order to depict the growing strength of Marxists as a Jewish conspiracy. It was first published in Russia in the early 1900s, and claimed to expose a plan by the Jewish people to achieve global domination. It was published again after the 1905 Russian Revolution, when the ruling monarchy, stung by the mass uprising, used it to blame the Jews for instigating the workers’ strikes, peasant uprisings, and military mutinies. The monarchy had also invoked
The Protocols
when it blamed the Jews for Russia’s defeat at the hands of Japan in 1904. By the time the Czar was overthrown in the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, anti-communist Russian exiles made
The Protocols
an instrument for blaming Jews for that upheaval, too. They depicted the Bolsheviks as overwhelmingly Jewish and allegedly executing the plan embodied in
The Protocols
.
In the 1920s, the London
Times
exposed
The Protocols
as a forgery. The newspaper revealed that much of the material was plagiarized from earlier works of political satire having nothing to do with Jews.
Today, the primary consumer of this forgery is the Muslim world, where
The Protocols
is cited as an authentic document validating the widespread belief that Jews control the world. Over time,
The Protocols
has been used to blame the Jews for both the horrors of communism and the excesses of capitalism, though this irony appears to have escaped the attention of its readers.
Pick up a newspaper in any part of the Arab world and you’re likely to see Hitler’s swastika superimposed on the Israeli flag. Such anti-Semitic imagery was once unheard of, but today caricatures of Jews – with fangs and exaggerated hook noses, for example – are common. Arab intellectuals and political leaders often insist that such images reflecta dislike for Israelis and Zionism, yes, but not necessarily of Jews and Judaism. However, a look at school textbooks shows otherwise. In one government-approved textbook for Jordanian high school students, Jews are described as innately deceitful and corrupt. “Up to the present,” it states, “they are the masters of usury and leaders of sexual exhibitionism and prostitution.” 1 It is not uncommon to hear Islamist televangelists and Saudi clerics in their sermons refer to Jews as descendants of apes and monkeys.
In Pakistan too, textbooks continue to depict Jews in a bad light. Conservative officials regularly block attempts by the government to delete anti-Jewish material from textbooks. In one instance, the textbook board agreed, under pressure from the World Bank and other funding agencies, to remove a section from ninth- and tenth-grade textbooks that urged pupils to “fight against those who believe not in Allah” and that asked for “Allah’s curse” on Jews and Christians. However, after removing the offensive text from books for grades nine and ten, board officials sneaked it into the books for grades eleven and twelve. 2
There is also evidence that Muslims are picking up anti-Semitism that is rooted in Christian dogma, which for centuries had little traction in the Muslim world. When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus in 2001, President Bashar al-Assad greeted him with a speech in which he suggested it was Jews who had killed Jesus. When Assad’s crude attempt to curry favour with the pope drew no response, his minister of religious affairs, Muhammad Ziyadah, went a step further. In a separate speech made before the pontiff, Ziyadah said: “We must be fully aware of what the enemies of God and malicious Zionism conspire to commit against Christianity and Islam.”
There is some truth to the claim that Judeophobia among Muslims is partly a consequence of the creation of the state of Israel and its continued occupation of the West Bank. However, there is clear evidence that contemporary anti-Semitism predates Israel and Zionism bydecades, and that it seeped into the Arab world from Europe as part and parcel of nineteenth-century colonization.
Few Jewish
Jonathan Strahan [Editor]