ritual murderers—that spread through social contagion regardless of their factual basis.
The tragic irony is that Judaism placed holiness precisely where paganism wanted license. Circumcision marked the body with a covenant. The Sabbath marked time with restraint. Family purity and sexual prohibitions insisted that eros could not be separated from sanctity. To the antisemitic imagination, this was not moral elevation but mutilation—a Jewish curse upon the body and, in the Nietzschean register, a “castration of natural instinct and vitality.”
This is why the old and new blood libels strike at the heart of the same battle: Which concept of good and evil will define the moral future of civilization?
The accusation that Israel trains dogs to rape is not an ordinary slander. It attempts to relocate depravity from the mind of the accuser onto the body of the Jew. The old blood libel transformed a people biblically forbidden to drink blood into ritual murderers. The new blood libel transforms a people whose civilization marked sexuality with covenant and restraint into agents of sexual desecration.
The task is not to answer every obscenity as though it were a serious argument. Some accusations deserve careful investigation; others deserve exposure as projections of deranged minds. The latest belongs to the latter. It tells us less about Jews or Israel than about the moral imagination of those who need Jews to embody the evil they cannot face in themselves.
The ostensible goal of defeating Zionism is a mask. The real target is Judaism itself and the civilizing morality it brought to the world. This was best articulated by the Catholic priest, Rev. Edward H. Flannery, who observed that the Jew has long carried “the burden of God in history.”
Judaism, he wrote, “brought the concept of a God-given universal moral law into the world,” and for that, the Jew “has never been forgiven.” That burden remains, and so does the hatred.
But this understanding points to the typically overlooked insight. Although the surface accusations morph to suit the age—from ritual murder to apartheid state—the deep structural source remains constant.
The battle against antisemitism cannot be won until the world recognizes its root in Jew-hatred, names the projection, exposes the inversion and actively affirms the holiness that the world’s oldest hatred has always sought to destroy. The aim is not merely to defeat Jew-hatred but to replace it with its opposite—genuine gratitude for the gift the Jewish people have contributed to civilization’s moral foundation.
