(JEWISH GROUP) UK university axes researcher for teaching students anti-Jewish blood libel

University College London, a prominent UK university, said on Thursday that it had launched an investigation and banned a researcher who taught an antisemitic blood libel in a lecture.

The researcher, Dr. Samar Maqusi, shared the libel with the campus branch of Students for Justice in Palestine on Tuesday.

The blood libel is an age-old anti-Jewish myth that falsely says Jews murder non-Jews to bake their blood into Passover matzah. The libel is one of the most notorious antisemitic falsehoods and has caused repeated violence to Jews in Europe and elsewhere.

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“During this feast, they make these special pancakes, or bread, and part of the holy ceremony is that drops of blood from someone who’s not Jewish, which the term is ‘gentile,’ has to be mixed in that bread,” Maqusi said, according to an audio recording shared by the advocacy group StandWithUs. The group said one of its members went to the event and recorded the lecture.

Link to tweet

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Marqusi’s page on the university’s website appears to have been taken down. An archived version of the page said Maqusi was a PhD student at the university’s Bartlett School of Architecture, where she was investigating “spatial politics of the Palestine refugee camp,” and was a former employee of UNRWA, the UN agency for the Palestinians.

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