
MK Ayelet Shaked (Jewish Home) met with British reporters on Tuesday, and was shocked when they repeated several libelous charges they had taken - without fact-checking - from Arab sources.
The journalists told Shaked that at a briefing in Palestinian Authority-controlled Ramallah they were told that 60 local Arabs were killed by Jews in the last year, and that "settlers shoot at innocent Palestinians with sniper rifles from within settlements."
Shaked testified regarding the journalists that "in their eyes it wasn't (a) baseless (accusation)."
"It's lucky they didn't tell them that the settlers use the blood of Palestinian children to bake Passover matzah," remarked Shaked cynically, referencing an ancient blood libel charge that was historically used numerous times to justify violent anti-Semitism in Europe.
Shaked noted that "the Palestinians continue to spread anti-Semitic blood libels of the worst kind. It's a shame that the Israeli left and the Western world swallows these lies with no hesitation."
A similar example of such claims occurred at an event for Israeli students and journalists last February, when none other than PA Chairman Mahmoud Abbas claimed that "settlers" regularly "cut our trees, they kill, they destroy... they slaughter my sheep. You must stop them."
Arutz Sheva Managing Editor Ari Soffer, who covered the event, noted that Abbas's claims regarding "settler murders" went unchallenged, with the audience instead reacting with applause.
Shaked's statements come on the same day as the IDF accused anti-Israel groups of providing misleading footage of recent "Nakba Day" clashes between Israeli forces and Arab rioters, in which two Arab youths were killed last Thursday.
The youths hurled rocks and burning tires at IDF soldiers by Ofer Prison north of Jerusalem to demand the release of terrorists and protest the "catastrophe" of Israel's existence. The IDF said live fire was not used, and that the video is heavily edited in order to give a false picture of what really took place.