Robert S. Wistrich - A Lethal Obsession: Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad

Woe unto them that call evil goodand good evil;that change darkness into light, and light into darkness;that change bitter into sweet, and sweet into bitter.

Isaiah 5:20

Most devious is the heart;It is perversewho can fathom it?

Jeremiah 17:9

Even if all the festivals should be annulled, Purim will never be annulled.

Midrash

Do not fear sudden terror or the fury of the wicked, when it comes.

Proverbs 3:25

F uture historians may well regard the past seven decades as a golden age of ideological politics. Millions have been slaughtered on the altar of false messianisms and their salvationist logic. In the totalitarian nightmare of the past seventy-five years, a special role has undoubtedly been played by the political religions of Nazism, Stalinism, and Islamism. It is certainly no coincidence that in all three cases, a remarkably similar anti-American and anti-Jewish demonology has been manipulated in the cause of destroying Judeo-Christian values, individual freedom, and liberal democracy. All three anti-Western ideologies have shared the same penchant for conspiracy theories of history, society, and civilization; they are equally characterized by a similarly closed system of belief, addiction to historical inevitability, and an unquenchable will to power. At their very heart we can find the oldest and darkest of ideological obsessionsthat of anti-Semitismfor which nearly twenty years ago I coined the term the longest hatred.

In the case of the Nazi movement, there is by now a consensus among most serious historians concerning the axial role of eliminationist anti-Semitism in the domestic and foreign policies of the Third Reich. However, much less attention has been given to the postwar aftermath. Hitlerism did not really die in April 1945 nor, unfortunately, was Auschwitz truly liberated. In the mid-1980s, I had occasion to point out that the Nazi poison was by no means extinguished, having infiltrated the former Soviet Union and especially the Arab-Muslim worldwhere hard-core anti-Semitism systematically defaming Israel and the Jews was widely (and officially) propagated. These pages expose the intensity of the culture of hatred that currently permeates books, magazines, newspapers, sermons, videocassettes, the Internet, television, and radio in the Middle East on a scale unprecedented since the heyday of Nazi Germany. Indeed, the demonic images of Jews presently circulating in much of the Islamic world are sufficiently radical in tone and content to constitute a new warrant for genocide. They combine to devastating effect the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jewish drive for world domination and dehumanizing Islamic quotations about Jews as the sons of apes and donkeys.

After the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Koranic motifs sharply increased in importance, along with virulent anti-Americanism. In the Islamic demonology, both America and Israel are firmly bonded together as Satanic forces that threaten the core identity, values, and existence of Islam. Contemporary Islamist apostles of jihad have in recent years turned Israel and Jewry into their great surrogate in the holy war against America and the corrupt modern world. Uncle Sam, so to speak, has coalesced with Shylock into a terrifying specter of globalization (Americanization) threatening to swamp the world of Islam, much as late-nineteenth-century European anti-Semites liked to depict international Jewry as the satanic engine of finance capitalism and supranational cosmopolitanism.

The Palestinian al-Aqsa intifada in the autumn of 2000, followed by the jihadi assault on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on September 11, 2001, provided the initial triggers. An astonishing number of Muslims sought to place the blame for this mass murder on the Jews and the Mossad, Israels intelligence service. Encouraged by the Islamists, they saw the fingerprints of an all-powerful Zionist lobby everywhere, spreading its tentacles and deadly lies, draining the lifeblood of Arabs and Muslims, gratuitously inciting the American war against Iraq, and pursuing their sinister plans for global conquest.

Conspiracy theories of this kind have intoxicated millions of Arabs since 2000 through the impact of such popular television series as Horseman Without a Horse in Egypt and the gory depiction of the blood libel (Jews slaughtering Christian children in order to use their blood for Passover matzo) in Al-Shattat (The Diaspora), a Syrian-Hezbollah production first broadcast in Lebanon. The blood libel has also been a prominent part of the anti-Semitic propaganda regularly promoted by fundamentalist and oil-rich Saudi Arabia. This is the same soil from which Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda movement spranga major hotbed of jihadism and the primary bankroller of anti-Western hate speech. A no less anti-Semitic and anti-American outlook holds sway in more secular Arab societies such as Egypt, Syria, Iraq, and Jordan, not to mention Shiite Iran.

Such anti-Semitic and anti-Western bigotry cannot be adequately understood in terms of the Arab-Israeli conflict alone or the so-called question of Palestine. Certainly, the Palestinian cause has been periodically hijacked by radical Islamists and pan-Arabists in order to broaden their political support in the Muslim world. But the Jewish question in radical Islam (as with its Western Christian, Nazi, and Marxist predecessors) is not centered primarily on Palestineat least not as a territorial or national issue amenable to rational bargaining. The mythical thinking that animates Islamist ideology is much closer in spirit to the Nazi model, with its fixation on destroying a secret Jewish power that strives for global hegemony.