They called it the Judensau. Sometimes it was a real pig, fresh from bathing in its own shit, other times it was an effigy made of wicker and filled with straw. The fools dressed as Jews, sporting ‘Jew beards’ and prayer shawls, would gyrate around the swine. They would mock-suck from its teats. Some even gestured towards its anus, hinting at fornication between this unclean people and unclean beast. Mobs of benighted peasants lapped it up, revelling in this street depiction of ‘the sodomitic proclivities of the sexually deviant Jew’.

Seven hundred years later, we have the Judenhund. Now mobs gather not to watch Jewish caricatures fake-fuck a pig but to watch them whore out canines for the sexual torture of their enemies. In London on 9 May 2026, ‘pro-Palestine’ activists carried out a stunt depicting soldiers of the Jewish State forcing Palestinians to fornicate with dogs. These fools wore the new caricature of the morally corrupted Jew – not the fake beards and hunched backs of medieval Jew-mockery, but the expressionless glare and rough-handed gestures of the modern Jewish soldier. They forced their blindfolded quarry to kneel as one of the Jew jesters held up a sign letting it be known what these innocents were shortly to suffer – ‘RAPE BY DOGS’. A mob watched, reeling, as their ancestors did, at the sodomitic proclivities of the sexually deviant Jew.

We need to talk about this. We need to talk about how we went from Judensau to Judenhund. How we got from bloodcurdling lies about Jews lying with pigs to atrocity propaganda about Jews forcing others to lie with dogs. How we went from carnivals of anti-Semitic hysteria in which people dressed as Jews danced lasciviously around pigs to carnivals of anti-Zionist hysteria in which people dressed as Jews drag non-Jews towards that most demonic of acts – ‘RAPE BY DOGS’. It is the 21st century and once more street theatre is depicting the Jews as a uniquely beastly people while a titillated swarm of non-Jews watches on in comedy and horror. What has become of us?

There is no mystery as to where the calumny of the Judenhund came from. The black vision of Jewish soldiers instructing dogs to rape Palestinians has been festering in the toxic recesses of the internet for two years. It was given sunlight – and respectability – by the New York Times this month. NYT columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote a now infamous feature titled ‘The Silence That Meets the Rape of Palestinians’ in which he alleged that the machinery of the Jewish State uses sexual assault as a tool of torture against incarcerated Palestinians. Israeli prison guards even rape children, he said. And then the most unimaginable thing, the thing that demonstrates beyond all doubt the devilishness of this state: its dogs are ‘coached to rape prisoners’.

Kristof’s telling of these dogs that rape is suitably salacious. He paints a vision of Hell in which men lost to moral reason marshal unclean beasts to defile the oppressed. ‘A dog was summoned’, he writes. Then ‘with encouragement from a handler’ – ‘in Hebrew’ – the dog ‘mounted’ a prisoner. The prisoner ‘tried to dislodge the dog… but it penetrated him’. And all the while the guards were having fits of ‘laughs and giggles’ and taking photographs, Kristof reports. New York Times readers were left with a most appalling vision, like something from Hieronymus Bosch, as they supped their morning espresso: agents of the Jewish State wearing rictus smirks as a captive tried but failed to remove a dog’s penis from his anus.

For me, even more scandalous than the NYT’s publication of these wild rumours was the speed with which they were not only believed but acted on. In normal times, times not ailed by the bourgeois malady of anti-Zionism, more proof would have been demanded for such serious accusations of inhuman savagery against a nation state. Liberals who care for truth would have pressed the NYT for more evidence. Leftists sensitive to the scourge of atrocity propaganda would have cocked a sceptical eyebrow. Not this time. This time the outlandish hearsay was instantly taken as good coin. The digital highways throbbed with brutish commentary about ‘Satan’s Chosen People’ and their ‘animalistic’ torture of Palestinians. The cry went up: the Zionists are a uniquely barbarous people and their ‘Satanic creation’ of Israel must be dismantled. And we had that stunt in London – a modern-day carnival of unhinged speculation about the zoosexual sadism of the Jewish nation.

It should be clear to everyone whose moral compass has not yet been shattered on the wheel of Jew hatred that the reason the NYT’s despicable tale of dog rape was so swiftly believed is not because it was well-sourced – it absolutely wasn’t. No, it’s because the hellish vision of IDF-trained mutts ‘mounting’ Palestinians as Jewish soldiers watch and laugh flatters the pre-existing prejudice that the Jewish nation is the most abominable nation. The dog-rape libel has been treated more like a religious revelation than a specious rumour, because it panders so beautifully to the cultural elite’s ugly hatred for the ‘uniquely murderous’ Jewish nation. This is not journalism but its death, its burning at the altar of the anti-Zionist miasma.

It feels ridiculous to even say this – a bit like saying to those jeering peasants: ‘Jews don’t actually suck pig’s tits, you know’ – but there are countless reasons to disbelieve with every fibre of your being the claim that Israelis employ rape dogs. The most glaring is the source of this vicious canard. The dog-rape story first emerged in 2024, from the activism of Euro-Med Human Rights Monitor. This is a Geneva-based outfit that is virulently Israelophobic and which has suspected links with Hamas. As the Honest Reporting think-tank says, the dog-rape libel came from a ‘Hamas-linked organisation’ that ‘offered no names, no witnesses and no evidence’ for its medieval-sounding accusations about Jews, dogs and sex. So how did it end up in America’s paper of record a mere two years later?

It simmered in the digital cesspit of Israelophobia first. Occasionally it would blow up, trending for a few days as anti-Semites with the Hamas red triangle in their social-media bios pointed to it as proof of the feral inhumanity of the Jewish nation. Then, late last year, it was amplified by elements in the bourgeois left. ‘Israeli prison guards are using dogs to rape Palestinians’, declared a headline in Novara Media, the UK-based left-wing outlet. The libel was more vague then. Visions of dogs being ‘summoned’ to ‘mount’ prisoners who would desperately try to ‘dislodge’ the canine pricks hadn’t solidified yet. Instead we were treated to nebulous assertions that Israelis ‘rape [Palestinians] with a dog or with a stick’ with the aim of ruining their lives: injured by rape, they would no longer be able to ‘carry out their jobs or live their lives normally’.

The Guardian’s Owen Jones then embraced the dog libel. ‘Israel is raping Palestinians with dogs’, the headline on his Battlelines website starkly stated. Again, the full version of the calumny had not yet been forged. In Jones’s telling, Israelis were using dogs to piss on Palestinian prisoners (a claim Kristof doesn’t make) and to try to rape them. A dog ‘tried to insert its penis’ into a prisoner’s anus, we’re told. Jones’s credulity is striking. This is the same hack who, when he saw an image of a Jewish woman with her underwear around her ankles after she was murdered by Hamas on 7 October 2023, said: ‘If there was rape and sexual violence… we don’t see this on the footage.’ Never forget the first rule of the anti-Zionist mania: when Israeli women say rapes occurred, scepticism is your highest duty; when rumours bubble up from the digital wasteland of Israelophobia about the Jewish State putting dog’s cocks into prisoners’ anuses, you must instantly believe it.

Then the dog-rape tale arrived at the NYT, on 11 May. No named source was given. No corroboration of the story was offered. Instead we were told that a ‘Gaza journalist’ was successfully raped by a dog that had been ‘coached’ for precisely that demonic purpose. From a ‘no names, no witnesses’ rumour spread by a furiously anti-Israel activist group to a story about rapacious ‘dogs and sticks’ in the left-wing press to an all-out, black-and-white insistence that a ‘Gaza journalist’ was penetrated by a rape-trained dog – it has all the elements of a whispering campaign. You can feel the viral physics of the rumour mill. With each frantic repetition, the unverified claims harden from flapping hearsay into an unshakeable reality. Israel is raping Palestinians with dogs, as Jones says, turning the feverish murmurs of the anti-Zionist echo chamber into choking, claustrophobic truth. For the first time in my life, I understand how the blood libel took hold of 12th-century England.

There are other reasons to be profoundly sceptical – by which I mean human – about these mendacious innuendos about the Jewish State. For a start there have been medieval-style whisperings for years about the Jews’ deployment of beasts as part of their ‘genocidal’ programme. Hamas has accused Israel of sending ‘killer Zionist dolphins’ to bump off its militants. The poor mammals were ‘stripped of [their] will’ and turned into ‘murderers’, the anti-Semites said. Palestinian officials have accused Israel of sending ‘trained rats’ to ‘attack’ Palestinian children. A Palestinian outlet once accused the Zionist entity of sending ‘spy cows’ to collect information about Palestinian activists. The cattle were ‘recruited and trained’ and then dispatched into Palestinian territory with ‘eavesdropping’ equipment hanging from their necks. Israel has been accused of training wild boars to destroy Palestinian crops and sending sharks to Egypt to mess with its tourism industry. After a series of shark attacks in 2010, an Egyptian official said it is ‘not out of the question’ that ‘Mossad [is] throwing the deadly sharks [in the sea] to hit tourism’. The Israelis were forced to issue a denial, saying the ‘shark attacks [are] not linked to Mossad’.

Now, either we are expected to believe that the Jewish nation enjoys supernatural powers over God’s beasts, so much so that it can train cows to spy and dogs to rape, or we must conclude that anti-Zionist bigotry is truly out of control. The message of the Judensau was that Jews were unclean. The message of the Judenhund – not to mention the Judenratte, the Judenkuh and the Judendelphin – is that the Jewish nation is uniquely malevolent. There is nothing it will not do to inflict its barbarous urges on the goyim who oppose it, whether by gun or beast. And thus the medieval view of the Jew as weak and perverted is replaced by the modern view of the Jewish nation as terrifying and all-powerful. Anti-Semitic contempt gives way to anti-Zionist terror.

It is a journalistic failing of extraordinary proportions that Kristof did not wonder if the Jewish State had previously been accused of deploying animals in the services of its alleged savagery. And to ask if those accusations were false – a child could tell you that they were – and thus whether the new one about dogs might be false, too.

There are other failings as well. As Alan Howe at the Australian says, Kristof tells us a Palestinian prisoner who allegedly experienced rape recalled the smell of cigarette smoke. ‘[But] smoking is banned in Israel’s prisons, which are monitored by cameras. There are no smoking breaks.’ Howe makes an even more pressing point. ‘If some deviant genius in the Israel Prison Service has trained dogs to rape Palestinian prisoners, that’s page one. It’s the splash. It’s not a throwaway line 2,500 words into a 3,750-word report.’ He’s dead right. We might even ask if Kristof really believes the dog-rape story. Does the NYT itself believe it? If they do, why didn’t they lead with this truly extraordinary, epoch-shaking story? And if they don’t – if, like some of us, they recognise that pungent whiff of black propaganda – then why publish it at all? Why commit to print such a malignant smear with its uncanny echoes of medieval libels?

Then there is the core untruth in the dog-rape libel. Dogs are physically incapable of raping human beings on command. Numerous veterinarians and animal experts attested to this fact following the NYT’s publication of its scurrilous story. One dog-behaviour expert with 34 years’ experience points out that a ‘canine erection is a reflexive neuroendocrine response to female reproductive pheromones’. It is not, he said, ‘a voluntary behaviour and cannot be trained or reliably triggered on command’. In short: ‘The specific act alleged [in the New York Times] is not biologically plausible.’ Being forced to discuss the mechanics of dog penises and human orifices – see what a low moral state the swirling cult of anti-Zionism has reduced us to?

In a sense, even discussing this as journalism – albeit a failure of journalism – is to play the cruel and sarcastic game of anti-Zionism. Having to interview dog experts about whether dogs can rape humans is as preposterous – no, sickening – as it would have been to interview well custodians in the 1300s about the plausibility of Jews dripping poison into a well and unleashing another outbreak of Bubonic Plague. Or asking an experienced medieval baker if it really is possible to make matzah bread with the blood of Christian children. It is to treat a weaponised lie as a potential fact. It is to treat a calumny birthed from that dark, historic wariness of Jews as if it might be a real event that really happened. I have no idea what Kristof’s intentions were when he bestowed respectability on the dog-rape libel. No doubt he thought he was doing good. But in society, in our anti-Zionist moment, the sole function of the dog-rape tale is as a blood libel – a rumour born of hatred that paints the Jewish nation as singularly barbaric in precisely the same way that earlier blood libels painted the Jewish people as barbaric.

The role of the Judensau in 14th-century northern Europe was to remind the Christian faithful of the animalism of the Jew. As Birgit Wiedl of the Institute for Jewish History in Austria says, this grotesque image was designed to ‘emphasise… the Jews’ beastly, non-human descent’. The Judensau was mostly carved into the exterior walls of churches. These depictions of the ‘sow-kissing Jew’ communicated the idea that the Jew himself was ‘equal to a sow, and therefore barely, if at all, human’. Therefore, writes Wiedel, it was seen as ‘absolutely justified, even inevitable, to laugh at him; he deserves no better’. And people did laugh. The Judensau took on a flesh form during Fastnacht festivals in German-speaking Europe, when townsfolk would stage rowdy folk plays featuring anti-Semitic iconography, including the molested pigs of the Jews. Such grotesque imagery found its echo in other rituals in medieval Europe, such as ‘Judas burnings’, when Jew-like effigies were set on fire, and of course in lethal libels about Jews draining Christian children of their blood, which originated in Norwich in England in the late 1100s. Untold numbers of Jews were expelled, forced to convert or massacred on the backs of these libellous stories and rumours.

The rude intrusion of such medieval imagery into our supposedly modern societies feels disquieting in the extreme. In the past two months alone, we’ve seen the rise and rise of the Judenhund libel; we’ve seen a 23-feet tall effigy of Benjamin Netanyahu, stuffed with 14kg of gunpowder, being set alight in a Judas-burning in Spain; we’ve seen a Jewish girl have her hair violently yanked by a seething mob yelling ‘Bitch!’ outside a synagogue in Brooklyn; and we’ve seen a Jew in England being allegedly assaulted by a man calling him a ‘baby killer’. Animal-themed libels, Jew-head burnings, Jewish women being subjected to the ritualistic humiliation of hair-pulling, as if it were the 1930s again – isn’t it remarkable how much ‘criticism of Israel’ looks, feels and smells like hatred for Jews?

And yet, horrified as we should be by the resuscitation of the zombie monster of medieval Jew hate, we also need to clock what is new; what is distinct about anti-Zionism. It is so clear now that anti-Zionism is not just some iffy ideology that occasionally crosses the line into anti-Semitism. It is not simply the mask Jew hatred wears, to try to doll up its low-IQ loathings as virtuous politics. No, anti-Zionism is its own ideology of hatred, and one that poses a very real threat not only to the physical health of Jews but also to the spiritual health of Western civilisation itself.

The dog-rape story might echo the Judensau mocking, but it is very much a libel of the modern, anti-Zionist era. It has joined the feverish accusations of genocide and settler-colonialism as one of the key means through which the Jewish nation is delegitimised and treated as a criminal entity deserving of erasure. Where medieval mockery and libels were motored by a religious animus that treated the Jew as a sickly pox in Christian Europe, anti-Zionist libels are underpinned by a dystopic vision of the Jews as a swaggering, violent people whose demented devotion to their ancient sovereign rights is harming not only Palestinians but world peace itself.

The Jew was once hated for being weak – now he is hated for being strong. He was once hated for supposedly being hunched and ashen-faced – now he is hated for being upright and armed. He was once hated for not being European – now he is libelled as a European settler of Arab lands. He was once laughed at as non-white – now he is branded as the ‘hyper-white’ thief of other people’s territory. He was once mocked for fucking pigs – now he is mocked for making other people fuck dogs. He was once told he did not belong in Europe – now he is told he doesn’t belong in Israel. The very elites whose ancestors expelled Jews from our nations now cry for the erasure of the Jewish nation, all the way ‘from the river to the sea’. And when they have nowhere to go – not here, not there – they’ll be branded a cosmopolitan menace whose very landlessness is a threat to human normalcy. It is the sheer cruelty of Jew hatred, the trickery of it, that alarms those of us who are clinging for dear life to our moral faculties.

‘One of the marks of anti-Semitism is an ability to believe stories that could not possibly be true’, wrote Orwell. We are back there again. In fact, there is something dispiriting even in the sight of Jews and their allies – spiked included – having to point out the mechanical impossibility of dogs being commanded to rape humans. ‘Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies’, wrote Sartre. ‘They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words.’ This, right here, is the moment we are in. The anti-Semites are revelling in the vision of Jews and their friends being compelled to discuss dog penises and human anuses. This in itself is a victory for the scum. They are amusing themselves. They are enjoying this. It is obscene.

Brendan O’Neill is spiked’s chief political writer and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. His latest book – After the Pogrom: 7 October, Israel and the Crisis of Civilisation – is available to order on Amazon UK and Amazon US now. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy.