The Blood Libel Returns to Bloomsbury
When a blood libel became a campus talking point & a new generation of Jews found their voices
A medieval antisemitic lie was repeated at UCL this week, not whispered, not questioned, but applauded.
On Tuesday 11 November, at University College London, one of Britain’s most exalted centres of higher education, a lecturer stood before a room of students and repeated, without hesitation or embarrassment, one of the oldest, deadliest antisemitic lies in human history.
And the room nodded along.
The footage came from an event organised by “UCL Students for Justice in Palestine”, a group that long ago stopped pretending it was motivated by justice, and has settled instead into the comforting, familiar rhythms of Jew-hatred. Their guest lecturer, Dr Samar Maqusi, formerly of UCL’s Bartlett Faculty of the Built Environment and previously employed by UNRWA, delivered a talk on “The Birth of Zionism”. What she chose instead to deliver was a blood libel.
Not a metaphorical one, but a literal one.
This wasn’t an academic lecture, it was the resurrection of a conspiracy theory that has justified Jewish suffering for a thousand years.
She told the assembled students that during “the feast of Tabernacles… Jews make special pancakes or bread,” and that “drops of blood from someone who’s not Jewish… has to be mixed in that.” She then repeated the accusation that Jews murdered a Christian priest in Damascus in 1840 to obtain gentile blood for this supposed ritual. She even encouraged students to “draw your own narrative”, as though the historical record and the countless Jews beaten, tortured, exiled and murdered because of this lie were just one of many equally valid interpretations.
A Thousand Years of Murderous Fantasy
The blood libel is not a myth Jews ‘claim’ was used against us, it is a historical record soaked in real blood, real torture, real death.
The blood libel first appears in 12th-century England with the fabricated martyrdom of William of Norwich. From there it spread across Europe: Norwich, Blois, Trent, Prague, Damascus. Each time the script was identical, each time Jews paid in blood.
In Damascus in 1840, when an Italian monk, Father Thomas and his Muslim servant vanished, the local Christian community, encouraged by a notoriously antisemitic French consul, rounded on the Jews. Men were arrested and tortured until they confessed to things they did not do. Jewish children were held hostage. Homes destroyed. Violence spread like wildfire.
That this story, fully debunked, thoroughly documented, is now being repeated at UCL in 2025 is not a shocking aberration.
It is the predictable consequence of what our universities have allowed to fester.
This is what happens when encampments chanting “From the river to the sea” are allowed to exist for months on end. When “Globalise the Intifada” banners are treated as legitimate political discourse. When Jewish students’ pleas for safety are ignored, dismissed, minimised. When administrators decide that keeping the peace means sacrificing one minority to appease another.
Shock horror: ignoring antisemitic bullying leads to more antisemitic bullying. Shock horror: tolerating genocidal rhetoric creates an environment where blood libels feel at home.
UNRWA: The Rot Behind the Rhetoric
When the institutions that shape children teach hate, why are we surprised when the adults they produce preach it?
Dr Maqusi’s previous employer deserves a moment of clarity too, there is a direct correlation between her background and the evil lies she now amplifies to students here in the UK.
UNRWA, the only UN agency dedicated to a single population, has been repeatedly exposed for fundamental failures: Employees participating in the October 7th massacre, check. Textbooks that glorify terrorism and demonise Jews, check. Widespread international suspension of funding, check.
This is the ideological ecosystem that produced the lecturer UCL allowed on campus. A system where vilifying Jews is not an aberration, it’s the curriculum. A system where denying Jewish peoplehood, demonising Zionism, and promoting conspiracy theories about Jews is not an accident, it is the water in the well.
So yes, seeing a blood libel espoused proudly at UCL is bone chilling, but not because of the words and not because of the lack of outrage.
It is bone chilling because it is normalised.
This Is Not Isolated — It’s National
If UCL gave us a lecturer reviving the blood libel, Glasgow University went one better and elected a man amplifying the modern version of it.
The current Rector of the University of Glasgow, a position previously held by respected figures like Charles Kennedy, Richard Wilson, even Edward Snowden, is now occupied by Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah, a man who has praised Palestinians who murdered Israelis as “heroes” and “martyrs” .
Now he’s accused Israel of “organ harvesting” from dead Palestinians, a grotesque lie amplified by Qatari state propaganda outlet Al Jazeera. Blood libel 2.0: same lie, same intent, new packaging.
The claim that Jews harvest the organs of non-Jews is not an “allegation”. It is the modern incarnation of the medieval accusation that Jews kill Christian and Muslim children as part of a satanic ritual. It is the same lie, repurposed for modern audiences, designed to achieve the same result: the dehumanisation and endangerment of Jews.
And the fact that he makes these allegations while serving as Rector, the symbolic head of the entire student body, should shock the conscience.
But it doesn’t, not anymore.
Not at a university where, only last month, students gathered proudly under a banner proclaiming “Glory to Our Martyrs”. Not among students who declare, openly and without shame, that they exist to “celebrate the glorious Al Aqsa Flood”, the Hamas codename for the 7 October massacre.
Yes, you read that correctly.
Students at a British university are celebrating the murder, rape, torture and kidnapping of 1,400 Jews.
This is what our universities have become, places where higher learning has been replaced with the celebration of anti-Jewish hate.
The Next Generation Is Already Standing Up
And yet, in the midst of watching an ancient hatred dragged back into the light, I found myself last week at a dinner organised by StandWithUs, an international, non-partisan organisation dedicated to empowering Jewish students, educating across communities, challenging misinformation and fighting antisemitism, where I had the privilege to meet three young students who reminded me exactly why this fight is still worth fighting.
One of them, a nineteen-year-old Israeli studying at UCL, had been in the room when Maqusi resurrected the blood libel. He went with his girlfriend out of curiosity. What he saw instead was medieval Jew-hatred recycled for a new audience.
He came to London just before 7 October. During the massacre, five of his closest friends were murdered at the Nova festival. Months later, five more died, three in Gaza in an RPG attack, two in a training accident.
He has lost half his entire high school class.
And still, every day, he walks through a campus filled with banners calling for the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state. Past chants for intifada. Through hatred dressed up as activism. Past lecture halls where blood libels are academic theory. He has been called “an occupier”, “a genocide supporter”, “a war criminal” and “a supporter of war crimes” by his peers.
And yet he does not hide.
“This is what real courage looks like: a young man wearing his Magen David openly in a place where he knows it makes him a target.”
He filmed the event, reported it, refused to be silenced.
He and students like him are our future.
Why I Speak — And Why I Won’t Stop
And it is they who drive me every single day. I do not write because it’s pleasant, I certainly do not speak out because it’s convenient.
I do it because I am confronted, every day, with the reality my children, eight, ten, and twelve years old, are going to face if I remain silent. I ask myself constantly whether my grandchildren will be born in this country, and most days, the answer I reach is no.
But what I will not do is leave the fight to them, or to my children.
Silence is not a personal choice. It is an intergenerational betrayal.
Believing that speaking up only affects ourselves is the most seductive lie of all. The truth is brutally simple:
No you coward, it does not.
The future of global Jewry is not an abstraction. It is our children and our grandchildren. They are the people who will live with the consequences of our cowardice.
They deserve better than our quiet resignation. They deserve our courage and they deserve pride.
And crucially we must let ourselves be inspired by the young leaders already emerging. Those who show us what true bravery looks like, who refuse to bow their heads, who stand tall even when the cost is high.
The Final Word
A blood libel returned to Bloomsbury this week, but so did something far more powerful.
Leadership and courage.
A new generation determined not only to survive, but to build a future worthy of their heritage, their identity and their history.
Our enemies resurrected an ancient lie, we resurrected an ancient strength. One of those forces has endured every century since, it will endure this one too.
The fight continues.
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