Should Arabs Who Peddle Anti-Semitic Nonsense Be Taken Seriously?

The recent injudicious comments by Raymond Baaklini, Lebanon's Canadian ambassador, suggesting that Canada's foreign policy was being influenced by the "90 per cent of the mass media . . . controlled by Jews or Zionists" was a shocking, but not entirely unusual observation. In fact, it echoed a well-worn myth about Jewish control: it has been nearly one hundred years since the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a forged, notorious screed purporting to expose a plot for Jewish domination of the world, crawled onto the world stage.

Though widely recognized for what it is--a malevolent adaptation of earlier pamphlet, "Dialogues in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu," published by the French satirist Maurice Joly--the Protocols has perpetuated Jewish conspiracy theories and served as the foundation for anti-Semitic feelings worldwide.

Now the Protocols is finding new life, and acceptance, in the Arab world, signaling what Bernard Lewis, a historian of Islam and the Middle East, has called the ''Islamization of anti-Semitism,''--an adaptation of the European anti-Jewish hatreds and myths for the new purpose of deriding and debasing Israel and Zionism.

One clear example of the new use of old anti-Semitism was last November's airing, on state-sanctioned Egyptian television, of "Horse Without a Horseman," a forty-one part soap opera that featured the supposed discovery and translation the Protocols, as well as scenes of bearded "elders" plotting the control of world by Jews. While the airing of the series, during the feast of Ramadan, brought vocal protests from Western governments, the fictional program apparently found wide Arab audiences willing to suspend disbelief-including Hala Sarhan, vice president of Dream TV, the independent channel that produced the series. "In a way, don't [Jews] dominate?" Sarhan mused in the New York Times. "Of course, what we read from the 'Protocols,' it says it's a kind of conspiracy. They want to control; they want to dominate . . . ."

The temper of those attitudes was generally echoed in the Egyptian press, most of which gave unqualified support to the veracity of the series and rallied against efforts to suppress or apologize for it. A column titled "No to Ideological Terrorism," which appeared in the government daily Al-Akhbar, editorialized, for instance, that "those who cast doubts upon the authenticity of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion argue that it was the Russian Czar Nikolai II's [secret police] who compiled them . . . The most important question is: in practice, doesn't Zionism seek to take over the world with money, murder, sex, and the [other] most despicable of means, primarily in our generation?"

Al Ahram, Egypt's largest newspaper, contained more restrained, but equally fallacious material in a recent article on Jewish influence. "A compilation of the 'investigative' work of four reporters on Jewish control of the world," the piece conclusively announced, "states that Jews have become the political decision-makers and control the media in most capitals of the world . . . and says that the main apparatus for the Jews to control the world is the international Jewish lobby which works for Israel."

In November, the Egyptian publication Aqidati alluded to the same "book of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, to which the Jews deny any connection . . . but always when a crime occurs, the finger is pointed towards the one who stands to gain from it. The Jews have gained from all that happened to the human race even in ancient times. They ignited the fire of wars from ancient times; it was they who today control all the great political forces in the world, which act for their benefit everywhere . . . ."

In such a highly-charged intellectual atmosphere, where attitudes are fomented through hatred and misrepresentation, it is not surprising that other Middle Eastern countries share beliefs in Jewish conspiracies and strong anti-Semitic views as well. Palestinian terror group Hamas includes a reference to the Protocols in its own charter, for example. "With their money [Jews] formed secret societies," it reads, "in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests."

"Antisemitism," wrote Stephen Eric Bronner, author of the engaging book A Rumor About the Jews, "is the stupid answer to a serious question: how does history operate behind our backs?" The Protocols gives a perverse and paranoiac view of the way history operates, in this case with the "other," the Jews, at the helm of governments, religion, the press, and the financial markets. Until Arabs can walk away from the old myths and lies, until they stop disseminating disinformation as a tool in their political struggle, they will still inhabit a world in which such theories can be taken seriously at all.