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Friday, May 13, 2022

mHealth

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MHealth

Nurse using a mobile phone in Accra, Ghana

mHealth (also written as m-health or mhealth) is an abbreviation for mobile health, a term used for the practice of medicine and public health supported by mobile devices. The term is most commonly used in reference to using mobile communication devices, such as mobile phones, tablet computers and personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wearable devices such as smart watches, for health services, information, and data collection. The mHealth field has emerged as a sub-segment of eHealth, the use of information and communication technology (ICT), such as computers, mobile phones, communications satellite, patient monitors, etc., for health services and information. mHealth applications include the use of mobile devices in collecting community and clinical health data, delivery/sharing of healthcare information for practitioners, researchers and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vital signs, the direct provision of care (via mobile telemedicine) as well as training and collaboration of health workers.

While mHealth has application for industrialized nations, the field has emerged in recent years as largely an application for developing countries, stemming from the rapid rise of mobile phone penetration in low-income nations. The field, then, largely emerges as a means of providing greater access to larger segments of a population in developing countries, as well as improving the capacity of health systems in such countries to provide quality healthcare. Within the mHealth space, projects operate with a variety of objectives, including increased access to healthcare and health-related information (particularly for hard-to-reach populations); improved ability to diagnose and track diseases; timelier, more actionable public health information; and expanded access to ongoing medical education and training for health workers.

Definitions

Malaria Clinic in Tanzania helped by SMS for Life program that uses cell phones to efficiently deliver malaria vaccine

mHealth broadly encompasses the use of mobile telecommunication and multimedia technologies as they are integrated within increasingly mobile and wireless health care delivery systems. The field broadly encompasses the use of mobile telecommunication and multimedia technologies in health care delivery. The term mHealth was coined by Robert Istepanian as use of "emerging mobile communications and network technologies for healthcare". A definition used at the 2010 mHealth Summit of the Foundation for the National Institutes of Health (FNIH) was "the delivery of healthcare services via mobile communication devices". The GSM Association representing the worldwide mobile communications industry published a report on mHealth in 2010 describing a new vision for healthcare and identified ways in which mobile technology might play a role in innovating healthcare delivery systems and healthcare system cost management.

While there are some projects that are considered solely within the field of mHealth, the linkage between mHealth and eHealth is unquestionable. For example, an mHealth project that uses mobile phones to access data on HIV/AIDS rates would require an eHealth system in order to manage, store, and assess the data. Thus, eHealth projects many times operate as the backbone of mHealth projects.

In a similar vein, while not clearly bifurcated by such a definition, eHealth can largely be viewed as technology that supports the functions and delivery of healthcare, while mHealth rests largely on providing healthcare access. Because mHealth is by definition based on mobile technology such as smartphones, healthcare, through information and delivery, can better reach areas, people, and/or healthcare practitioners with previously limited exposure to certain aspects of healthcare.

Medical uses

mHealth apps are designed to support diagnostic procedures, to aid physician decision-making for treatments, and to advance disease-related education for physicians and people under treatment. Mobile health has much potential in medicine and, if used in conjunction with human factors may improve access to care, the scope, and quality of health care services that can be provided. Some applications of mobile health may also improve the ability to improve accountability in healthcare and improve continuum of care by connecting interdisciplinary team members.

mHealth is one aspect of eHealth that is pushing the limits of how to acquire, transport, store, process, and secure the raw and processed data to deliver meaningful results. mHealth offers the ability of remote individuals to participate in the health care value matrix, which may not have been possible in the past. Participation does not imply just consumption of health care services. In many cases remote users are valuable contributors to gather data regarding disease and public health concerns such as outdoor pollution, drugs and violence.

While others exist, the 2009 UN Foundation and Vodafone Foundation report presents seven application categories within the mHealth field:

Education and awareness
Helpline
Diagnostic and treatment support
Communication and training for healthcare workers
Disease and epidemic outbreak tracking
Remote monitoring
Remote data collection

Education and awareness

Education and awareness programs within the mHealth field are largely about the spreading of mass information from source to recipient through short message services (SMS). In education and awareness applications, SMS messages are sent directly to users' phones to offer information about various subjects, including testing and treatment methods, availability of health services, and disease management. SMSs provide an advantage of being relatively unobtrusive, offering patients confidentiality in environments where disease (especially HIV/AIDS) is often taboo. Additionally, SMSs provide an avenue to reach far-reaching areas—such as rural areas—which may have limited access to public health information and education, health clinics, and a deficit of healthcare workers.

Helpline

Helpline typically consists of a specific phone number that any individual is able to call to gain access to a range of medical services. These include phone consultations, counseling, service complaints, and information on facilities, drugs, equipment, and/or available mobile health clinics.

Diagnostic support, treatment support, communication and training for healthcare workers

Diagnostic and treatment support systems are typically designed to provide healthcare workers in remote areas advice about diagnosis and treatment of patients. While some projects may provide mobile phone applications—such as a step-by-step medical decision tree systems—to help healthcare workers diagnose, other projects provide direct diagnosis to patients themselves. In such cases, known as telemedicine, patients might take a photograph of a wound or illness and allow a remote physician to diagnose to help treat the medical problem. Both diagnosis and treatment support projects attempt to mitigate the cost and time of travel for patients located in remote areas.

mHealth projects within the communication and training for healthcare workers subset involve connecting healthcare workers to sources of information through their mobile phone. This involves connecting healthcare workers to other healthcare workers, medical institutions, ministries of health, or other houses of medical information. Such projects additionally involve using mobile phones to better organize and target in-person training. Improved communication projects attempt to increase knowledge transfer amongst healthcare workers and improve patient outcomes through such programs as patient referral processes. For example, the systematic use of mobile instant messaging for the training and empowerment of health professionals has resulted in higher levels of clinical knowledge and fewer feelings of professional isolation.

Disease surveillance, remote data collection, and epidemic outbreak tracking

Projects within this area operate to utilize mobile phones' ability to collect and transmit data quickly, cheaply, and relatively efficiently. Data concerning the location and levels of specific diseases (such as malaria, HIV/AIDS, TB, Avian Flu) can help medical systems or ministries of health or other organizations identify outbreaks and better target medical resources to areas of greatest need. Such projects can be particularly useful during emergencies, in order to identify where the greatest medical needs are within a country.

Policymakers and health providers at the national, district, and community level need accurate data in order to gauge the effectiveness of existing policies and programs and shape new ones. In the developing world, collecting field information is particularly difficult since many segments of the population are rarely able to visit a hospital, even in the case of severe illness. A lack of patient data creates an arduous environment in which policy makers can decide where and how to spend their (sometimes limited) resources. While some software within this area is specific to a particular content or area, other software can be adapted to any data collection purpose.

Treatment support and medication compliance for patients, including chronic disease management

Remote monitoring and treatment support allows for greater involvement in the continued care of patients. Recent studies seem to show also the efficacy of inducing positive and negative affective states, using smart phones. Within environments of limited resources and beds—and subsequently a 'outpatient' culture—remote monitoring allows healthcare workers to better track patient conditions, medication regimen adherence, and follow-up scheduling. Such projects can operate through either one- or two-way communications systems. Remote monitoring has been used particularly in the area of medication adherence for AIDS, cardiovascular disease, chronic lung disease, diabetes, antenatal mental health, mild anxiety, and tuberculosis. Technical process evaluations have confirmed the feasibility of deploying dynamically tailored, SMS-based interventions designed to provide ongoing behavioral reinforcement for persons living with HIV among others.

In conclusion, the use of mobile phone technology (in combination with a web-based interface) in health care results in an increase in convenience and efficiency of data collection, transfer, storage and analysis management of data as compared with paper-based systems. Formal studies and preliminary project assessments demonstrate this improvement of efficiency of healthcare delivery by mobile technology. Nevertheless, mHealth should not be considered as a panacea for healthcare. Possible organizational issues include the ensuring of appropriate use and proper care of the handset, lost or stolen phones, and the important consideration of costs related to the purchase of equipment. There is therefore a difficulty in comparison in weighing up mHealth interventions against other priority and evidence-based interventions.

Criticism and concerns

The extensive practice of mhealth research has sparked criticism, for example on the proliferation of fragmented pilot studies in low- and middle-income countries, which is also referred to as "pilotitis." The extent of un-coordinated pilot studies prompted for instance the Ugandan Director General Health Services Dr Jane Ruth Aceng in 2012 to issue a notice that, "in order to jointly ensure that all eHealth efforts are harmonized and coordinated, I am directing that ALL eHealth projects/Initiatives be put to halt." The assumptions that justify mhealth initiatives have also been challenged in recent sociological research. For example, mobile phones have been argued to be less widely accessible and usable than is often portrayed in mhealth-related publications; people integrate mobile phones into their health behavior without external intervention; and the spread of mobile phones in low- and middle-income countries itself can create new forms of digital and healthcare exclusion, which mhealth interventions (using mobile phones as a platform) cannot overcome and potentially accentuate. Mhealth has also been argued to alter the practice of healthcare and patient-physician relationships as well as how bodies and health are being represented. Another widespread concern relates to privacy and data protection, for example in the context of electronic health records.

Studies looking into the perceptions and experiences of primary healthcare professionals using mheath have found that most health care professionals appreciated being connected to their colleagues, however some prefer face to face communication. Some healthcare workers also felt that while reporting was improved and team members who require help or training could be more easily identified, some healthcare professionals did not feel comfortable being monitored continuously. A proportion of healthcare professionals prefer paper reporting. The use of mobile apps may sometimes lead to healthcare professionals spending more time performing additional tasks such as filling out electronic forms and may generate more workload in some cases. Some healthcare professionals also do not feel comfortable with work-related contact from patients/clients outside of business hours (however some professionals did find this useful for emergencies).

Communicating with clients/patients while using a mobile device may need to be considered. A decrease in eye contact and the potential to miss non-verbal cues due to concentrating on a screen while speaking with patients is a potential consideration.

Society and Culture

Healthcare in low- and middle-income countries

Disability-adjusted life year for all causes per 100,000 inhabitants in 2004.

no data

less than 9,250

9,250–16,000

16,000–22,750

22,750–29,500

29,500–36,250

36,250–43,000

43,000–49,750

49,750–56,500

56,500–63,250

63,250–70,000

70,000–80,000

more than 80,000

Middle income and especially low-income countries face a plethora of constraints in their healthcare systems. These countries face a severe lack of human and physical resources, as well as some of the largest burdens of disease, extreme poverty, and large population growth rates. Additionally, healthcare access to all reaches of society is generally low in these countries.

According to a World Health Organization (WHO) report from June 2011, higher-income countries show more mHealth activity than do lower-income countries (as consistent with eHealth trends in general). Countries in the European Region are currently the most active and those in the African Region the least active. The WHO report findings also included that mHealth is most easily incorporated into processes and services that historically use voice communication through conventional telephone networks. The report was the result of a mHealth survey module designed by researchers at the Earth Institute's Center for Global Health and Economic Development, Columbia University.

The WHO notes an extreme deficit within the global healthcare workforce. The WHO notes critical healthcare workforce shortages in 57 countries—most of which are characterized as developing countries—and a global deficit of 2.4 million doctors, nurses, and midwives. The WHO, in a study of the healthcare workforce in 12 countries of Africa, finds an average density of physicians, nurses and midwives per 1000 population of 0.64. The density of the same metric is four times as high in the United States, at 2.6.

The burden of disease is additionally much higher in low- and middle-income countries than high-income countries. The burden of disease, measured in disability-adjusted life year (DALY), which can be thought of as a measurement of the gap between current health status and an ideal situation where everyone lives into old age, free of disease and disability, is about five times higher in Africa than in high-income countries. In addition, low- and middle-income countries are forced to face the burdens of both extreme poverty and the growing incidence of chronic diseases, such as diabetes and heart disease, an effect of new-found (relative) affluence.

Considering poor infrastructure and low human resources, the WHO notes that the healthcare workforce in sub-Saharan Africa would need to be scaled up by as much as 140% to attain international health development targets such as those in the Millennium Declaration.

The WHO, in reference to the healthcare condition in sub-Saharan Africa, states:

The problem is so serious that in many instances there is simply not enough human capacity even to absorb, deploy and efficiently use the substantial additional funds that are considered necessary to improve health in these countries.

Mobile technology has made a recent and rapid appearance into low- and middle-income nations. While, in the mHealth field, mobile technology usually refers to mobile phone technology, the entrance of other technologies into these nations to facilitate healthcare are also discussed here.

Health and development

The link between health and development can be found in three of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), as set forth by the United Nations Millennium Declaration in 2000. The MDGs that specifically address health include reducing child mortality; improving maternal health; combating HIV and AIDS, malaria, and other diseases; and increasing access to safe drinking water. A progress report published in 2006 indicates that childhood immunization and deliveries by skilled birth attendants are on the rise, while many regions continue to struggle to achieve reductions in the prevalence of the diseases of poverty including malaria, HIV and AIDS and tuberculosis.

Healthcare in developed countries

In developed countries, healthcare systems have different policies and goals in relation to the personal and population health care goals.

In the US and EU many patients and consumers use their cell phones and tablets to access health information and look for healthcare services. In parallel the number of mHealth applications grew significantly in the last years.

Doctors, nurses and clinicians use mobile devices to access patient information and other databases and resources.

Technology and market

Basic SMS functions and real-time voice communication serve as the backbone and the current most common use of mobile phone technology. The broad range of potential benefits to the health sector that the simple functions of mobile phones can provide should not be understated.

The appeal of mobile communication technologies is that they enable communication in motion, allowing individuals to contact each other irrespective of time and place. This is particularly beneficial for work in remote areas where the mobile phone, and now increasingly wireless infrastructure, is able to reach more people, faster. As a result of such technological advances, the capacity for improved access to information and two-way communication becomes more available at the point of need.

Mobile phones

Mobile phone subscribers per 100 inhabitants 1997–2007

With the global mobile phone penetration rate drastically increasing over the last decade, mobile phones have made a recent and rapid entrance into many parts of the low- and middle-income world. Improvements in telecommunications technology infrastructure, reduced costs of mobile handsets, and a general increase in non-food expenditure have influenced this trend. Low- and middle-income countries are utilizing mobile phones as "leapfrog technology" (see leapfrogging). That is, mobile phones have allowed many developing countries, even those with relatively poor infrastructure, to bypass 20th century fixed-line technology and jump to modern mobile technology.

The number of global mobile phone subscribers in 2007 was estimated at 3.1 billion of an estimated global population of 6.6 billion (47%). These figures are expected to grow to 4.5 billion by 2012, or a 64.7% mobile penetration rate. The greatest growth is expected in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. In many countries, the number of mobile phone subscribers has bypassed the number of fixed-line telephones; this is particularly true in developing countries. Globally, there were 4.1 billion mobile phones in use in December 2008. See List of countries by number of mobile phones in use.

While mobile phone penetration rates are on the rise, globally, the growth within countries is not generally evenly distributed. In India, for example, while mobile penetration rates have increased markedly, by far the greatest growth rates are found in urban areas. Mobile penetration, in September 2008, was 66% in urban areas, while only 9.4% in rural areas. The all India average was 28.2% at the same time. So, while mobile phones may have the potential to provide greater healthcare access to a larger portion of a population, there are certainly within-country equity issues to consider.

Mobile phones are spreading because the cost of mobile technology deployment is dropping and people are, on average, getting wealthier in low- and middle-income nations. Vendors, such as Nokia, are developing cheaper infrastructure technologies (CDMA) and cheaper phones (sub $50–100, such as Sun's Java phone). Non-food consumption expenditure is increasing in many parts of the developing world, as disposable income rises, causing a rapid increase in spending on new technology, such as mobile phones. In India, for example, consumers have become and continue to become wealthier. Consumers are shifting their expenditure from necessity to discretionary. For example, on average, 56% of Indian consumers' consumption went towards food in 1995, compared to 42% in 2005. The number is expected to drop to 34% by 2015. That being said, although total share of consumption has declined, total consumption of food and beverages increased 82% from 1985 to 2005, while per-capita consumption of food and beverages increased 24%. Indian consumers are getting wealthier and they are spending more and more, with a greater ability to spend on new technologies.

Smartphones

More advanced mobile phone technologies are enabling the potential for further healthcare delivery. Smartphone technologies are now in the hands of a large number of physicians and other healthcare workers in low- and middle-income countries. Although far from ubiquitous, the spread of smartphone technologies opens up doors for mHealth projects such as technology-based diagnosis support, remote diagnostics and telemedicine, preprogrammed daily self-assessment prompts, video or audio clips,^[56] web browsing, GPS navigation, access to web-based patient information, post-visit patient surveillance, and decentralized health management information systems (HMIS).

While uptake of smartphone technology by the medical field has grown in low- and middle-income countries, it is worth noting that the capabilities of mobile phones in low- and middle-income countries has not reached the sophistication of those in high-income countries. The infrastructure that enables web browsing, GPS navigation, and email through smartphones is not as well developed in much of the low- and middle-income countries. Increased availability and efficiency in both voice and data-transfer systems in addition to rapid deployment of wireless infrastructure will likely accelerate the deployment of mobile-enabled health systems and services throughout the world.

Other technologies

Beyond mobile phones, wireless-enabled laptops and specialized health-related software applications are currently being developed, tested, and marketed for use in the mHealth field. Many of these technologies, while having some application to low- and middle-income nations, are developing primarily in high-income countries. However, with broad advocacy campaigns for free and open source software (FOSS), applications are beginning to be tailored for and make inroads in low- and middle-income countries.

Some other mHealth technologies include:

Patient monitoring devices
Mobile telemedicine/telecare devices
Microcomputers
Data collection software
Mobile Operating System Technology
Mobile applications (e.g., gamified/social wellness solutions)
Chatterbots

Mobile device operating system technology

Technologies relate to the operating systems that orchestrate mobile device hardware while maintaining confidentiality, integrity and availability are required to build trust. This may foster greater adoption of mHealth technologies and services, by exploiting lower cost multi purpose mobile devices such as tablets, PCs, and smartphones. Operating systems that control these emerging classes of devices include Google's Android, Apple's iPhone OS, Microsoft's Windows Mobile, and RIM's BlackBerry OS.

Operating systems must be agile and evolve to effectively balance and deliver the desired level of service to an application and end user, while managing display real estate, power consumption and security posture. With advances in capabilities such as integrating voice, video and Web 2.0 collaboration tools into mobile devices, significant benefits can be achieved in the delivery of health care services. New sensor technologies such as HD video and audio capabilities, accelerometers, GPS, ambient light detectors, barometers and gyroscopes can enhance the methods of describing and studying cases, close to the patient or consumer of the health care service. This could include diagnosis, education, treatment and monitoring.

Air quality sensing technologies

Environmental conditions have a significant impact on public health. Per the World Health Organization, outdoor air pollution accounts for about 1.4% of total mortality. Utilizing Participatory sensing technologies in mobile telephone, public health research can exploit the wide penetration of mobile devices to collect air measurements, which can be utilized to assess the impact of pollution. Projects such as the Urban Atmospheres are utilizing embedded technologies in mobile phones to acquire real time conditions from millions of users mobile phones. By aggregating this data, public health policy shall be able to craft initiatives to mitigate the risk associated with outdoor air pollution.

Data

Data has become an especially important aspect of mHealth. Data collection requires both the collection device (mobile phones, computer, or portable device) and the software that houses the information. Data is primarily focused on visualizing static text but can also extend to interactive decision support algorithms, other visual image information, and also communication capabilities through the integration of e-mail and SMS features. Integrating use of GIS and GPS with mobile technologies adds a geographical mapping component that is able to "tag" voice and data communication to a particular location or series of locations. These combined capabilities have been used for emergency health services as well as for disease surveillance, health facilities and services mapping, and other health-related data collection.

History

The motivation behind the development of the mHealth field arises from two factors. The first factor concerns the myriad constraints felt by healthcare systems of developing nations. These constraints include high population growth, a high burden of disease prevalence, low health care workforce, large numbers of rural inhabitants, and limited financial resources to support healthcare infrastructure and health information systems. The second factor is the recent rapid rise in mobile phone penetration in developing countries to large segments of the healthcare workforce, as well as the population of a country as a whole. With greater access to mobile phones to all segments of a country, including rural areas, the potential of lowering information and transaction costs in order to deliver healthcare improves.

The combination of these two factors has motivated much discussion of how greater access to mobile phone technology can be leveraged to mitigate the numerous pressures faced by developing countries' healthcare systems.

Research

Emerging trends and areas of interest:

Emergency response systems (e.g., road traffic accidents, emergency obstetric care).
Human resources coordination, management, and supervision.
Mobile synchronous (voice) and asynchronous (SMS) telemedicine diagnostic and decision support to remote clinicians.
Clinician-focused, evidence-based formulary, database and decision support information available at the point of care.
Pharmaceutical supply chain integrity and patient safety systems (e.g. Sproxil and mPedigree).
Clinical care and remote patient monitoring (e.g. Clear Arch Health).
Health extension services.
Inpatient monitoring.
Health services monitoring and reporting.
Health-related mLearning for the general public.
Public health services, for example, tobacco cessation
Mental health promotion and illness prevention
Training and continuing professional development for health care workers.
Health promotion and community mobilization.
Support of long-term conditions, for example medication reminders and diabetes self-management.
Peer-to-peer personal health management for telemedicine.
Social mobilization for infectious disease prevention.
Surgical follow-up, such as for major joint arthroplasty patients.
Mobile social media for global health personnel; for example, the capacity to facilitate professional connectedness, and to empower health workforce.

According to the Vodafone Group Foundation on February 13, 2008, a partnership for emergency communications was created between the group and United Nations Foundation. Such partnership will increase the effectiveness of the information and communications technology response to major emergencies and disasters around the world.

Quantum Zeno effect

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_Zeno_effect

With the increasing number of measurements the wave function tends to stay in its initial form. In the animation, a free time evolution of a wave function, depicted on the left, is in the central part interrupted by occasional position measurements that localize the wave function in one of nine sectors. On the right, a series of very frequent measurements leads to the quantum Zeno effect.

The quantum Zeno effect (also known as the Turing paradox) is a feature of quantum-mechanical systems allowing a particle's time evolution to be slowed down by measuring it frequently enough with respect to some chosen measurement setting.

Sometimes this effect is interpreted as "a system cannot change while you are watching it". One can "freeze" the evolution of the system by measuring it frequently enough in its known initial state. The meaning of the term has since expanded, leading to a more technical definition, in which time evolution can be suppressed not only by measurement: the quantum Zeno effect is the suppression of unitary time evolution in quantum systems provided by a variety of sources: measurement, interactions with the environment, stochastic fields, among other factors. As an outgrowth of study of the quantum Zeno effect, it has become clear that applying a series of sufficiently strong and fast pulses with appropriate symmetry can also decouple a system from its decohering environment.

The name comes from Zeno's arrow paradox, which states that because an arrow in flight is not seen to move during any single instant, it cannot possibly be moving at all. The first rigorous and general derivation of the quantum Zeno effect was presented in 1974 by Degasperis, Fonda, and Ghirardi, although it had previously been described by Alan Turing. The comparison with Zeno's paradox is due to a 1977 article by George Sudarshan and Baidyanath Misra.

According to the reduction postulate, each measurement causes the wavefunction to collapse to an eigenstate of the measurement basis. In the context of this effect, an observation can simply be the absorption of a particle, without the need of an observer in any conventional sense. However, there is controversy over the interpretation of the effect, sometimes referred to as the "measurement problem" in traversing the interface between microscopic and macroscopic objects.

Another crucial problem related to the effect is strictly connected to the time–energy indeterminacy relation (part of the indeterminacy principle). If one wants to make the measurement process more and more frequent, one has to correspondingly decrease the time duration of the measurement itself. But the request that the measurement last only a very short time implies that the energy spread of the state in which reduction occurs becomes increasingly large. However, the deviations from the exponential decay law for small times is crucially related to the inverse of the energy spread, so that the region in which the deviations are appreciable shrinks when one makes the measurement process duration shorter and shorter. An explicit evaluation of these two competing requests shows that it is inappropriate, without taking into account this basic fact, to deal with the actual occurrence and emergence of Zeno's effect.^[9]

Closely related (and sometimes not distinguished from the quantum Zeno effect) is the watchdog effect, in which the time evolution of a system is affected by its continuous coupling to the environment.

Description

Unstable quantum systems are predicted to exhibit a short-time deviation from the exponential decay law. This universal phenomenon has led to the prediction that frequent measurements during this nonexponential period could inhibit decay of the system, one form of the quantum Zeno effect. Subsequently, it was predicted that measurements applied more slowly could also enhance decay rates, a phenomenon known as the quantum anti-Zeno effect.

In quantum mechanics, the interaction mentioned is called "measurement" because its result can be interpreted in terms of classical mechanics. Frequent measurement prohibits the transition. It can be a transition of a particle from one half-space to another (which could be used for an atomic mirror in an atomic nanoscope) as in the time-of-arrival problem, a transition of a photon in a waveguide from one mode to another, and it can be a transition of an atom from one quantum state to another. It can be a transition from the subspace without decoherent loss of a qubit to a state with a qubit lost in a quantum computer. In this sense, for the qubit correction, it is sufficient to determine whether the decoherence has already occurred or not. All these can be considered as applications of the Zeno effect. By its nature, the effect appears only in systems with distinguishable quantum states, and hence is inapplicable to classical phenomena and macroscopic bodies.

The mathematician Robin Gandy recalled Turing's formulation of the quantum Zeno effect in a letter to fellow mathematician Max Newman, shortly after Turing's death:

[I]t is easy to show using standard theory that if a system starts in an eigenstate of some observable, and measurements are made of that observable N times a second, then, even if the state is not a stationary one, the probability that the system will be in the same state after, say, one second, tends to one as N tends to infinity; that is, that continual observations will prevent motion. Alan and I tackled one or two theoretical physicists with this, and they rather pooh-poohed it by saying that continual observation is not possible. But there is nothing in the standard books (e.g., Dirac's) to this effect, so that at least the paradox shows up an inadequacy of Quantum Theory as usually presented.
— Quoted by Andrew Hodges in Mathematical Logic, R. O. Gandy and C. E. M. Yates, eds. (Elsevier, 2001), p. 267.

As a result of Turing's suggestion, the quantum Zeno effect is also sometimes known as the Turing paradox. The idea is implicit in the early work of John von Neumann on the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics, and in particular the rule sometimes called the reduction postulate. It was later shown that the quantum Zeno effect of a single system is equivalent to the indetermination of the quantum state of a single system.

Various realizations and general definition

The treatment of the Zeno effect as a paradox is not limited to the processes of quantum decay. In general, the term Zeno effect is applied to various transitions, and sometimes these transitions may be very different from a mere "decay" (whether exponential or non-exponential).

One realization refers to the observation of an object (Zeno's arrow, or any quantum particle) as it leaves some region of space. In the 20th century, the trapping (confinement) of a particle in some region by its observation outside the region was considered as nonsensical, indicating some non-completeness of quantum mechanics. Even as late as 2001, confinement by absorption was considered as a paradox. Later, similar effects of the suppression of Raman scattering was considered an expected effect, not a paradox at all. The absorption of a photon at some wavelength, the release of a photon (for example one that has escaped from some mode of a fiber), or even the relaxation of a particle as it enters some region, are all processes that can be interpreted as measurement. Such a measurement suppresses the transition, and is called the Zeno effect in the scientific literature.

In order to cover all of these phenomena (including the original effect of suppression of quantum decay), the Zeno effect can be defined as a class of phenomena in which some transition is suppressed by an interaction – one that allows the interpretation of the resulting state in the terms 'transition did not yet happen' and 'transition has already occurred', or 'The proposition that the evolution of a quantum system is halted' if the state of the system is continuously measured by a macroscopic device to check whether the system is still in its initial state.

Periodic measurement of a quantum system

Consider a system in a state $A$ , which is the eigenstate of some measurement operator. Say the system under free time evolution will decay with a certain probability into state $B$ . If measurements are made periodically, with some finite interval between each one, at each measurement, the wave function collapses to an eigenstate of the measurement operator. Between the measurements, the system evolves away from this eigenstate into a superposition state of the states $A$ and $B$ . When the superposition state is measured, it will again collapse, either back into state $A$ as in the first measurement, or away into state $B$ . However, its probability of collapsing into state $B$ after a very short amount of time $t$ is proportional to $t^{2}$ , since probabilities are proportional to squared amplitudes, and amplitudes behave linearly. Thus, in the limit of a large number of short intervals, with a measurement at the end of every interval, the probability of making the transition to $B$ goes to zero.

According to decoherence theory, the collapse of the wave function is not a discrete, instantaneous event. A "measurement" is equivalent to strongly coupling the quantum system to the noisy thermal environment for a brief period of time, and continuous strong coupling is equivalent to frequent "measurement". The time it takes for the wave function to "collapse" is related to the decoherence time of the system when coupled to the environment. The stronger the coupling is, and the shorter the decoherence time, the faster it will collapse. So in the decoherence picture, a perfect implementation of the quantum Zeno effect corresponds to the limit where a quantum system is continuously coupled to the environment, and where that coupling is infinitely strong, and where the "environment" is an infinitely large source of thermal randomness.

Experiments and discussion

Experimentally, strong suppression of the evolution of a quantum system due to environmental coupling has been observed in a number of microscopic systems.

In 1989, David J. Wineland and his group at NIST observed the quantum Zeno effect for a two-level atomic system that was interrogated during its evolution. Approximately 5,000 ⁹Be⁺ ions were stored in a cylindrical Penning trap and laser-cooled to below 250 mK. A resonant RF pulse was applied, which, if applied alone, would cause the entire ground-state population to migrate into an excited state. After the pulse was applied, the ions were monitored for photons emitted due to relaxation. The ion trap was then regularly "measured" by applying a sequence of ultraviolet pulses during the RF pulse. As expected, the ultraviolet pulses suppressed the evolution of the system into the excited state. The results were in good agreement with theoretical models. A recent review describes subsequent work in this area.

In 2001, Mark G. Raizen and his group at the University of Texas at Austin observed the quantum Zeno effect for an unstable quantum system, as originally proposed by Sudarshan and Misra. They also observed an anti-Zeno effect. Ultracold sodium atoms were trapped in an accelerating optical lattice, and the loss due to tunneling was measured. The evolution was interrupted by reducing the acceleration, thereby stopping quantum tunneling. The group observed suppression or enhancement of the decay rate, depending on the regime of measurement.

In 2015, Mukund Vengalattore and his group at Cornell University demonstrated a quantum Zeno effect as the modulation of the rate of quantum tunnelling in an ultracold lattice gas by the intensity of light used to image the atoms.

The quantum Zeno effect is used in commercial atomic magnetometers and proposed to be part of birds' magnetic compass sensory mechanism (magnetoreception).

It is still an open question how closely one can approach the limit of an infinite number of interrogations due to the Heisenberg uncertainty involved in shorter measurement times. It has been shown, however, that measurements performed at a finite frequency can yield arbitrarily strong Zeno effects. In 2006, Streed et al. at MIT observed the dependence of the Zeno effect on measurement pulse characteristics.

The interpretation of experiments in terms of the "Zeno effect" helps describe the origin of a phenomenon. Nevertheless, such an interpretation does not bring any principally new features not described with the Schrödinger equation of the quantum system.

Even more, the detailed description of experiments with the "Zeno effect", especially at the limit of high frequency of measurements (high efficiency of suppression of transition, or high reflectivity of a ridged mirror) usually do not behave as expected for an idealized measurement.

It was shown that the quantum Zeno effect persists in the many-worlds and relative-states interpretations of quantum mechanics.

Antisemitic canard

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Antisemitism
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Antisemitic canards are "sensational reports, misrepresentations, or fabrications" that are defamatory towards Judaism as a religion or defamatory towards Jews as an ethnic or religious group. Since the Middle Ages, they have formed parts of broader antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Some antisemitic canards or false accusations date back to the birth of Christianity, such as the allegation that the Jews are collectively responsible for the crucifixion of Jesus. In Medieval Europe, the scope of antisemitic canards expanded and became the basis for regular persecutions and formal expulsions of Jews in England, France, Germany, Spain and Portugal. During these times, it was widely believed that Jews caused epidemics like the Black Death by poisoning wells. Jews were also accused of ritually consuming the blood of Christians.

Starting in the 19th century, the notion that Jews were plotting to establish control over the world and dominate it by promoting capitalism and engaging in banking and finance first emerged. In the 20th century, other antisemitic canards alleged that Jews were responsible for the propagation of Communism and trying to dominate the news media. Those antisemitic canards which had political and economic contexts became political myths which were central to the worldview of Adolf Hitler, and they persist to the present day.

Holocaust denial is also considered an antisemitic conspiracy theory because of its position that the Holocaust was a hoax or misrepresentation and was designed to advance the interests of Jews and/or justify the creation of the State of Israel.

Economic and political canards

World domination

A Nazi German cartoon circa 1938 depicts Churchill as a Jewish-controlled octopus encircling the globe.

The publication of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 1903 is usually considered the beginning of contemporary conspiracy theory literature.

Included in this canard are not only writings that seek to accuse Jews of trying to control the world, but graphic imagery which depicts Jews, or their supporters, as trying to control the world. Examples of this imagery include Nazi cartoons that depict Jews as octopuses, encircling the globe. A more recent example is the 2001 re-printing of Henry Ford's antisemitic text, The International Jew in Egypt, with the same octopus imagery on the front cover.

Among the earliest refutations of The Protocols as a forgery were a series of articles printed in The Times of London in 1921. This series revealed that much of the material in The Protocols was plagiarized from The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, an earlier political satire that did not have an antisemitic theme. Since 1903, when The Protocols first appeared in print, its earliest publishers have offered vague and often contradictory testimony detailing how they obtained their copies of the rumored original manuscript.

The text was popularized by supporters of the Tsarist regime. It was widely circulated in the West from 1920 onward. The Great Depression and the rise of Nazism were important developments in the history of The Protocols, and the hoax continued to be published and circulated despite its debunking. Despite the fact that numerous independent investigations have repeatedly proven The Protocols to be a plagiarism and a literary forgery, the hoax is still frequently quoted and reprinted by antisemites, and is sometimes used as evidence of an alleged Jewish cabal by antisemitic groups in the United States and in the Middle East.

Nazi propagandists, accusing "international Jewry" of plotting and extending World War II through its supposed control of Allied governments, threatened to annihilate the Jews as justified retaliation.

Another world-domination conspiracy goes by the name Zionist Occupation Government (ZOG) and various other names, and it claims that Jews secretly control the governments of Western states. The expression is used by white supremacist, white nationalist, far right, nativist, black nationalist, or antisemitic groups in the United States and Europe, as well as by ultra-nationalists such as Svoboda in Ukraine.

On 16 October 2003, the Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed drew a standing ovation at the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference for his speech, in which he said: "today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them ... They invented socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong so that they can enjoy equal rights with others. With these, they have gained control of the most powerful countries and they, this tiny community, have become a world power." He further urged Muslims to emulate Jews in this regard in order to achieve similar results.

In April 2017, Politico magazine published an article purporting to show links between U.S. President Donald Trump, Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Jewish outreach organization Chabad-Lubavitch. The article was condemned. Jonathan Greenblatt, the head of the Anti-Defamation League, said that it "evokes age-old myths about Jews".

Two-time heavyweight world champion Tyson Fury has spoken of his belief in a Jewish/Zionist plot to brainwash people and lower moral standards by utilising influence held in the media and financial industries.

According to Gustavo Perednik, unlike any other group hatred, antisemitism tries to disguise brutal instincts as a struggle against "the powerful" embodied in the Jew, no matter how defenceless the actual victim.

Controlling the media

First edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion

One antisemitic cliché is that "the Jews control the media" and Hollywood. Historically, it has been traced to discredited early 20th-century publications such as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903) and to Henry Ford's Dearborn Independent. Despite the fact that he opposed antisemitism during the Hilsner affair, Czech politician Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk believed that Jews controlled the press and helped the nascent state of Czechoslovakia during its struggle for independence. Czech historian Jan Láníček comments that "The great philosopher and humanist Masaryk was still using the same anti-Semitic trope found at the bottom of all anti-Jewish accusations."

J. J. Goldberg, editorial director of the newspaper The Forward, in 1997 published a study of this myth regarding the United States, concluding that, although Jews do hold many prominent positions in the U.S. media industry, they "do not make a high priority of Jewish concerns" and that Jewish Americans generally perceive the media as anti-Israel. Variants on this theme have focused on Hollywood, the press, and the music industry.

Scholar Alan Dershowitz said of the subject:

Many of these individuals are Jewish only in the sense that their parents or grandparents happen to be Jews. They do not live Jewish lives or support Jewish causes. They certainly do not conspire to exercise any sort of "Jewish control" over the areas in which they work. Indeed, many individual Jews who are in positions of authority are anti-Israel and critical of Jewish values. Others simply don't care about these issues ... So let's stop all this nonsense about Jewish control over the media and praise those individual Jews who, by dint of hard work and talent, have earned their place, as individuals, in so many areas of American life. I always thought that was the American dream.

Controlling the world financial system

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) documented various antisemitic canards concerning Jews and banking, including the myth that world banking is dominated by the Rothschild family, that Jews control Wall Street, and that Jews control the United States Federal Reserve. The ADL has said the canard is traceable to the prevalence of Jews in the money-lending profession in Europe during the Middle Ages due to a prohibition against Christians in that profession. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion repeat this canard.

In an article written by anti-racism activist Tim Wise about such accusations of Jewish financial control, he wrote:

Of course, in keeping with the logic of anti-Jewish bigots, perhaps one should ask the following: If media or financial wrongdoing is Jewish inspired, since Jews are prominent in media and finance, should the depredations of white Christian-dominated industries (like the tobacco or automobile industries) be viewed as examples of white Christian malfeasance? After all, 400,000 people per year die because of smoking-related illnesses, and tobacco companies withheld information on the cancerous properties of their products. Likewise, should executives at Ford and Firestone be thought of as specifically white Christian criminals, due to recent disclosures that defective tires were installed on SUVs, resulting in the deaths of over 150 people worldwide? Is their race, religion or ethnic culture relevant to their misdeeds? If not, why is it suddenly relevant when the executives in question are Jewish?

Usury and profiteering

In the Middle Ages, Jews were ostracized from most professions by the Christian Church and the guilds and were pushed into marginal occupations considered socially inferior, such as tax and rent collecting and moneylending. At the same time, church law and rulings prohibited Christians from charging interest. For instance, the Third Council of the Lateran of 1179 threatened excommunication for any Christian lending money at interest. People who wanted or needed to borrow money thus often turned to Jews. This was said to show Jews were insolent, greedy usurers. Natural tensions between creditors and debtors were added to social, political, religious, and economic strains.

financial oppression of Jews tended to occur in areas where they were most disliked, and if Jews reacted by concentrating on moneylending to gentiles, the unpopularity – and so, of course, the pressure – would increase. Thus, Jews became an element in a vicious circle. The Christians, on the basis of the Biblical rulings, condemned interest-taking absolutely, and from 1179 those who practised it were excommunicated. But Christians also imposed the harshest financial burdens on Jews. Jews reacted by engaging in the one business where Christian laws actually discriminated in their favour, and so became identified with the hated trade of moneylending.

Peasants who were forced to pay their taxes to Jews could personify them as the people taking their earnings while remaining loyal to the lords on whose behalf Jews worked. Gentile debtors may have been quick to lay charges of usury against Jewish moneylenders charging even nominal interest or fees. Thus, historically attacks on usury have often been linked to antisemitism.

In England, the departing Crusaders were joined by crowds of debtors in the massacres of Jews at London and York in 1189–1190. In 1275, Edward I of England passed the Statute of Jewry which made usury illegal and linked it to blasphemy, in order to seize the assets of the violators. Scores of English Jews were arrested, 300 hanged and their property went to the Crown. In 1290, all Jews were expelled from England, allowed to take only what they could carry, the rest of their property became the Crown's. The usury was cited as the official reason for the Edict of Expulsion. According to Walter Laqueur,

The issue at stake was not really whether the Jews had entered it out of greed (as antisemites claimed) or because most other professions were barred to them. ... In countries where other professions were open to them, such as Al-Andalus and the Ottoman Empire, one finds more Jewish blacksmiths than Jewish money lenders. The high tide of Jewish usury was before the fifteenth century; as cities grew in power and affluence, the Jews were squeezed out from money lending with the development of banking.

During World War I, Alfred Roth claimed, without evidence, that Jews in the German Army were profiteers, spies and defeatists.

"Kosher tax"

The "Kosher tax" (or "Jewish tax") canard claims that food producers are forced to pay an exorbitant amount to obtain the right to display a symbol on their products that indicates it is kosher, and that this cost is secretly passed on to consumers through higher prices which constitute a "kosher tax". It is mainly spread by antisemitic white supremacist and other extremist organizations.

Refuters of this canard state that if it were not profitable to obtain such certification, then food producers would not engage in the certification process, and that the increased sales resulting from kosher certification actually lower the overall cost per item. Obtaining certification that an item is kosher is a voluntary business decision made by companies desiring additional sales from consumers (both Jewish and non-Jewish) who look for kosher certification when shopping, and is sought by marketing departments of food production companies.

Propagation of communism

White Russian anti-Communist and antisemitic propaganda poster, c. 1919. Senior Bolsheviks – Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Lenin, Trotsky, Kamenev, Radek – sacrifice an allegorical character representing Russia to a statue of Karl Marx.

In the 20th century allegations started to surface that Jews were responsible for the propagation of Communism, the most notorious example being The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (1903).

The term "Judeo-Bolshevism" was adopted and used in Nazi Germany to refer to Jews and communists together, implying that the communist movement served Jewish interests.

Religious canards

Guilt for the death of Jesus of Nazareth

The blame for the death of Jesus has often been placed on Jews. Matthew 27:24–25 has been invoked to blame Jews "throughout generations":^[62]

When Pilate saw that he could prevail nothing, but that rather a tumult was made, he took water, and washed his hands before the multitude, saying, I am innocent of the blood of this just person: see ye to it. Then answered all the people, and said, His blood be on us, and on our children.

These verses appear in a narrative in which there was a custom of releasing "a prisoner"^{[Mat. 27:15]}. This content appears nowhere in the Bible except in Matthew. According to The New Oxford Annotated Bible there is no independent evidence of the custom, and the word "children" refers to the generation that lived to see the destruction of "Jerusalem in 70 CE" and "not all subsequent Jews".

During the Second Vatican Council which was held from 1962 to 1965, the Roman Catholic Church under Pope Paul VI issued the document Nostra aetate, which repudiated the belief that Jews are collectively guilty for the Crucifixion of Jesus.

Host desecration

16th-century painting showing alleged host desecration by Jews in Passau, Germany

During the Middle Ages in Europe, it was claimed that Jews stole consecrated Hosts, or communion wafers, and desecrated them to reenact the crucifixion of Jesus by stabbing or burning the host or otherwise misusing it. The accusations were often supported only by the testimony of the accuser.

The first recorded accusation of host desecration by Jews was made in 1243 at Beelitz, near Berlin, and in consequence of it all the Jews of Beelitz were burned on the spot, subsequently called Judenberg.Jeremy Cohen states that the first host desecration accusation occurred in 1290 in Paris and continues:

The story exerted its influence even in the absence of Jews ... Edward I of England expelled the Jews from his kingdom in 1290, and they would not reappear in Britain until the late 1650s. Yet the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw the proliferation of the Host-desecration story in England: in collections of miracle stories, many of them dedicated to the miracles of the Virgin Mary; in the art of illuminated manuscripts used for Christian prayer and meditation; and on stage, as in popular Croxton Play of the Sacrament, which itself evoked memories of an alleged ritual murder committed by Jews in East Anglia in 1191.

In the following centuries, similar accusations circulated throughout Europe, often accompanied by massacres. The accusation of host desecration gradually ceased after the Reformation when first Martin Luther in 1523 and then Sigismund August of Poland in 1558 were among those who repudiated the accusation. However, sporadic instances of host desecration libel occurred even in the 18th and 19th century. In 1761 in Nancy, several Jews from Alsace were executed on a charge of host desecration. The last recorded accusations were brought up in Barlad, Romania, in 1836 and 1867.

Ritual murder and blood libel

Jews were accused of the ritual murder of William of Norwich in 1144.

"The blood libel accusation, another famous anti-Semitic canard, is also a twelfth-century creation." The first recorded ritual murder accusation against Jews was that of William of Norwich, reported by a monk Thomas of Monmouth.

The descriptions of torture and human sacrifice in the antisemitic blood libels run contrary to many of the teachings of Judaism. The Ten Commandments forbid murder. The use of blood (human or otherwise) in cooking is prohibited by Kashrut and blood and other discharges from the human body are considered ritually unclean. (Lev 15) The Bible (Old Testament) and Jewish teachings portray human sacrifice as one of the evils that separated the pagans of Canaan from the Hebrews. (Deut 12:31, 2 Kings 16:3) Jews were prohibited from engaging in these rituals and were punished for doing so (Ex 34:15, Lev 20:2, Deut 18:12, Jer 7:31). Ritual cleanliness for priests prohibited even being in the same room with a human corpse (Lev 21:11).

When "Church and secular leaders sharply denounced these defamations ... people refused to abandon this myth ... Popes, kings and emperors declared that Jews, if for no other reason than their strict dietary laws banning even the smallest drop of blood in meat or poultry, were incapable of the crime. The Christian populace was not impressed. In 1385, Geoffrey Chaucer published his Canterbury Tales which included an account of Jews murdering a deeply pious and innocent Christian boy. This blood libel became a part of English literary tradition."

Among those who refuted the blood libel against Jews were Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in 1236: "we pronounce the Jews of the aforementioned place [Fulda] and the rest of the Jews in Germany completely absolved of this imputed crime"; Pope Gregory IX in Papal Bull dated 7 October 1272: "We decree ... that Christians need not be obeyed against Jews in a case or situation of this type, and we order that Jews seized upon such a silly pretext be freed from imprisonment, and that they shall not be arrested henceforth on such a miserable pretext, unless – which we do not believe – they be caught in the commission of the crime"; Pope Clement VI on 26 September 1348: "Jews are not responsible for the Plague."

Blood libel stories have appeared in modern times on many occasions in the state-sponsored media of a number of Arab and Muslim nations, their television shows and websites, and books alleging instances of the Jewish blood libels are not uncommon there.

Some Arab writers have condemned blood libel. The Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram published a series of articles by Osama Al-Baz, a senior advisor to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. He explained the origins of the anti-Jewish blood libel and said that Arabs and Muslims have never been antisemitic as a group and urged people not to succumb to "myths" such as the blood libel.

Anti-Christian bias

Throughout the years, some antisemites within the Christian community have claimed that Jews either dislike Christianity or are trying to destroy it. On the Jews and Their Lies, which was written by Martin Luther, is one literary work which espouses this claim. The claim has continued to be espoused to the present day, with radio host James Edwards claiming that Jews "hate Christianity" and "the WASP establishment" and further claiming that Jews "are using pornography as a subversive tool against us".

The Anti-Defamation League has written the following statement on the subject:

This is not to say that Jews have historically borne no animus (hostility) towards Jesus and the Apostles, or towards Christianity as a whole. In the two-thousand year relationship between Judaism and Christianity, many of them marred by anti-Jewish polemic and Christian persecution of Jews, some rabbis have fulminated against the church, and in some places Jews developed a folk literature that demeaned Christianity. But contemporary anti-Semitic polemicists are not interested in learning or reporting about the historical development of Jewish-Christian relations. Their goal is to incite hatred against Judaism and Jews by portraying them as bigoted and hateful.

Demonization, accusations of impurity

Jeremy Cohen writes:

Yet the very impulse that propelled the Christian imagination from the Jew as a deliberate killer of Christ to the Jew as a perpetrator of the most heinous crimes against humanity also led to the portrayal of the Jew as inhuman, satanic, animal-like, and monstrous. ... Popular traditions of the later Middle Ages, for example, characterize Jews as having a distinctive foul odor. ... By all accounts, the bestiality of the Jew climaxed in the image of the Judensau ...

17th-century Judensau engraving, based on a 15th-century painting

Judensau (German for "Jew-sow") was a derogatory and dehumanizing image of Jews that appeared around the 13th century. Its popularity lasted for over 600 years and was revived by the Nazis. Jews, who were typically portrayed as having obscene contact with unclean animals such as pigs or owls or representing a devil, appeared on cathedral or church ceilings, pillars, utensils, etchings, etc.

Often, the images combined several antisemitic motifs and they also included derisive prose or poetry. Cohen continues:

Dozens of Judensaus ... intersect with the portrayal of the Jew as a Christ killer. Various illustrations of the murder of Simon of Trent blended images of Judensau, the devil, the murder of little Simon himself, and the Crucifixion. In the seventeenth-century engraving from Frankfurt ... a well-dressed, very contemporary-looking Jew has mounted the sow backward and holds her tail, while a second Jew sucks at her milk and a third eats her feces. The horned devil, himself wearing a Jewish badge, looks on and the butchered Simon, splayed as if on a cross, appears on a panel above.

More recently, "[t]he main recurrent motif in Arab cartoons concerning Israel is 'the devilish Jew'" and "[t]he core anti-Semitic motif of the Jew as the paradigm of absolute evil has a set of submotifs. These, in turn, recur over the centuries but are differently cloaked according to the predominant narrative of the period."

Male menstruation

The Christian belief that Jewish men menstruated, which appeared in the 16th century, was part of the overall antisemitic concept that all Jews were of feminine gender. This belief, first arising around 1500, was based on biblical passages connecting Jews with bleeding, which were however not suggesting anything in terms of gender. Such were the description of the death of Judas in Acts 1:18–19, with his belly bursting open, a detail inspiring other accounts of heretics spilling their blood or entrails through the anus at their death. This was linked in the twelfth century with the so-called "blood curse" invoked by the Jews present at Jesus' trial before Pilate (Matt 27:25). In the following century, an allegedly rational explanation was added based on ancient humoral medicine, supplemented with a verse from the Psalms offered as an argument supporting the idea of anal bleeding as a supernatural punishment: "And he smote his enemies in the hinder parts" (Psalm 78:66, King James Version). Already in 1302 Christians alleged that Jewish men who were direct descendants of those who had taken responsibility for the crucifixion in the "blood curse" would suffer of a monthly bleeding. In 1503, an account of the ritual murder trials held in Tyrnau in 1494 contains the earliest mention of gendered, monthly bleeding.

In 17th-century Spain the old notion was recycled with the help of physicians, including the king's own, and combining the accusation of menstruation with that of hemorrhoids, at a time when there were efforts underway of establishing a legal concept of "impure blood" connected to family or caste. These have been interpreted as attempts at creating the legal notion of racial impurity.

Well poisoning

During the Black Death (often identified as bubonic plague epidemic) throughout the late Middle Ages, crowded cities were especially hard hit by the disease, with death tolls as high as 50% of the population. In their distress, emotionally distraught survivors searched for something, or someone, to blame. Jews proved to be a convenient scapegoat. The accusation entered into the repertoire of antisemitic language, showing up again in contexts as diverse as Stalin's doctors' plot and charges of Jews spreading AIDS or other infectious diseases.

Representation of a massacre of the Jews in 1349 Antiquitates Flandriae (Royal Library of Belgium manuscript 1376/77)

A series of violent attacks broke out in Europe from 1348 to 1351 targeting Jewish communities blamed for an outbreak of the Black Death.

The first massacres directly related to the plague took place in April 1348 in Toulon, France, where the Jewish quarter was sacked, and forty Jews were murdered in their homes, then in Barcelona. In 1349, massacres and persecution spread across Europe, including the Erfurt massacre (1349), the Basel massacre, massacres in Aragon, and Flanders. Two thousand Jews were burned alive on 14 February 1349 in the Strasbourg massacre, where the plague had not yet affected the city.

Other canards

Causing wars, revolutions, and calamities

1943 Nazi propaganda poster by Mjölnir: "He is to blame for the war!"

As many European localities and entire countries expelled their Jewish populations after robbing them, and others denied them entrance, the legend of the Wandering Jew, a condemned harbinger of calamity, gained popularity. German politician Heinrich von Treitschke in the 19th century coined a phrase "Die Juden sind unser Unglück!" ("The Jews are our misfortune!") adopted as a motto by Der Stürmer several decades later.

Efraim Karsh notes that: "Jews have traditionally been accused of lacking true patriotism to their countries of citizenship, and instead seeking to embroil their non-Jewish compatriots in endless conflicts and wars on behalf of such cosmopolitan movements and ideals as 'world imperialism', 'international bolshevism', or 'world Zionism'". According to Karsh, in the United States Jews were blamed for allegedly dragging the country into World War II and the Iraq War. He sees this as being related to exaggerated claims about the influence of the "Israel lobby".

The Franklin Prophecy was unknown before its appearance in 1934 in the pages of William Dudley Pelley's pro-Nazi weekly magazine Liberation. According to the US Congress report, Anti-Semitism in Europe: Hearing Before the Subcommittee on European Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations (2004):

The Franklin "Prophecy" is a classic anti-Semitic canard that falsely claims that American statesman Benjamin Franklin made anti-Jewish statements during the Constitutional Convention of 1787. It has found widening acceptance in Muslim and Arab media, where it has been used to criticize Israel and Jews ...

Making people LGBT

Conspiracy theorist Rick Wiles, through his website TruNews, endorsed a claim by self-identified Messianic Jews Steve and Jana Ben-Nun that Zionists seek to "make all of humanity androgynous" in accordance with the Kabbalistic concept of Adam Kadmon. The alleged plot supposedly involves Zionists supporting transgender rights, as well as actually making people LGBT by "putting specific things in food, in drink".

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has claimed that Jews are "turning men into women and women into men" and using a specially concocted strain of marijuana which is designed to make Black men gay and effeminate.

MEMRI highlighted a video in which a Kuwaiti Salafi preacher claimed that SpongeBob SquarePants and other children's cartoons were created by Jews in order to promote homosexuality, atheism, Satanism, and the emo movement.

Provoking or fabricating antisemitism

During a speech at the Reichstag on 30 January 1939, Adolf Hitler ascribed the blame for the future "annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe" on international Jewish financiers who were seeking to start a world war.

In 2002, the Hamas leader Abdel Aziz al-Rantisi said, "People always talk about what the Germans did to the Jews, but the true question is, 'What did the Jews do to the Germans?'"^[99] Gilad Atzmon stated, "Jewish texts tend to glaze over the fact that Hitler's 28 March 1933, ordering a boycott against Jewish stores and goods, was an escalation in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership."

In January 2005, 19 members of the Russian State Duma demanded that Judaism and Jewish organizations be banned in Russia. "Their seven-page letter ... accused Jews of carrying out ritual killings, controlling Russian and international capital, inciting ethnic strife in Russia, and staging hate crimes against themselves. "The majority of antisemitic actions in the whole world are constantly carried out by Jews themselves with a goal of provocation", the letter claimed. After sharp protests were staged by Russian Jewish leaders, including Russia's Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar, human rights activists, and the Russian Foreign Ministry, Duma members retracted their appeal.

Dual loyalty

A canard found in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, but dating to before that document, is that Jews are more loyal to world Jewry than to their own country. Since the establishment of the state of Israel, this canard has taken the form of accusations that Jewish citizens of other countries are more loyal to Israel than to their country of residence.

Cowardice and lack of patriotism

With the rise of racist theories in the 19th century, "[a]nother old anti-Semitic canard served to underline the putative 'femininity' of the Jewish race. Like women, Jews lacked an 'essence'". In Genocide and Gross Human Rights Violations, Kurt Jonassohn and Karin S. Björnson wrote:

Historically, Jews were not allowed to bear arms in most of the countries of the diaspora. Therefore, when they were attacked, they were not able to defend themselves. In some situations, their protector would defend them. If not, they only had a choice between hiding and fleeing. This is the origin of the anti-Semitic canard that Jews are cowards.

"12,000 Jewish soldiers died on the field of honor for the fatherland." A leaflet published in 1920 by German Jewish veterans to counter the stab-in-the-back myth.

Jews were frequently accused of being insufficiently patriotic. In late 19th-century France, a political scandal known as the Dreyfus affair involved the wrongful conviction for treason of a young Jewish French officer. The political and judicial scandal ended with his full rehabilitation.

During World War I, the German Military High Command administered Judenzählung (German for "Jewish Census"). It was designed to confirm allegations of the lack of patriotism among German Jews, but the results of the census disproved the accusations and were not made public. After the end of the war, the stab-in-the-back myth alleged that internal enemies, including Jews, were responsible for Germany's defeat.

In Stalin's Soviet Union, the statewide campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" – a euphemism for Jews – was set out on 28 January 1949 with an article in the newspaper Pravda:

unbridled, evil-minded cosmopolitans, profiteers with no roots and no conscience ... Grown on rotten yeast of bourgeois cosmopolitanism, decadence and formalism ... non-indigenous nationals without a motherland, who poison with stench ... our proletarian culture.

Racism

A number of books and websites which are run by Neo-Nazis, white supremacy advocates, Christian Identity adherents, and radical Islamist groups contain quotes which they claim are authoritative quotes from rabbinic literature, all in an attempt to prove their belief that Judaism is a racist religion which teaches its adherents to hate non-Jews by espousing the belief that they are not even human.

According to Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik:

Even as the Jew is moved by his private Sinaitic Covenant with God to embody and preserve the teachings of the Torah, he is committed to the belief that all mankind, of whatever color or creed, is "in His image" and is possessed of an inherent human dignity and worthiness. Man's singularity is derived from the breath "He [God] breathed into his nostrils at the moment of creation" (Genesis 2:7). Thus, we do share in the universal historical experience, and God's providential concern does embrace all of humanity.

According to the record of a 1984 hearing before the Subcommittee on Human Rights and International Organizations in the US Congress concerning Soviet Jewry,

This vicious anti-Semitic canard, frequently repeated by other Soviet writers and officials, is based upon the malicious notion that the "Chosen People" of the Torah and Talmud preaches "superiority over other peoples", as well as exclusivity. This was, of course, the principal theme of the notorious Tsarist Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

Inventing or exaggerating the Holocaust

Holocaust denial consists of claims that the genocide of Jews during World War II – usually referred to as the Holocaust – did not occur at all, or that it did not happen in the manner or to the extent which is historically recognized. Key elements of these claims are the rejection of any of the following: that the German Nazi government had a policy of deliberately targeting Jews for extermination as a people; that more than five million Jews were systematically killed by the Nazis and their allies; that genocide was carried out at extermination camps using tools of mass murder, such as gas chambers.

Most Holocaust denial claims imply, or openly state, that the Holocaust is a hoax arising out of a deliberate Jewish conspiracy to advance the interest of Jews at the expense of other peoples. For this reason, Holocaust denial is generally considered to be an antisemitic conspiracy theory. The methodologies of Holocaust deniers are criticized as based on a predetermined conclusion that ignores extensive historical evidence to the contrary.

Holocaust deniers include former Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinejad; Germar Rudolf, who had been convicted by a German court of inciting racial hatred; and the discredited author David Irving, who lost a libel action, Irving v Penguin Books Ltd, in 2000.

Controlling the Atlantic slave trade

Anti-Jewish propagandists have tried to exaggerate the role of Jews in the transatlantic slave trade. In the 1490s, the Jews were expelled from Spain and Portugal at a time when trade with the New World was opening up, leading to their participation in the Columbian exchange in general, and participation in the Atlantic slave trade in particular. Jewish participation in the slave trade was significant in Brazil, Curaçao, Suriname, and Rhode Island, but it was otherwise modest or minimal, and Jews had virtually no participation in the triangular slave trade that involved Northern European nations. The Nation of Islam published The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews in 1991, which asserted that Jews played a major role in the Atlantic slave trade. The book was widely criticized as antisemitic and led to additional scholarly research on the subject, including books such as Jews and the American Slave Trade by Saul S. Friedman, which concluded that Jewish involvement in the slave trade was "minimal", and the accusations were an antisemitic canard. In 1995 the American Historical Association (AHA) issued a statement condemning "any statement alleging that Jews played a disproportionate role in the Atlantic slave trade".

Organ harvesting

Palestinians

In August 2009, an article in the Swedish tabloid Aftonbladet alleged that Israeli troops harvested organs from Palestinians that died in their custody. Henrik Bredberg wrote in the rival newspaper Sydsvenskan: "Donald Boström publicised a variant of an anti-Semitic classic, the Jew who abducts children and steals their blood." In a video on their website, Time magazine quoted the 2009 Swedish Aftonbladet's unbacked variant of the classic antisemitic blood libel accusation as fact and retracted the allegations that Israeli soldiers had harvested and sold Palestinian organs in 2009 within hours on 24 August 2014 after a denouncing report from Honest Reporting came out.

In December 2009, Israel's Channel 2 published an interview with Yehuda Hiss, the former chief pathologist at L. Greenberg Institute of Forensic Medicine, where he said that workers at the forensic institute had informally and without permission taken skin, corneas, heart valves and bones from deceased Israelis, Palestinians and foreign workers during the 1990s. Hiss was dismissed as head of Abu Kabir in 2004 after discovery of the use of organs. Israeli officials acknowledged that incidents like that had taken place, but stated that the vast majority of cases involved Israeli citizens, that no such incidents had occurred for a long time, and that Hiss had been removed from his position.

Haiti

In the immediate aftermath of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, Israel sent 120 staff, doctors and troops of the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to Port-au-Prince. The IDF set up a field hospital that performed 316 surgeries and delivered 16 babies.

On 18 January, an American activist, who was only known as T. West, posted a video on YouTube in which he called for Haitians to be wary of "personalities who are out for money" and he also called for Haitians to be particularly wary of the IDF. To explain his allegations, West stated that in the past "the IDF [had] participated in stealing organ transplants of Palestinians and others", thus echoing the Aftonbladet Israel controversy. West, who claimed to speak for a black-empowerment group called AfriSynergy Productions, stopped short of making more explicit accusations against the IDF's behaviour in Haiti but he noted that there was "little monitoring" of it in the quake's aftermath, insinuating that organ theft was at the very least a strong possibility. The Iranian state television station Press TV reported on the allegations and in a speech on 22 January, Ayatollah Ahmad Khatami said "There have been news reports that the Zionist regime, in the case of the catastrophe of Haiti, and under the pretext of providing relief to the people of Haiti, is stealing the organs of these wretched people", again without citing any evidence. On 27 January, a Syrian TV reporter described T. West's video as "document[ing] this heinous crime and ... show[ing] Israelis engaged in stealing organs from the earthquake victims" (despite the fact that the video quite evidently does no such thing). The original accusations were also relayed by a number of organizations often criticized for their antisemitism or anti-Israel positions, such as the websites of Al-Manar and former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke.

On 1 February 2010, the Gaza-based The Palestine Telegraph, of which Baroness Jenny Tonge was a patron at that time, published the claim that the IDF were secretly harvesting organs in Haiti and selling them on the black market, based on the above-mentioned YouTube video by T. West, in which video material was re-used from Hezbollah's Al-Manar television broadcast with no cited evidence to support it. In the United Kingdom, Baroness Jenny Tonge was removed from her role as Liberal Democrat health spokeswoman as a result of an interview in which she suggested that an independent inquiry should be established.

Israeli media and Jewish groups immediately fought back against the claims. In an interview with Ynetnews, West re-iterated his accusation about past incidents of organ theft by the IDF and cited Operation Bid Rig as further evidence of Jewish involvement in organ trafficking. The Anti-Defamation League responded, labeling West's allegations as antisemitic and as a "Big Lie", while an author for the Jewish Ledger referred to the rumors as a "blood libel".

9/11 attacks conspiracy

Some conspiracy theories hold that Jews or Israel played a key role in carrying out the September 11, 2001 attacks. According to a paper published by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), "anti-Semitic conspiracy theories have not been accepted in mainstream circles in the U.S.", but "this is not the case in the Arab and Muslim world". A claim that 4,000 Jewish employees skipped work at the WTC on 11 September has been widely reported and widely debunked. The number of Jews who died in the attacks – typically estimated at around 400 – tracks closely with the proportion of Jews living in the New York area. Five Israelis died in the attack.

In 2003, the ADL published a report which attacked "hateful conspiracy theories" that the 9/11 attacks were carried out by Israelis and Jews, saying that they had the potential to "rationalize and fuel global anti-Semitism". It found that such theories were widely accepted in the Arab and Muslim world, as well as in Europe and North America.

The ADL's report found that "The Big Lie has united American far-right extremists and white supremacists and elements within the Arab and Muslim world". It asserted that many of the theories were modern manifestations of the 19th century Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which purported to map out a Jewish conspiracy for world domination. The ADL has characterized the Jeff Rense website as carrying antisemitic materials, such as "American Jews staged the 9/11 terrorist attacks for their own financial gain and to induce the American people to endorse wars of aggression and genocide on the nations of the Middle East and the theft of their resources for the benefit of Israel".

Contradictory accusations

A number of researchers noted the contradictions and irrationality which exist across antisemitic myths. Leon Pinsker noted as early as 1882:

Friend and foe alike have tried to explain or to justify this hatred of the Jews by bringing all sorts of charges against them. They are said to have crucified Jesus, to have drunk the blood of Christians, to have poisoned wells, to have taken usury, to have exploited the peasant, and so on. These and a thousand and one other charges against an entire people have been proved groundless. They showed their own weakness in that they had to be trumped up wholesale in order to quiet the evil conscience of the Jew-baiters, to justify the condemnation of an entire nation, to demonstrate the necessity of burning the Jew, or rather the Jewish ghost, at the stake. He who tries to prove too much proves nothing at all. Though the Jews may justly be charged with many shortcomings, those shortcomings are, at all events, not such great vices, not such capital crimes, as to justify the condemnation of the entire people.

In her 2003 book The Holocaust and Antisemitism: A Short History, Jocelyn Hellig wrote:

Michael Curtis has pointed out that no other group of people in the world has been charged simultaneously with the following, among others:
Alienation from society and cosmopolitanism;
Being isolationists and intermingling with other people;
Being capitalist exploiters and agents of international finance, as well as being revolutionary Marxists;
Having a materialistic mentality and being people of the Book;
Acting as militant aggressors, and being cowardly pacifists;
Adhering to a superstitious religion while also being agents of secularism;
Upholding a rigid law while also being morally decadent;
Being a chosen people, but having an inferior human nature;
Being both arrogant and timid;
Emphasizing individualism while upholding communal adherence;
Being guilty of the crucifixion of Christ, and being blamed for the invention of Christianity.
Curtis points out that "this catalogue of contradictory accusations cannot possibly be true because no single group of people could feasibly have such a total monopoly on evil."

Gustavo Perednik wrote in his book The Judeophobia:

The Jews were accused by the nationalists of being the creators of Communism; by the Communists of ruling Capitalism. If they live in non-Jewish countries, they are accused of double-loyalties; if they live in the Jewish country, of being racists. When they spend their money, they are reproached for being ostentatious; when they don't spend their money, of being avaricious. They are called rootless cosmopolitans or hardened chauvinists. If they assimilate, they are accused of being fifth-columnists, if they don't, of shutting themselves away."

Comments about canards

According to defense attorney Kenneth Stern, "Historically, Jews have not fared well around conspiracy theories. Such ideas fuel anti-Semitism. The myths that all Jews are responsible for the death of Christ, or poisoned wells, or killed Christian children to bake matzos, or 'made up' the Holocaust, or plot to control the world, do not succeed each other; rather, the list of anti-Semitic canards gets longer."

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Friday, May 13, 2022

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