Volume 4 No 2 - Journal for the Study of Antisemitism

2012] MONUMENTAL TREATISE AND MONUMENTAL REVIEW 775tsars] and of fascist origin. Hiding under Marxist phraseology, they cameout with coarse attacks on Jewish culture, on Judaism, and on Jews ingeneral.”A parallel development to nazi-fascist antisemitism, equally insidiousthough much less studied and analyzed, is what Wistrich in his last chaptercalls the “Marxist-Islamist Alliance”; here too he is the pioneer and leadinginterpreter, although in a sense all the preceding chapters lead up to andculminate in that one. Early on, initiated by Lenin himself, the communistrulers looked to mobilize Arab/Muslim societies by exporting revolution tothem and igniting revolts against their Anglo-French colonial masters. Moscow’sefforts would readily, as Stalin thought, “Bolshevize” the Arab/Muslimmasses. Thus as early as the 1920 meeting of the CommunistInternational in Baku, Russian spokesmen fired up the delegates representingthe “enslaved popular masses of the East” to launch “a really holy war[jihad] against the [colonial] robbers and oppressors”; they were to beroused to militant action by the warrior spirit of their ancestors and “thegreat conquering Caliphs of Islam” as well as the example of GenghisKhan(!). Together, Muslims and Marxists would “create a new civilizationunder the banner of Communism.” The “Manifesto” issued that same yearrepeatedly—like an instrument with one string sounding one note—calledfor “Holy War” on the part of the “Peoples of the East” and blasted theBritish Mandate of Palestine as “imperialism.” Visceral anti-Zionism madeits Arab-Muslim debut. Though radically different in belief, Marxists andIslamists share a Manichean concept that divides the world into capitalistsand exploited/oppressors and oppressed, who are locked in apocalyptic waruntil the messianic vision of universal social justice is inevitably achieved.Forty years later, the Arabs and Iranians showed themselves to beattentive pupils of Soviet antisemitism and anti-Zionism, as they took upthe corpus of Judaeophobia that runs the whole gamut from deicide to genocide.The Soviet propaganda mill invented the combination of Holocaustdenial and Holocaust inversion—namely, that Zionists had collaboratedwith the Germans in murdering their own people and then committed genocideagainst Palestinians, making the Israelis into Nazis. This “ZionistNazism” idea, Wistrich comments incisively, is the same conspiratorial formulationas Hitler’s “Jewish Bolshevism,” one segment of a ferocious anti-Zionism that utterly delegitimizes Israel and makes it the center of a globalconspiracy, initially to destroy the USSR and the Soviet bloc, then adaptedto make Israel the cat’s-paw of the United States in imperial domination ofthe Middle East and Third World. By the 1960s, the melding process ofMarxism and Islam had proceeded sufficiently to produce Egyptian presidentNasser’s fairly typical version of “Arab socialism,” an amalgam comprisingnationalization of the Suez Canal, murderous destruction of Israel,