This tweet from “GnasherJew” includes a video clip from a lecture on “The Birth of Zionism” given by Dr Samar Maqusi for the group “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. Watch the video clip. 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. The spreading of such tales is usually the precursor to a pogrom, as it was in Lincoln in 1255.
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 kidnapping 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 historical blood libels. I wasn’t expecting to see it related as fact in 2025 in one of the top ten universities in the world. Like every conspiracy theorist ever born, Dr Maqusi peppers her speech with literal and metaphorical “uptalk”, little get-out clauses such as “the story goes” and “draw your own narrative”, so that if challenged she can claim to be “just asking questions”. But she felt safe enough to speak as she did, and, with the delayed exception of whoever recorded her, her student audience did not challenge her.
As ever, I do not seek to use the law to silence Dr Maqusi. I want it made clear to all how common and accepted her views are among the pro-Palestinian movement, and among Palestinians. I do think that unless UCL takes action their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion policy will be revealed as an empty sham, but if that is the case I would rather know about it.
Update: Dan Souter points out in the comments that UCL has apologised and Dr Maqusi’s profile has been removed from the UCL website. The link is to an article by David Rose in Unherd. I commend the Provost’s decisive action to protect his university’s reputation, but I do find it disquieting that in just five years universities across the English-speaking world went from beating their breasts in penitence for the most minuscule and indirect manifestations of racism – here is UCL’s 2020 statement on Black Lives Matter and here is an account from its website of how it “denamed” buildings named after a couple of Victorian eugenicists because seeing the old names has “a profound impact on the sense of belonging that we want all of our staff and students to have” – to this.
Apologies all round it seems:
UCL apologizes for lecture citing antisemitic blood libel
Not that it makes any difference. Given the enabling support that the leftist establishment of the UK has given to those espousing “morally correct” forms of Jew hatred, especially the Gaza lobby and the likes of London Mayor Sir Sadiq Khan, I’m surprised any self-respecting Jew hasn’t fled the UK for more accommodating climes.
This appears to be the movement that will now cripple the Right’s ascendency in the US, and cut thin Trump’s power for the second half of his term.
At some point, the pro-Hamas, anti-Jew wing of the Right decided it was time to crawl out from under their rock and publicly announce their hatred of all things Jewish.
And, as the rest of the Right suppressed their gag reflexes long enough to loudly condemn them, they declared that it was those Jew-lover people who are now splitting the Right by attacking their own teammates.
Here’s the thing: you will never be my teammate. You are my enemy, just as much as the most woke of the progressives.
Walsh, Carlson, Owens, et al – are going to get richer off of this grift, and people are going to take them seriously. So maybe we deserve to lose political power now.
bobby b
Wow. I don’t know much about Walsh and Owens, but I can assure you Tucker Carlson has never engaged in blood libel and is not pro-Hamas, anti-Jew, or a hater of all things Jewish. Just wow.
It goes with the Qatari cash.
Carlson is a scumbag, giving softball interviews (ie tacit support) to the most malignant and deranged Jew haters, and Putin of course. Gotta love his tourism ads for Russia, it’s like all those lefties who visited the USSR pre-WW2. Although, of course, they were dimwitted ideologues. I suspect Carlson, despite the idiot admiring expression he adopts when someone he interviews is spouting lunacy, is not so thick and a lot more bought-and-paid-for.
Would you say President Trump has been paid off by Qatar?
America has it’s largest military base in the Middle East in Qatar, and it’s been used for well over two decades. I find it very suspicious that supposed Qatari influence over American politics has suddenly just become an issue. Perhaps someone can correct me if I’m wrong but I haven’t seen a single person who has been going on suddenly about Qatari influence calling for the US to leave the Qatari base.
If the right lose power in the US it will be far more likely to do with thinking fifty year mortgages are any kind of solution to home affordability and backsliding on immigration than anything Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes, or Ben Shapiro say or do.
So it’s not just me growing more disappointed in recent months with Matt Walsh.
A great shame but I still hope he hasn’t gone completely over the edge unlike others.
I don’t follow any of these U.S. pundits in detail. But a lot of people whose opinion I respect praised Ben Shapiro’s recent show when he spoke about the way Tucker Carlson has recently had various malignant kooks like Nick Fuentes and Aleksandr Dugin on his show and gave them a very gentle ride. Shapiro included copious video clips backing up what he said.
This link from the YouTube version of Shapiro’s show covers the part where Carlson had on Darryl Cooper, also known as MartyrMade, about whom I have posted recently. There’s a clip of Cooper saying Churchill was the “chief villain of the second world war” and saying that the Nazis didn’t deliberately kill anyone, it was just that when they went into the East in 1941 they were “unprepared” to deal with the millions of prisoners of war and local political leaders they captured so they threw them into camps and millions of people just “ended up dead”. Carlson nods along and calls Cooper the “best and most honest historian in America”.
Candace Owens appears to have literally gone mad. Every conspiracy theory going. It might be hard to believe now, but a few years ago she seemed perfectly reasonable. I remember being embarrassed for her when her friend Kanye West started to go mad and starting turning up to interviews in a kind of hazmat suit. Now I think he’s saner than she is. I think the most charitable thing I can say about either of them is that they appear to have rotted their brains with drugs.
When these folk come up with the “I’m just asking questions” approach, I want to see a measure of consistency. In the case of Tucker Carlson, he’s tough on someone such as Ted Cruz, but light as a feather on a turd such as Darryl Cooper and Nick Fuentes.
TC appears to be in the business of enabling, or even “laundering”, evil ideas and people. He can’t plead honest or fearless journalism. That ship sailed a long time ago.
The influence of Tucker Carlson and others of his ilk is vastly overblown. But the media gives them a platform because they conform to help further the media/leftist narrative and which makes them seem far more influential than they actually are. Don’t believe everything you read in the papers, is still the best advice where they are concerned. In fact, don’t believe anything at all in the papers. Americans on the whole pay little attention to those loudmouth men and women behind the curtains. The conservative right’s ascendancy is in no danger, and is still growing.
That is the US using Qatar. It has no relevance whatsoever to the malignant Qataris spreading their noxious terrorism-adjacent politics by buying people and institutions in the first world. Even by the generally pitiful standards of Arab despots, they are poisonous and dangerous.
Why would you place your largest airbase in the region in such an apparently unfriendly country if what you say is true? Why accept a plane to be used as a air force one from such an apparently hostile country?
Why sell American weapons to a supposed hostile country? Why does the Trump White House say the US and Qatar have a ‘security partnership‘ if Qatar is a terrorist threat to the USA? Why is the current American AG a former lobbyist for Qatar?
It may well be true that Qatar is supporting terrorism. But that makes the actual US policy to Qatar seem pretty schizophrenic.
But then a former Al Qaeda member is now invited to the White House so I guess we are where we are.
Jews are forbidden animal blood – let alone human blood.
As for Dr Maqusi – this is the Tucker Carlson tactic “I did not make any claim – I am just asking questions” which he rather undermines by his practice of saying “obviously” or “obviously true” when a guest of his tells a particularly vicious lie.
Sure, but Ted Cruz was always like that 😀
As for Tucker Carlson, ever since he lost the TV slot and started panhandling on YouTube, he’s been corrupted and corruptible.
Thank you Paul. This is correct and has indirectly benefitted the civilised world by inventing that greatest of delicacies, salt beef, where the distinctive taste is the result of lengthy salting (nowadays immersion in brine) in order to eliminate any traces of blood.
On a less pleasant note it has also resulted in the continuation to this day of kosher slaughtering, not something I’m at all proud of.
Note my emphasis. Isn’t seeming to be influential the same as being influential?
This is correct and has indirectly benefitted the civilised world by inventing that greatest of delicacies, salt beef
And don’t forget the amazing advances in non-diary desserts to avoid the mother’s milk.
John and Runcie Balspune – I remember Blooms restaurant in Whitechapel, sadly not there anymore – due to the rise of the followers of the Crescent Moon, but the world changes and some of us live too long (past our time).
Johnathan Pearce – yes the difference in how Mr Carlson treated Senator Cruz (a real conservative) and how he treated Mr Cooper and Mr Fuentes, was instructive.
“For the record” (as they say) – I suspect Mr Cooper (“the most honest American historian” according to Mr Carlson) is sincere in all his National Socialist (Nazi) vileness, whereas both Mr Fuentes and Mr Carlson have “asset of elements of the security and intelligence services” written all over them.