The coronavirus pandemic has upended the world. China instituted a lockdown on tens of millions of its people. Israel set drastic restrictions on workplaces and public gatherings. And the United States on Friday declared a national emergency, all in an attempt to contain the spread of the novel virus.
As the infectious disease — with no vaccine or specific cure — has spread across the globe, a new conspiracy theory has been brewing on the fringes of society: The Jews are behind it.
According to Alex Friedfeld, a researcher with the Anti-Defamation League’s (ADL) Center on Extremism, extremists began promulgating the notion in January that the coronavirus was created by a cabal of Jews, around the time the virus was first being detected.
“The most popular conspiracy theory is that Jews are using this virus as a means for profit,” Friedfeld told The Times of Israel. “They are saying Jews manufactured it and are going to take advantage of the markets collapse through insider trading.”
Such ideas have been percolating not only on extremist platforms like Telegram and Gab, he said, but through posts on mainstream platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, where memes and statements have been posted regularly.
“What’s interesting to me was I started to see these same conspiracy theories — and anti-Semitic ones in particular — pop-up on social media,” he said.
In some cases, these theories have also appeared on state-sponsored television networks, like in Turkey.
One guest on Turkish television said “Jews, Zionists have organized and engineered the novel coronavirus as a biological weapon just like bird flu” to “design the world, seize countries and neuter the world’s population.”
