Another day, another University lecturer poisoning the minds of the young – this time at University College London:
University College London, a prominent UK university, launches an investigation and bans a researcher who shared an antisemitic blood libel with students.
The researcher, Dr. Samar Maqusi, shared the blood libel with the campus branch of Students for Justice in Palestine.
The blood libel is a medieval anti-Jewish myth that falsely says Jews murder non-Jews to bake their blood into Passover matzah. The libel is one of the most notorious antisemitic falsehoods and has caused repeated violence to Jews in Europe and elsewhere.
Maqusi’s lesson centered on the Damascus Affair, an incident in Syria in 1840 during which a monk disappeared and the Jewish community was falsely accused of murdering him to use his blood for Passover. Eight leading members of the Jewish community were tortured into confessing.
Maqusi said the monk had disappeared during a “Jewish feast.”
“During this feast, they make these special pancakes, or 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,” Maqusi said, according to an audio recording shared by the advocacy group StandWithUs.
“The story is that a certain investigation was undergoing to find out where Father Thomas is. He was found murdered and a group of Jews who lived in Syria said that, admitted to kidnapping him and murdering him to get drops of blood for making the holy bread,” she said.
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The advertisement for the event said Maqusi was a researcher at the university and a former employee of UNRWA, the UN agency for the Palestinians.
The university president and provost, Dr. Michael Spence, says: “I am utterly appalled by these heinous antisemitic comments.”
“Antisemitism has absolutely no place in our university, and I want to express my unequivocal apology to all Jewish students, staff, alumni, and the wider community that these words were uttered at UCL,” Spence says in a statement to The Times of Israel.Spence says the researcher is not a current university staffer, that the university reported the incident to police, and that the lecturer is banned from campus.
The university has launched a “full investigation into how this happened and have banned the student group which hosted it from holding any further events on campus pending the outcome of this.”
At my university, UCL, this week, an academic repeated the medieval blood libel that Jews murder to use non-Jewish blood in our rituals.
— Dov Forman (@DovForman) November 13, 2025
Centuries of massacres against Jews began with exactly this myth.
Will @ucl actually do anything about this or stay silent as usual? pic.twitter.com/dX4xU9oaKY
Believe it or not, it gets worse.
Firstly, the same lecture contained other heinous antisemitic tropes, such as Jews controlling the banks and the “financial infrastructure”:
LISTEN to more of the recording from the lecture at UCL called “The Birth of Zionism”
— StandWithUsUK (@StandWithUsUK) November 13, 2025
See how easy it is to invoke classic antisemitic tropes about the Jews controlling the banks and the “financial infrastructure”. Not just some Jewish families, but- “the Jews”.
All while… pic.twitter.com/s4xl72Gc3o
as well as Jews controlling the media:
Maqusi also allegedly referred to the claim that the mainstream media was “Zionist-controlled”. She told students: “Keep in mind, when we’re talking about Zionism, we’re talking about an ideology that’s held within a structure that also controls a lot of what’s within our hands.
“When you’re trying to read about Zionism you’re most probably being guided or censored or being directed.”
Secondly, not only is Dr. Samar Maqusi evil in sharing an antisemitic blood libel and antisemitic tropes, she is also an ignoramus. When speaking of the Damascus Affair, she is referring to Passover, but describes it as the “Feast of Tabernacles”. This is the completely different Jewish festival of Sukkot, which falls about half a year later.
And this isn’t even her first antisemitic rodeo. In a talk uploaded to Youtube on October 8 2025, Dr Samar Maqusi perpetuates the idea that Israel is predicated on Jewish supremacy (a concept popularized by former KKK wizard David Duke), which seeks to eliminate and replace the “indigenous” palestinians:
Besides this now well-documented antisemitism, Dr. Samar Maqusi has in the past perpetuated the idea that Israel is predicated on Jewish supremacy, which seeks to eliminate and replace the "indigenous" palestinians https://t.co/kWUDYE1xqf pic.twitter.com/CEZ5xJipSa
— David Lange (@Israellycool) November 14, 2025
Not surprisingly, she also considers palestinian terrorism – including those terror tunnels that were used to hold the innocent hostages – to be “resistance.”
And here is Dr Samar Maqusi describing terrorism as "resistance", including the terror tunnels (for smuggling weapons, hiding terrorists, and holding innocent civilian hostages) https://t.co/860ACcTD5n pic.twitter.com/UmmfdDxqPy
— David Lange (@Israellycool) November 14, 2025
As you can see, this was not an isolated incident but a pattern of deep-seated ideological venom. It’s about a climate that allows antisemitism to masquerade as critical theory, and invites those who cling to conspiracy and hatred to stand at the lectern as if they are serious thinkers.
The blood libel Maqusi repeated is not an academic curiosity. It is a lie that led directly to Jewish torture, expulsions, and death. Pair that with claims that Jews control banks, media, and governments, and you’ve recreated the exact ideological cocktail that fuels antisemitism today.
Add in praise for terrorism, and you have a worldview that doesn’t just distort history – it endangers the present.
UCL took action. Good.
But the full investigation must reveal and dismantle how such poison was allowed to infect a student environment in the first place.
