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The National Interest
The Old-New Anti-Semitism
by Robert S. Wistrich
. . . There is currently a culture of hatred that permeates books, magazines, newspapers, sermons, video-cassettes, the Internet, television and radio in the Arab Middle East, which has not been seen since the heyday of Nazi Germany. Indeed, the dehumanizing images of Jews and Israel that are penetrating the body politic of Islam are sufficiently radical in tone and content to constitute a new "warrant for genocide."2 They combine the blood libel of medieval Christian Europe with Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jewish drive for "world domination" and slanderous Islamic quotations about Jews as the "sons of apes" and donkeys. . . . Of course, the two models and the two situations are not identical, and the context has changed as well. The "Jewish question" radically changed its contours with the establishment of a Jewish state and Israeli military power in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the creation of Israel could not, on its own, blunt the potential of anti-Semitism as a global phenomenon. It seems rather to have attenuated its force for about two decades, even while a new version of the problem metathesized. Zionism in effect has shifted the focus of postwar anti-Jewishness to an assault on the dominant collective representation of contemporary Jewish existence — the State of Israel itself. Since 1948, the major ideological and political threat to the survival of the Jewish nation gradually switched from Europe to the Arab Islamic world, fueled by a politicidal "anti-Zionist" ideology whose main thrust has always been the destruction of Israel as an independent state. . . .