Mutatis mutandis, what applies to Russians applies equally to Palestinians. Tonge and many others do not sincerely wish to end Palestinian suffering. If they did, they would think about what
theocratic Islamism would do and is doing to Palestinian women, Christians, gays, socialists and, indeed, Palestinian liberals and democrats, and declare themselves an enemy both of Israeli interference in the West Bank and Hamas's bid for power. They would overcome the wilful blindness in the West that refuses to see that anti-Semitism is not only about the hatred of Jews. From the czars through to the Nazis and on to today's Middle Eastern tyrannies, dictators have used the Jewish "threat" to justify their rule and stigmatise their dissenters as Jewish dupes.

I do not want to push this argument too far because, of course, when all is said and done, anti-Semitism is mainly about hating Jews. And in Tonge's discourse, tropes of thousands of years of loathing are repeated as if they occurred to her only yesterday. The all-powerful Jewish conspiracy controls everything, of course, even, somewhat implausibly, the Lib Dems. "The pro-Israeli lobby has got its grips on the Western world, its financial grips," she declared in 2006. "I think they've probably got a grip on our party." 

Once baronesses start talking like this, it is only a matter of time before they embrace the "blood libel", the most ancient and dangerous racial theory Europe has produced. In Trials of the Diaspora, his scholarly dissection of English anti-Semitism, Anthony Julius explains the various fantasies collected under the heading thus: "They are known as the blood libel partly because they suppose that Jews wish to kill non-Jews (at first Christians, now more usually Muslims), partly because some of them involve the claim that Jews require non-Jewish blood for ritual purposes, and partly because so much Jewish blood has been shed in consequence of them." 

The blood libel long predates the Jewish conspiracy theory, which only began to circulate after the Jewish emancipation of the Enlightenment. (Before then, even the maddest thinkers in Christendom could not manage to convince themselves that peasants in the shtetl were the secret rulers of the world.) In the first recorded instance that Julius can find, the feudal authorities executed 30 Jews in Blois, France, in 1171 for the ritual murder of a Christian, even though no body was ever discovered and no alleged victim was reported missing. He traces it through to the Nazi period where German propagandists told the occupied French that "the victory of the German armies was necessary in order that small children shall no longer be the victims of the Jews", through to Syrian television, which annexed the European anti-Semitic tradition and replicated faithfully the medieval version of the blood libel by showing Jews baking bread with gentile blood.

This year, after Julius published his book, Israel sent aid workers to help the victims of the Haiti earthquake. All over the internet, the word went out that Jewish relief workers were not sincerely helping the needy but harvesting the organs of the gentiles. The Palestinian Telegraph, of which Tonge is a patron, helped to spread the slur. She then intervened and tried to keep the story going by saying the accusations were sufficiently credible to warrant an inquiry.