A vehicle and push carts are used as a road block in a business district during a lockdown in efforts to stem the spread of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19), in Karachi, Pakistan, May 1, 2020. Photo: Reuters / Akhtar Soomro.

A Pakistani Islamist cleric has concocted an elaborate conspiracy theory to explain the coronavirus pandemic, charging that “the Jews” created Covid-19 to accelerate their bid for “global governance” and that they would similarly decide who was eligible for a vaccine, should one be developed.

In a publication entitled “Coronavirus or Virus War?”, Mufti Abu Hisham Masood asserted that “the Coronavirus too is an important part of the war underway in the name of the New World Order.”

Masood, a cleric affiliated with the the Tehreek-e-Taliban (TTP) movement of the Taliban in Pakistan, opined that Jewish descent from King Solomon was the ultimate cause of this ambition for global domination.

“To comprehend this, it is necessary to understand a short background,” he wrote in the document, translated by the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI), a Washington, DC-based monitoring group.

“Since it is a claim of the Jews that they are from among the descendants of Prophet Sulaiman [Solomon] and Prophet Sulaiman ruled over the entire world, therefore the right to a global governance belongs to the Jews only,” Masood added.

Masood then went on to detail the broader strategy of “the Jews” in a text from which the word “Israel” was entirely absent.

It “must be especially understood that the current military and political war is also being fought for achieving this objective which has, more than the Corona, burned down people to ashes, which has turned the entire world into a furnace of fire; it is the hand of Jews behind all these,” he wrote.

He continued that “the Jews biggest need is to manifest themselves in the form of an international power and have them accepted in the world so that the next stages of [the process to] achieving the Greatest Objectives can be traveled easily. Despite shedding the blood of the children of Adam on a large scale and occupying the international markets, their existence could not be accepted.”

The document concluded: “Now, by bringing the world to a standstill through the virus war, [the Jews] are eager to have their existence accepted. Because, the world will see that even the vaccine for the Corona will be discovered by the Jews and then without accepting the existence of the Jews, this vaccine will perhaps not be available to anyone.”

Launched in 2007, the TTP is one of southern Asia’s deadliest Islamist terror groups. According to a Stanford University study, the organization is closely linked to Al Qaeda, and is also associated with the Afghan Taliban.

In the wake of the death of its longstanding leader, Maulana Fazlullah, in 2018, the TTP has been riddled with faction fighting and some analysts have questioned whether the group will survive.

Nonetheless, TTP attacks in the region have continued, and the terror group retains several thousand fighters in its main base of operations in the South Waziristan province.