Letter to the Editor: Mia Bloom and Yulie Maimon

There is an increasing number of Orthodox Jews falling down the QAnon rabbit hole and becoming followers of the conspiracy.

Save the Children Israel on Telegram uses the actual charity’s logo but is a QAnon propaganda platform. The posts reproduce many of the same QAnon tropes available on English language QAnon channels: an evil cabal, children kidnapped and trafficked, insisting that 8 million children a year go missing. The channel explains how American convicted pedophiles can use Israel’s “right of return” as a loophole to avoid prosecution in the United States and make aliyah to Israel.

On the QAnon Hebrew channel, they circulate comparable content you could find on the American channels. They promote the fallacy that doctors and child-protective services are ripping children away from their mothers. QAnon in Israel rekindles age- old conspiracy that circulated in the 1950s among Mizrahi families who alleged their healthy children were being stolen to be given to Ashkenazi families or killed for their blood. For decades 1,000 families lived with their doubts and deep distrust of Israeli authorities that there had been a systematic scheme to abduct the newborn babies from families of recent immigrants from Yemen and give them to childless Ashkenazi couples. This myth even existed in [this letter’s co-author] Yulie’s own family, after they immigrated from Tripoli, Libya, when two seemingly healthy children were pronounced dead at the hospital during a routine postnatal exam.

Save the Children Israel identifies the usual boogeymen: George Soros, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Further, the channel alleges that former President Obama purchased his two daughters from Clinton’s underground trafficking network (whose underground tunnels exists throughout the D.C. area) since they also allege that Michelle Obama was not born female. The channel attacks Soros, the Pope, Tom Hanks, and many of the Hollywood targets, connecting them to Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein.

Unique to QAnon in Israel is the addition of several Israeli celebrities to help the channel resonate by adding local flavor, hip hop singer Momy Levi is accused of having sexually abused a boy of 11 ½, rock musician Aviv Geffen, the singer and poet Daniel Oz (son of Moshe), musician Amrani Brockman (for wearing a shirt with a logo that connects him to the pedophilic cabal) and even the popular TV show “Zehu Ze” for singing a song about pizza in season 3 episode 1.

QAnon Israel supported Netanyahu and reiterated some of the most conspiratorial statements from former PM Netanyahu about how the social media companies colluded with his enemies and caused him to lose the recent Israeli election. The QAnon channel in Hebrew even suggested that Netanyahu refuse to leave the residence – before Bibi announced he wasn’t leaving for an additional two weeks.

The existence of a QAnon Israel may have some of the same corrosive effects on Israel’s already brittle democracy, and religious leaders from within the Orthodox community need to disavow it before it grows out of control as it has in the United States.

Mia Bloom of Atlanta and Yulie Maimon, Sandy Springs