NEWSWEEK
Arab world delusions fuel #BDS campaign’s coronavirus conspiracies
by Samantha Mandeles
May 17, 2020

The past two months have seen an explosion of coronavirus-related anti-Zionist discourse from across the globe. Notably, proponents of the global “Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS)” campaign against Israel have lost no time in exploiting the outbreak to feed their obsessive vendetta. But BDS appropriation of coronavirus is only part of a larger effort—popular within the Arab and Muslim world—to incorporate coronavirus into pre-existing anti-Zionist and anti-Jewish ideologies. Jews have long been accused of producing or spreading diseases. Modern iterations of these charges include Nazi myths of the Jewish biological threat, Hamas’ assertions that “Zionists” use HIV-positive women to seduce and infect Arabs and the Iranian regime’s habit of terming Israel a “cancerous tumor.” READ MORE