Medieval blood libel at University College London. Again.

This tweet from “GnasherJew” includes a video clip from a lecture on “The Birth of Zionism” given by Dr Samar Maqusi for UCL Students for Justice in Palestine, on 11th November 2025. Dr Marqusi is currently Research Associate at University College London’s Person-Environment-Activity Research Laboratory (PEARL). (“Her work looks into the politics of space-making inside the Palestine refugee camps. More recently, she has been investigating modes of sociality and vitality in refugee camps inside a burdened Lebanon. Previously, Samar worked with UNRWA (UN Agency for Palestine refugees) as an Architect/Physical Planner, focusing on programmes of shelter rehabilitation and camp improvement.”)

Update: It looks like I pressed “publish” too soon. Never mind, you can enjoy seeing this post made in real time. Listen to the recording. It shows an academic in University College, London (UCL) spreading the blood libel. For anyone new to the term, a blood libel is a specific sort of anti-Jewish propaganda in which Jews are said to have murdered Christians for ritual purposes, often including baking their blood into bread. The genre goes back to the thirteenth century cult of Little Saint Hugh of Lincoln.

Dr Samar Maqusi said this to her students the day before yesterday:

Now 40 years later, in about 1838, there was something called the “Damascus Affair”. Uh, what happened is, there is, um, a priest, a Christian priest called Thomas. He disappears, um, in Damascus during what is called the feast of Tabernacles. So, this is a Jewish feast, and the story goes – and, you know, again, these are things that you read again and again. As I said: do investigate, draw your own narrative. But the story is that during this feast they make this, um special pancakes, or um 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. So, the story is that, um, a certain investigation was undergoing to try and find where Father Thomas is. He was found murdered and a group of, of Jews, who lived in Syria, said that, you know, admitted to kindnapping and murdering him to get the drops of blood for making, uh, the holy bread.

This one is known as “the Damascus Affair” or “the Damascus Blood Libel”. It’s famous enough to appear in lists of blood libels. I wasn’t expecting to see it related as fact in 2025 in one of the top ten universities in the world.

UCL has form on this. Here is UCL’s statement from last time.