The State Department Must Act Against Antisemitic Blood Libels
by Shimon Samuels and Alex Uberti
Paris, 2 April 2025
Mr. Secretary of State,
The Facebook page of the “Zaid Bin Harithah Secondary School for Boys” in Madaba, Jordan, posted a video of 10th grade student, Jamal Shehadeh, who is one of the school’s nominees to participate in this year's edition of the “Arab Reading Challenge”. This is one of the “Global Initiatives” launched by the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed ibn Rashid Al Maktoum, to encourage children to read.
In the clip, the student praises “the most beautiful book” he has ever read, entitled “The Jewish Quarter (Blood for the Unleavened Bread of Zion)”, by Najib al-Kilani. This horrifies us.
The book is also distributed online through Noor Books.
The schoolboy mentions that the main theme of the book is “the murder of Father Thomas by the Jews, in order to obtain Christian blood for the unleavened bread (matzah) of Passover... as mentioned in their books and the Talmud, which does wonders and miracles for them.” He continues by adding, “the 100 pages of the book are full of excitement.”
According to the school’s Facebook page, it benefits from the SKEP program (Schools for a Knowledge Economy Project) of USAid.
For your information, author Najib al-Kilani (1931-1995), among other things, was also a fervent follower of the Muslim Brotherhood, the pan-Arab supremacist organization, inspiration to several terrorist organizations, such as Hamas, PIJ, al-Qaeda or ISIS.
The same fake conspiracy – also known as “the Damascus blood libel” – was plagiarized in “The Matzah of Zion”, a 1983 novel by the infamous former Syrian Defense Minister (under dictator Hafez al-Assad), Mustafa Tlass, who was a brutal torturer and murderer, as well as being a notorious antisemite.
See: https://www.memri.org/reports/mustafa-tlass-blood-libel-matzah-of-zion
In the early 1990s, an Egyptian producer, Munir Radhi, decided to adapt this heinous book into a film, “as a response to Schindler’s List” (sic!). Since a first 2001 article summarizing the book’s content, Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram and other Arab media have regularly relayed this defamatory screed to kindle the fire of Jew-hatred in Cairo, Damascus, Beirut, Ramallah, Algiers or Baghdad...
In its numerous versions, this story is among the top blood libels and conspiracy theories that consistently appear in the six Arab Book Fairs, that we have been monitoring over the past 20 years. It has become a best-seller throughout the MENA region – next to the Russian forgery “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, Henry Ford’s “The International Jew” and Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” – used to incite Jew-hatred and justify violence and the lust for genocide in individuals as well as terrorist groups.
Mr. Secretary of State, since USAid is of no use any more to influence or audit (if ever!) the schools it supported, we urge you to send this information to US Embassies and other diplomatic offices in the Arab World and beyond, to alert on the pervasive presence of antisemitic propaganda, distributed as “literature” or displayed in the media, that serves the purpose of terrorist organizations, to recruit, indoctrinate and activate the next murderers among us!
Your action is ever more urgent in the current context of widespread anti-Jewish scapegoating, and in view of the upcoming Passover festival, where this blood libel must not become, as in the past, a trigger for murder.
Through knowledge comes the possibility of fighting hatred, and the motivation to foster tolerance and dialogue.
Most respectfully,
Shimon Samuels and Alex Uberti
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Dr. Shimon Samuels is Emeritus Director for International Relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center
Alex Uberti is an independent researcher and consultant
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For further information, contact stsamuels018@gmail.com