Date: Sun, 12 May 2002 09:36:00 -0400
From: bobhunt@erols.com
Subject: [lpaz-repost] (fwd) The Modern Use of Ancient Lies
To: Individual-Sovereignty@yahoogroups.com, American_Liberty@yahoogroups.com, libs4peace@yahoogroups.com ("Libertarians 4Peace"), liberty_outlook@yahoogroups.com

NYTimes

May 9, 2002

The Modern Use of Ancient Lies

By DAVID I.  KERTZER

ROVIDENCE, R.I.   As Jews view the demonic images of themselves that
are circulating in the Middle East today, they have a sickening sense of
dj vu.  The strain of anti-Semitism that has taken hold in the Arab
world, particularly since Sept.  11, is especially hateful.  When
Western commentators take note of this phenomenon they tend to ascribe
it to a "medieval mentality" in the Muslim world.  Yet a look at the
anti-Semitic imagery sweeping much of the Arab world shows something
quite different.

Although many of these images go back hundreds of years in the West,
they are far from medieval.  On the contrary, they have an uncomfortably
recent history in both Europe and the United States.  To say that Arab
anti-Semitism is not entirely indigenous is not to minimize it; it is
only to help explain why the West has been so reluctant to acknowledge
its growth or to see it as a meaningful threat.

The charge of ritual murder, for example, has increasingly appeared in
the Arab press recently.  This slander holds that Judaism requires its
adherents to torture and murder non-Jewish children in order to use
their blood for Jewish rites.  The Egyptian government-linked daily, Al
Akhbar, published an article this spring asserting that the practice was
well established, as did the Saudi government-linked paper, Al Riyadh.

A few months ago, a TV station in Abu Dhabi, one of the most popular in
the Arab world, showed a cartoon of Israel's prime minister dressed as a
vampire drinking blood.  In Syria, the defense minister, Mustafa Tlas,
has published a book, "The Matzoh of Zion," in which he elaborates upon
the charge of ritual murder.

It is true that this imagery has its roots in medieval Europe.  Yet
those in the Arab world who have used it need not go back to medieval
European sources.  European Jews were accused of ritual murder  with
lethal consequences  well into the 20th century.  The Nazis themselves
championed the blood libel, with Der Strmer devoting article after
article, complete with grisly illustrations, to the theme.  Today
radical Islamic Web sites offer the full texts of Nazi disquisitions on
the subject.

These Nazi publications themselves cited Christian teachings  some
quite recent  for support.  The uncomfortable fact is that into the
20th century the Vatican actively promoted the ritual murder charge
against the Jews, as has been discovered from examination of the
recently opened archives of the Inquisition at the Vatican and evident
as well from stories published in Vatican-controlled newspapers through
1914.

Along with ritual murder, another European anti-Semitic favorite of the
20th century, "Protocols of the Elders ofZion," has become increasingly
popular in the Arab world.  This forgery, produced by the czar's secret
police in Russia at the end of the 19th century and purporting to be the
text of a meeting of Jewish leaders plotting world conquest, is featured
in the founding covenant of Hamas.  Article 32 of that document, in
warning Palestinians never to make peace with Israel, speaks of the
Zionist secret plot to seize all Arab lands: "Their plan is embodied in
the `Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'"

While Hitler himself championed the "Protocols," the Nazis had no
monopoly here.  Henry Ford was an enthusiastic supporter, publishing the
document himself and doing all he could to warn Christian America of the
Jewish threat.  It should be no surprise that radical Islamic Web sites,
like the site of Radio Islam, try to bolster their credibility by
reproducing Ford's writings on this subject.

The "Protocols," which became the bible of European anti-Semitism in the
1920's, was published in Germany by the Nazi Party, but its popularity
in Europe was not simply due to the Nazis.  In France and Italy its main
champions and publishers were Catholic priests.

Part of the reason why the new anti-Semitism that is growing in the Arab
world seems so depressingly familiar is that demonization itself is a
singularly unoriginal human impulse.  The hated other has been cast as
the opposite of all that is good and normal for millennia.  In the 14th
century, the ancestors of the Jews who are now accused in Arab
newspapers of planning the attacks of Sept.  11 were massacred on
charges of poisoning wells and spreading the plague.

For Israeli Jews, who recall all too well the role that these images
played in paving the road to the Holocaust, the reappearance of these
same images in the Arab population around them is obviously
frightening.  But the tepid response of the Christian world has also
been disturbing, because what is going on in the Muslim world today has
its roots in the Christian past.

Might this be the reason why Europeans, in particular, seem so reluctant
to face the threat posed to Jews by this new wave of anti-Semitism?  Are
Europeans in a state of denial?  And what of America's own experience
with anti-Semitism, of the sort identified with Henry Ford or with
Father Charles Coughlin, who used his weekly radio broadcasts in the
1930's to explain Nazi repression of the Jews by the "fact" that
communism was the work of the Jews?

This conspiratorial view of Jews popularly held in Arab countries is,
alas, relatively modern.  In fact, in the medieval period Islamic
societies were more hospitable to Jews and viewed them more positively
than did Christian Europe.  Now, at a time of great conflict in the
Middle East, the dark store of anti-Semitism nurtured and promoted in
the West has proved irresistible to extremists in the Arab world.

Given the historical role of Christianity in promulgating such hatred,
it is not unreasonable to hope that church leaders will face their own
past with clear eyes.  They should be among the first to call attention
to these lies, and they should be among the loudest in their
condemnation of them.

David I.  Kertzer is a professor of anthropology at Brown University and
author of "The Popes Against the Jews: The Vatican's Role in the Rise of
Modern Anti-Semitism."