Midfielder Mostafa Ziko after Egypt was knocked out of the World Cup by Argentina.
After the match between Egypt and Argentina in the FIFA World Cup some commentators, like Mohammed Nour, started spreading the false rumour that Egypt had lost because the French referee, Francois Letexiere, is Jewish. "We played against Argentina, but also against FIFA and Israel," Nour claimed. This spread like wildfire on social media. Someone even changed Lexetier's Wikipedia page to repeat the false claim that he is Jewish. Wikipedia corrected this after many hours, but the damage had been done.
People are willing to believe such nonsense because claims of this kind build on a long history of conspiracy theories about Jews. One of the original and most dangerous conspiracy theories was that Jews conspired to kill Jesus. This in turn birthed further conspiracy theories. Once you’re willing to believe that a people is responsible for killing the son of God, you are willing to believe that they are capable of anything: that they are league with the devil, that they poisoned the water supply and deliberately spread disease, that they stole and desecrated the eucharistic host, that they sacrificed Christian children to make Passover matzah. All of these conspiracies provided pretext to murder Jews in the Middle Ages.
