QAnon and the Blood Libel | Beth Immanuel Messianic Synagogue

QAnon and the Blood Libel

A child goes missing.

The innocent child has been abducted.

His captors torment him, abuse him, and ritually sacrifice him in a Satanic ceremony.

“They cut the martyr’s throat and drain all his blood.”

They secretly dispose of the body.

The child’s remains are never found.

Who are these evil kidnappers, Satan worshippers, and killers of children?

Medieval Christians used to tell stories like this to incite pogroms and persecutions against the Jewish community. It’s called a Blood Libel. Medieval and Renaissance-era Christians believed that Jews needed the blood of baptized Christian children to make their Passover Matzah. Everytime a child disappeared, the Jewish community was blamed. For example, in 1475, a two-year old boy named Simon disappeared around Easter. His father believed he had been kidnapped and murdered by the local Jewish community in order to make matzah for Passover. The entire Jewish community was arrested and forced to confess under torture before they were all sentenced to death and burned at the stake. After the mass murders, the missing boy is declared to be a saint in the church. Learn about the history of Blood Libel here

The Blood Libels were not true. They were anti-Semitic lies created to defame, dehumanize, and demonize the Jewish people. It's hard to believe that, after all these years, the old Blood Libel has returned and is being propagated among American Christians under the name QAnon. It's a viral social-media-based conspiracy theory that posits the existence of a clandestine cabal of child-trafficking pedophiliacs run by the “liberal elites” and the “Hollywood elites” (aka Jews). Here is a link to an Anti-Defamation League article on the subject. QAnon infects religious communities, churches, and conservative groups easily because it initially presents itself as a worthy cause trying to stop rampant child sex-trafficking. That sounds legitimate. Online posts from Q confirm conservative values, quote scriptures, and decry leftist social agendas. But a little further in and QAnon Conspiracy starts to sound very much like a throwback to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, a sensationalist and hype-driven witchhunt that went through Evangelical and Charismatic Church circles. A recent NPR piece explains the sudden viral spread of the conspiracy into Evangelical Christian communities. Similarly, Relevant Magazine posted an article titled “Why are so many Christrians falling for QAnon?”  

What is QAnon?

Originally called Storm, the conspiracy begins in 2017 with an anonymous online poster who claims to be a “government source” (Q) leaking classified information through social media to alert the world to a secret, deep-state liberal government, closely connected with the Clintons and Barak Obama. According to Q, the deep state is engaged in nefarious Satanic rituals which require the molestation of children. These hidden Satanists are in every level of government, the media, the entertainment industry, world governments, and banks. They are responsible for child abductions across America. American children are being abducted and then used in cannibalistic sex rituals by the liberals as they worship Satan.

The source called Q creates short cryptic posts called "crumbs" and "Q drops" containing allegedly leaked information about the conspiracy and further information for followers on anonymous online forums such as 4chan and 8chan and 8kun. The "Q Drop" posts are laced with scripture verses, appeals to God, warnings about Satanism, and apocalyptic themes. Those are disseminated through Twitter, Facebook, and other forms of social media and collected on aggregating websites dedicated to unmasking the deep state conspiracy.

According to Q theory, President Donald Trump is fully aware of the deep state and actively fighting the Satanic cabal. He is secretly working to bring the guilty to justice. How does he do it? He sends secret coded messages to his QAnon followers through his seemingly disjointed statements on twitter and during press conferences. The QAnon followers study his words for their real hidden meaning, detecting secret messages about the deep state. They believe that President Trump is preparing to use federal agents to conduct massive sweeps to expose the conspiracy, and he is working behind the scenes to prepare for a big purge, a quickly coming day of reckoning called the the Storm.

QAnon explains the deep-state liberal government has created or utilized the “scamdemic” fake-virus (Covid-19) to destabilize the economy and remove Donald Trump from office. Of course, the deep state is also planning to use the virus to force everyone to receive a vaccination which will contain microchips which may carry the mark of the beast. Likewise, the same deep state actors responsible for the pandemic are responsible for engineering the recent riots and the Black Lives Matter movement. All of these are seen as efforts to destabilize President Trump before he exposes their conspiracy.

Origins and Growth

This conspiracy theory is very closely related to (if not started by) the work of Jack Posobeic, a well-known White Nationalist and anti-Semite who in 2016 promoted the Pizzagate Conspiracy Theory that falsely claimed Democrat leaders in Washington DC were involved in a child sex ring. Posobeic is best-known for diseminating pro-Trump statements on Twitter, but he is also known for seeding anti-liberal and racist conspiracy theories on the internet.

The recent high-profile sex-scandal and mysterious “suicide” of Jewish financier and Clinton-friend Jeffery Epstein is regarded as proof of the QAnon claims and has given the movement an enormous boost. The Catholic Church also gets wrapped into the conspiracy on the basis of their long and ongoing problem with pederasty. On the surface, the QAnon sources do not actually name the Jews as the culprits pulling the strings behind the whole evil system—not until the QAnon believers have gone far enough down the rabbit hole to put the pieces together with the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, etc. Instead, the conspiracy theory relies on thinly veiled anti-Semitic libels such as “global elite bankers” and “Hollywood elites.”

QAnon as Political Campaign Boost

Mainstream Republican leaders reject QAnon and are doing their best to distance themselves from it. The outlandish claims of the conspiracy theory damages conservative credibility. Nevertheless, the popular QAnon movement has the potential to provide a political boost to elections this fall.

When questioned about QAnon, President Trump publicly offered to help their cause and defended the conspiracy theorists. The president said, “I’ve heard these are people that love our country. So I don’t know really anything about it other than they do supposedly like me.” He went on to say he was willing to work with the goals of QAnon, “If I can help save the world from problems, I am willing to do it. I’m willing to put myself out there.”

Some politicians are already using the vast popularity of QAnon to propel their campaigns. Recent headlines from around the country have reported Federal Marshals conducting investigations and sweeps as part of something called “Operation Not Forgotten” in order to recover and rescue kidnapped children who are being sexually abused. This is a major federal operation which sounds good, but it’s being used for political advantage and feeding the conspiracy theory through media reports. For example, a headline from Friday reads, “Nearly 40 missing children rescued during Georgia sex trafficking bust.” The news story, now widely disseminated, is misleading. One would have to actually read the article carefully to realize that it does not describe a sex-trafficking bust or pedophilia ring. Instead, it was an investigation across 20 different Georgia counties to retrieve children under the age of 18 reported missing, many of which were taken illegally by parents without custody rights. The children were only deemed potentially “at-risk” of “victimization of child sex trafficking, child exploitation, sexual abuse, physical abuse, and medical or mental health conditions.” The story and its sensationalist headline appears to be intentionally crafted to create the impression of Federal action against the secret cabal.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican candidate for Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, openly endorses the QAnon conspiracy. She is known for racist, Islamaphobic and anti-Semitic remarks, but she won the run-off for the seat last week. She states, “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out, and I think we have the president to do it.”

As long as QAnon is garnering votes, we can expect to see politicians feeding it.

Russia Joins In

Up until a few months ago, QAnon was mostly contained to the fringe conspiracy-theory world. It was the domain of the extreme right wing, the White Nationalist, and the alternative universe of Youtube videos. This last summer, it's become ubiquitous. The recent explosion in QAnon presence on social media and its broad dissmination has occurred virally as people under the social distress of Covid-19 turn to the internet for answers. More recently, social-media accounts propagating the theory have also been traced to Russian sources. Russia has a powerful social-media presence employing fake accounts which actively seize upon all opportunities to sow disinformation, anti-establishment propaganda, and general mayhem into American society. The theory did not start with Russian disinformation, but it appears that Russian accounts are eager to push it along.

Real Child Trafficking

Don’t misunderstand the intention of this article. Child trafficking is a real problem in the world, but it’s usually not a conspiracy. It’s pretty much right out in the open. The world is full of sin, and adults often prey on children. Sexual predators are real. Child pornography is real. And there are real pedophiliacs who abuse children. It's not a political thing. It's not unique to one political party or another. It's a human sin problem.

If you are concerned about trafficking, put your efforts toward helping reputable and established organizations and non-profits that address those issues. Beth Immanuel endorses and financially contributes to two such organizations. On the local scene, we recommend Fierce Freedom as a reliable and sound non-partisan organization dedicated to the war on human trafficking. Internationally Frontier Alliance International is doing great work in this area as well. 

Blood Libel

Ultimately, QAnon is the same old blood libel from the Middle Ages, revived and repackaged for modern consumption. It’s dangerous in that it opens the church up to a steady flow of poisonous and hate-filled rhetoric which dehumanizes people using anti-Semitic and racist ideas. This is the type of stuff we have seen over and over again through the centuries. 

During the Middle Ages, anti-Semitic Christians accused the Jewish community of secretly abducting Christian children, abusing them, and ritually murdering them for Satanic ceremonies connected with Passover. The Blood Libels, which were widely circulated by concerned Christians, were the source of pogroms and violence against the Jewish community. Every time a child went missing, Christians assumed that the Jews had stolen the child for their satanic ceremonies.

In the modern era, the Blood Libel myths have been kept alive by Nazis, anti-Semites, White Nationalists, and even anti-Jewish/anti-Zionist Muslims. The QAnon conspiracy theory which posits thousands of missing children abducted for purposes of sex-trafficking, ritual abuse, and cannibalism is a repetition of the old trope with roots in White Supremacist ultra-right circles. It has no place in a Messianic Jewish community or among any disciples of our Master. To do so is to join ourselves with the "other side."

Daniel Thomas Lancaster

Elul 10, 5780

Revised 9/1/2020

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