RFK Jr. is NOT an antisemite … he is a politician who didn’t exercise discretion. Rather typical.

He did not blame Jews for creating COVID, he merely posited that COVID might preferentially attack Caucasians and whites. His conjecture, if anything, would have laid the blame at the door of the Chinese or the CIA.

The press soon jumped upon his statement as malicious.  But were it so, why would the ever diligent defender of Israel and Jews, Dov Hikind of Brooklyn, host RFK Jr. on his podcast?  Even Dov Hikind admitted that “Your [RFK’s] intentions may be very pure.  [1:02]”

Even Rabbi Shmuley defended RFK.

RFK Jr. was just tackling the touchy subject of bioweapons.

That didn’t stop the internet from accusing RFK Jr. of a plethora of hateful opinions. However, he hit back quite effectively.

I won’t be lectured to about antisemitism from Democratic lawmakers like Wasserman Schultz @RepDWStweets  who voted to give Iran $150b while that regime promises a new Holocaust against the Jews.  -- RFK Twitter.

He also listed a report he used for the basis of his claim.

However, RFK Jr. placed too much faith in official science. Had RFK thought this through, he could have avoided some errors.

Ashkenazic Jews have a massive amount of autosomal European DNA.

Recent STRUCTURE analysis of the entire Jewish Diaspora estimated that the Ashkenazi and Syrian Jewish populations have between 20 and 40% European admixture. --  PNAS (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences)

Other studies indicate even higher percentages of European DNA.

The present research indicates that only a small portion of Ashkenazi Jews have maternal mitochondrial DNA which tracks back to the Mideast to the four matriarchs of Israel: Rachel, Leah, Bilhah, and Ziphah.

This is more than a mere statistic, since Jews usually track ancestry through the maternal line.

“Thus the great majority of Ashkenazi maternal lineages were not brought from the Levant, as commonly supposed,” Dr. Richards and colleagues conclude in their paper. Overall, at least 80 percent of Ashkenazi maternal ancestry comes from women indigenous to Europe, and 8 percent from the Near East, with the rest uncertain, the researchers estimate.  -- New York Times

However, on the paternal line (Y-chromosome), the Jewish lineage shines through.

Past research found that 50 percent to 80 percent of DNA from the Ashkenazi Y chromosome, which is used to trace the male lineage, originated in the Near East, -- NBC News.

The standard interpretation is that single Jewish men who migrated to Europe married European women. Again, since it is modern practice for Jews to trace their lineage through the female lines, it is assumed that the women were converts.

Okay, so Ashkenazi Jews are not purely Middle Eastern. What this tells us is that Jews do indeed have a connection to the Mideast, however they also have a connection to Europeans.  Given that Ashkenazic Jews carry such a high load of European DNA, it would be impossible to target a genetic bioweapon that goes after Caucasians and spares Ashkenazic Jews.

What this means is that RFK Jr. was not antisemitic, but his comments were ill considered. Had he pondered a bit more, he would have realized that the official reports he read were ridiculous or misinterpreted.

Similarly, WIRED magazine claimed in 1998 that Israel was developing bioweapons to get rid of Arabs.

Israel is reportedly developing a biological weapon that would harm Arabs while leaving Jews unaffected, according to a report in London's Sunday Times. The report, citing Israeli military and western intelligence sources, says that scientists are trying to identify distinctive genes carried by Arabs to create a genetically modified bacterium or virus. -- WIRED

WIRED Magazine credited the source to the London Sunday Times, but whatever the source is, no thought was put into the article.

Even WIRED admitted that the problems would be formidable.

The task is very complex because both Arabs and Jews are Semitic peoples. But according to the report, the Israelis have succeeded in isolating particular characteristics of certain Arabs, "particularly the Iraqi people."  -- WIRED

Complex?!  How about impossible. More than half of Israel is either Sephardic or Mizrahi Jews which carry a lot of Arab DNA. Any such weapon would kill half of Israel at least.

Yet, apparently, a member of the Knesset at that time was furious about it.

Dedi Zucker, a member of the Israeli parliament, denounced the research in the Sunday Times. "Morally, based on our history, and our tradition and our experience, such a weapon is monstrous and should be denied."   -- WIRED

So RFK Jr. is not unique.  These are politicians not scientists.

Mind you, these claims were not coming from nut cases, but respected sources and authorities, proving that even experts are gullible.

Now, it would not surprise me if one Israeli scientist had broached the subject. “What about a bioweapon to get rid of the Arabs?”

But only a few seconds later another scientist would have said, “Shut up! Half of my relatives are Sephardi. Do you want to kill them? DON’T BE SO STUPID!”

And it would have ended there.

Scientific journals publish a lot of idiocy. … Think of global warming.  And RFK Jr., who fights with Big Pharma and is a big COVID Vaxx skeptic, should have been more circumspect. He mistrusts Big Pharma. Why wouldn’t he treat all medical reports with proper skepticism?

As for me, I am not sure if I agree with the percentages in those reports above about Ashkenazic DNA, but it is clear that Ashkenazim have a lot of European mix – enough to make targeted bioweapons unfeasible.

RFK Jr. was also slammed in other places as an antisemite for meeting with Farrakhan.

I doubt that proves anything. Just typical politicking without aforethought.

I admire RFK Jr.’s anti-Vax crusade; but the rest of his agenda is not well thought out.

What we have to remember is how such idiocies can propagate.

Remember that António Egas Moniz won a Nobel prize for the Frontal Lobotomy.

America invaded Iraq in 2003 over a non-existent weapons of mass destruction program.

And the present opioid crisis started when a letter to a medical journal was misinterpreted by Sackler’s Purdue Pharma to push OxyContin.

RFK Jr. is not an antisemite, but he should have put more thought into his statements.

Photo credit: Fix News Channel screengrab (cropped)