41845358-Antisemitism

THE DIABOLIZATION OF JEWS
113
Since 1945 the Protocols has been printed and distributed, generally by
neo-Nazi organizations in many Western countries, and now it can be downloaded
on the Internet. To be sure, in Western lands intellectual and public
figures, if they give the work any thought at all, view it as a hate-filled canard
from a hate-filled past. Its appeal now, unlike in the interwar years, is almost
exclusively with professional antisemites and the marginal figures who constitute
their audience. Objectivity has little influence on the mind-set of these
antisemites, for whom a Jewish world conspiracy has become an integrating
principle that provides emotionally satisfying answers to the crucial questions
of existence. For purveyors of hate, the sinister hand of the Jew lies behind all
the problems of the modern world; the Jews’ victims must unite in self-defense
against their evil enemy.
At times governments have responded to the book’s circulation. In 1965
the United States government issued a report entitled “Protocols of the Elders
of Zion: A Fabricated ‘Historic’ Document.” The Senate committee concluded:
“It is impossible for a fair-minded person of any common sense not to
see that the ‘Protocols’ are the fictional product of a warped mind and that for
years they have been and still are the chief staple of the anti-Jewish pamphleteer....
[T]he peddlers of the ‘Protocols’ are peddlers of un-American prejudice
who spread hate and dissension among the American people.” 70 In 1991 a
South African court declared the Protocols to be fraudulent.
Curiously, the Nation of Islam displays the Protocols at college conferences
and in its bookstores; it also endorses speakers who claim that Jews
are engaged in still another conspiracy—this time Jewish doctors are deliberately
injecting black babies with the AIDS virus as part of a genocidal
plot. (See chapter 6.) And periodically American populists conjure up “international
Jewish bankers” to explain the economic woes of the “little
man.” But, to repeat, attempts to demonize the Jew in Western lands do not
receive public support from established political, financial, and intellectual
elites.
In eastern Europe, where antisemitic feelings have always been vicious
and vile, conspiracy theories directed at Jews have had a resurgence. After the
Six Day War (1967), in which Israel trounced several Arab states that had both
military and political support of the Soviet Union, the USSR unleashed an
“anti-Zionist” campaign that branded Judaism as a criminal, bloodthirsty, and
racist religion. Soviet propaganda asserted that Jewish bankers and Zionists
had collaborated with Hitler and, in the spirit of the Protocols, insisted that
Jewish capitalists were using Zionism as a front to fulfill their goal of world
domination. The dissolution of the Soviet Union has been accompanied by a
revival of conservative nationalist organizations; employing the same logic and