A new survey by the Claims Conference — Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany found that, “Nearly one-third of all Americans (31 percent) and more than 4-in-10 Millennials (41 percent) believe that substantially less than 6 million Jews were killed (two million or fewer) during the Holocaust.” Further, “While there were over 40,000 concentration camps and ghettos in Europe during the Holocaust, almost half of Americans (45 percent) cannot name a single one — and this percentage is even higher amongst Millennials.”
[“New Survey by Claims Conference Finds Significant Lack of Holocaust Knowledge in the United States,” Claims Conference, Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany, https://www.claimscon.org/study/.%5D
Chairman of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center:
“I want to focus on one issue that I think that is probably the most important and sometimes overlooked. I’m not talking about the students that chant in the campuses of the world that genocidal phrase that became a kind of hymn for the destruction of Israel, to the genocide of the Jewish people, “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” … But I want to talk about the professors, and my friends I am going to say something that is harsh. … There are professors, not all but a significant number of scholars at some of the most prestigious universities who are building stone by stone, piece by piece, a pseudo-academic, pseudo-scientific, pseudo-intellectual theory justifying the annihilation of the Jewish state at worst and the demonization and the destruction of Jewish life in Israel at best, in their minds. Buzzwords like ‘genocide by Israel’, ‘apartheid’, ‘decolonization of Palestine’ and ‘settler colonialist state’ are aimed at justifying and moralizing the elimination of the State of Israel.
“I will conclude by saying something that I didn’t imagine two months ago, or even a little over a month and a half ago, that I will ever say but, my friends, we have been here before. We have seen how Heidelberg University a prestigious university, no less respected than Harvard or the London School of Economics gave academic backing to the most despicable, the most racist, the most exterminatory, the most genocidal theories. If it happened in the cradle of European culture in the 20th century, it can happen anywhere in the 21st century, and we have to put all our efforts now in order to prevent that from repeating. I will say that “Never Again is NOW.”
[Dani Dayan, Chairman of the Yad Vashem World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Introductory Remarks at the “Rome-Jerusalem Emergency Summit” on Global Antisemitism Crisis (11/23/2023), Yad Vashem, The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, https://www.yadvashem.org/blog/state-of-global-antisemitism-in-november-2023.html.%5D
“You’re only gonna hear what you want to hear, do you hear your master’s voice now?” Monsters of Folk, “Master’s Voice,” Monsters of Folk (2009)
Detective and Murder “whodunit” shows in the movies and on TV often include a prop to help solve the case and carry the story along. It is called by different names — a “crazy wall,” a “conspiracy board,” a “link chart,” or a “murder map.” On it, investigators attach pictures and tidbits of fact using strings to connect suspects, victims, events and timelines. This is one such prop for putting together evidence dealing with the longest on-going murder mystery in history. Sadly, it seems increasingly fewer care to solve it. More instead look to either join in the crime or cover it up.
For whatever was written in earlier times was written for our instruction that through perseverance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope. Romans 15:4
And the Lord appeared to Abram and said, “To your descendants — seed — I will give this land.” Genesis 12:7
And the Lord said to Abram…”Now lift up your eyes and look from the place where you are northward and southward and eastward and westward for all the land which you see, I will give it to you and to your descendants — seed — forever. … Arise, walk about the land through its length and breadth; for I will give it to you.” Genesis 13:15, 17
Then behold the word of the Lord came to him, saying, … “I am the Lord who brought you out of Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess it.” Genesis 15:7
And it came about when the sun had set, that it was very dark, and behold, there appeared a smoking oven and a flaming torch which passed between these pieces. On that day the Lord made a covenant with Abram, saying, “To your descendants — seed — I have given this land, from the river of Egypt as far as the great river, the river Euphrates… (Genesis 15:17-18)
“And I will give to you and to your descendants — seed — after you, the land of your sojournings, all the land of Canaan, for an everlasting possession; and I will be their God.” Genesis 17:8
Then Jacob departed… And he had a dream… And behold the Lord stood beside him and said, “I am the Lord, the God of your father Abraham and the God of Isaac; the land on which you lie, I will give to you and to your descendants — seed.” Genesis 28:10, 12, 13
He is the Lord our God; His judgments are in all the earth. He has remembered His covenant forever, the word He commanded to a thousand generations, the covenant which He made with Abraham, and His oath to Isaac. Then He confirmed it to Jacob for a statute, to Israel as an everlasting covenant, saying, “To you I will give the land of Canaan as the portion of your inheritance.” Psalm 105:7-11
Wherefore, accept one another, just as Christ also accepted you to the glory of God. For Christ has become a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to the fathers, and for the nations to glorify God for His mercy. Romans 15:7-9
“Remember what Amalek did to you along the way when you came out from Egypt, how he met you along the way and attacked among you all the stragglers at your rear when you were faint and weary; and he did not fear God. Therefore it shall come about when the Lord your God has given you rest from all your surrounding enemies, in the land which the Lord your God gives you as an inheritance to possess, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven; you must not forget.” Deuteronomy 25:17-19
And every created thing which is in heaven and on the earth and under the earth and on the sea, and all things in them, I heard saying, “To Him who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb, be blessing and honor and glory and dominion forever and ever.” Revelation 5:13
Pudendum — Latin, literally, thing to be ashamed of; neuter gerundive of pudere, make ashamed; be ashamed
“The double standard involved in this dramatic priority given to Palestinians has only one reasonable explanation: antisemitism rooted in Islamist supremacism and left-wing ideologies that falsely demonize Israel as an “apartheid” and/or “settler/colonialist” state of whites oppressing people of color. What passes for enlightened opinion among the chattering classes in the United States and the international community simply exhibits no concern for Israelis. That’s true whether they were killed, raped or kidnapped—or if they are among the hundreds of thousands forced to flee their homes in the south due to Hamas and the north due to Hezbollah until the threat of violence is over. Apparently, only Palestinian suffering…which is the direct result of a culture that values hatred for Jews and an urge for their genocide, seems to count.“
[Jonathan S. Tobin, “Biden’s ‘help’ at the UN will put Israeli lives at risk,” Jewish News Service (2/22/2024), https://www.jns.org/bidens-help-at-the-un-will-put-israeli-lives-at-risk/.
U. S. Ambassador to the United States:
“… All to say, we are not giving up. We are eager to continue working with the Council on this proposal: One that would see a temporary ceasefire as soon as practicable, based on the formula of all hostages being released. And one that would get aid into the hands of those Palestinians who so desperately need it. … And so, having put forward an alternative path, we intend to take it. We intend to do this the right way so that we can create the right conditions for a safer, more peaceful future. And we will continue to actively engage in the hard work of direct diplomacy on the ground until we reach a final solution.”
[“Remarks by [U.S.] Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at the UN Security Council Stakeout Following a Vote on the Situation in the Middle East,” United States Mission to the United Nations (2/20/2024), https://usun.usmission.gov/remarks-by-ambassador-linda-thomas-greenfield-at-the-un-security-council-stakeout-following-a-vote-on-the-situation-in-the-middle-east/. ]
“final solution”? Deliberate dog whistle for antisemitic listeners (Auchtung oder besser gesagt, Ächtung – die Endlösung der Judenfrage), or were her prepared remarks the product of a systematic group think prevailing in the U. S. State Department marinated in an insensitive and ahistorical mindset toward the Jewish people and the nation-state of Israel?
How the World Celebrates International Holocaust Memorial Day, 2024
President of the State of Israel, Isaac Herzog:
“‘[T]he widespread civilian support in Gaza for the crimes and atrocities of October 7 could not be ignored, and that Hamas operates from the heart of the civilian population everywhere, from children’s bedrooms in homes, from schools, from mosques, and hospitals,’ Herzog said Sunday.
“‘But I added and emphasized that for the State of Israel, and of course for me personally, innocent civilians are not considered targets in any way whatsoever,’ he said. ‘There are also innocent Palestinians in Gaza. I am deeply sorry for the tragedy they are going through. From the first day of the war right until today, I have called and worked for humanitarian aid for them — and only for them. This is part of our values as a country.
“‘But the reality cannot be ignored, a reality which we all saw with our own eyes as published by Hamas on that cursed day, and that was the involvement of many residents of Gaza in the slaughter, in the looting, and in the riots of October 7. How the crowds in Gaza cheered at the sight of Israelis being slaughtered and their bodies mutilated. At the sight of hostages — God knows what they did to them — wounded and bleeding being dragged through the streets. In view of such terrible crimes, it is appropriate that the honorable court investigate them in depth, and not casually in passing.
“‘We are fighting an exceptionally just campaign,’ Herzog also said at Sunday’s event. ‘A campaign for the return of the hostages, those who are held and tortured by Hamas murderers in an unparalleled crime against humanity. We are fighting a campaign to restore security to our citizens, women and men, elderly and babies. A whole people whom Hamas didn’t just declare their desire to wipe from the face of the earth, but actually set out on a brutal massacre to destroy – and is still working hard to do so.’
“Stressing that Israel has ‘the full right to self-defense,’ Herzog said that ‘everyone with sense can see that Israel is acting in accordance with international law.
“‘The very fact that the hearing at the court in The Hague was held on the eve of International Holocaust Memorial Day, to judge whether the democratic, moral and responsible State of Israel, which rose from the ashes of the Holocaust with the overwhelming support of the family of nations, and its institutions were guilty of committing genocide, is a blood libel that undermines the very values on which this court was established,’ he said in sharp criticism of the ruling.”
[Toi Staff, “‘A blood libel’: Herzog says ICJ ‘twisted my words’ to support ‘unfounded’ contention,” Times of Israel (1/29/2024), https://www.timesofisrael.com/a-blood-libel-herzog-says-icj-twisted-my-words-to-support-unfounded-contention/.]
Use of Casualties as Tool of Propaganda, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy:
“Executive Summary
“The post–October 7 Hamas-Israel war is a destructive and tragic event that has killed thousands of noncombatant civilians and displaced many more. As analysts noted at the outset, civilian harm is inevitable in urban battles where terrorist fighters hide among the population and refuse to surrender. The humanitarian cost in the current war has caused justifiable dismay, and fatality figures from the Gaza Ministry of Health and the Government Media Office (GMO)—both Hamas-run institutions—have provided a focus for global horror, providing metrics that have been relied on almost universally by international media and NGOs and at the International Court of Justice.
* * *
“Although thousands of Palestinian noncombatants, including military-age males, have undoubtedly been killed in the Hamas-initiated conflict, the world must also recognize that the group has manipulated and exploited civilian fatality claims for its strategic benefit, in an attempt to truncate Israel’s air and ground operations [and] stir international outrage. The international media and NGOs have repeated such claims without proper scrutiny and in turn validated and reinforced Hamas propaganda efforts. In reality, no one yet knows the proportion of civilians harmed versus Hamas fighters, and judgment should be reserved or at least qualified as an interim assessment informed largely by low-quality metrics provided by a combatant with a track record of propagandizing civilian deaths.”
[Gabriel Epstein, “How Hamas Manipulates Gaza Fatality Numbers, Examining the Male Undercount and Other Problems, Executive Summary” The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, no. 144 (January 2024), https://www.washingtoninstitute.org/media/7168?disposition=inline.]
Antisemitism as a disposition of envy, resentment and jealousy is a pervasive lust deeply entrenched in the heart of the nations. It is one of the most structurally embedded lies under the sway of the evil one at work in the world. Globalized antisemitism does not prove that the devil exists. It does, however, confirm that as the god and ruler of this evil age the whole world lies in his power. (John 12:31; 14:30; 16:11; 2 Corinthians 4:4; Galatians 1:4; Revelation 12)
The clasping lie that closes the narrative loop of every antisemitic discourse is its speaker insisting, “I am not an antisemite.” Antisemites (even those counted among the Jewish people) always choose a claim to truth that does not come from the Jews. The last thing any of us wants to admit is that those we love who are like us are hypocrites.
[See “Our Longest Wish,” Fruit of His Lips (September, 2015).]
The United Nations: Structural Antisemitism on a Global Scale
“Everyone in Gaza including UN staff knows about the dual use of these facilities.” – Journalist Jan Franke
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: UN agencies, government aid programs and NGOs have consistently and willfully aided and abetted Hamas as it built its vast terror infrastructure in the Gaza Strip. They diverted aid money to Hamas to fund its terrorist activities, provided propaganda and disinformation support to Hamas in its efforts to tarnish and discredit Israel, and indoctrinated Gazan schoolchildren to hate Jews. Systematic documentation of the roles played by UN and government officials, as well as NGOs operating under the vast framework of international humanitarian aid, in enabling and cooperating with Hamas, both tacitly and actively, is vital to prevent a repetition of this abdication of responsibility and accountability.
[Prof. M. Steinberg, “Documenting the Enablers of Hamas War Crimes: UN Agencies, Government Aid Programs and NGOs,” The Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies Perspectives Paper No. 2,257 (1/21/2024), https://besacenter.org/documenting-the-enablers-of-hamas-war-crimes-un-agencies-government-aid-programs-and-ngos/.]
We witnessed this bias at work upon the Israeli defense forces entry into the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza under Hamas control. What the author below calls “the sickness of post-truth thinking,” is simply the continuation of antisemitic thought in a postsecular context:
“The proof of Hamas’s criminal misuse of al-Shifa as a base for torture, murder and warmongering is abundant. Palestinian dissidents have pointed to it. Amnesty [International] has documented the Room 101-style horrors committed by Hamas’s ‘Internal Security officers’ there. Israel has shown us weapons, trucks, tunnels, hostages. Anyone still saying ‘Hmm’ following almost two decades’ worth of proof that Hamas exploits al-Shifa has clearly left the realm of reason and entered the hell of dogma. This is not scepticism, it’s denialism. It is not a noble hunt for ‘the truth’ of war – it’s the sickness of post-truth thinking, where nothing as trifling as evidence can ever be allowed to interfere with one’s ideological bias. Which in this case is that Israel is evil and always lies.
“It isn’t hard to work out why so many in the woke elites, from CNN to the influencer left, are clinging for dear life to the lie that al-Shifa was a normal hospital. It’s because they have staked so much on this battle in the Israel-Hamas war. Israel’s conquering of al-Shifa is, in their eyes, the ‘war crime’ that proves beyond doubt that Israel is uniquely malevolent among the nations of the Earth, and that they, in contrast, are righteous for opposing it. Every piece of evidence that points to the true war crime being Hamas’s, this fascistic movement that is even willing to hide lethal weaponry among the sick and the newborn and elderly, is a blow not just to their infantile narrative about Israel-Palestine, but also to their own moral prestige, their own cultural authority to determine what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.”
[Brendan O’Neill, “Al-Shifa Hospital and the pathological distrust of Israel,” Spiked (11/20/2023), https://www.spiked-online.com/2023/11/20/al-shifa-hospital-and-the-pathological-distrust-of-israel/. For Amnesty International report see “Palestine (State of): ‘Strangling Necks’ Abductions, torture and summary killings of Palestinians by Hamas forces during the 2014 Gaza/Israel conflict,” Amnesty International (5/27/2015), https://www.amnesty.org/en/documents/mde21/1643/2015/en/. For a large-hadron-collider-like dialectical read of the Hamas-Israeli War, see Lee Smith, “The Global Empire of Palestine,” Tablet (12/19/2023), https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/global-empire-of-palestine with Slavoj Žižek, “What the left gets wrong about Gaza and ‘decolonisation,’ The New Statesman (12/23/2023), https://www.newstatesman.com/world/middle-east/2023/12/israel-gaza-palestine-peace. ]https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/images/2023-12/Antisemitism-in-Arab-Cartoons-Israel-Hamas-War-1020-16.jpghttps://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/images/2023-12/Antisemitism-in-Arab-Cartoons-Israel-Hamas-War-1020-16.jpg
Written in Arabic: “Israel Raises its Flag on Shifa Hospital.” ”Antisemitism in Arab Cartoons during the Israel-Hamas War: A Chronology of Dehumanization of Jews and Demonization of Zionism and Israel,” ADL (12/23/2023), https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitism-arab-cartoons-during-israel-hamas-war-chronology-dehumanization-jews.
Two-State ‘Solution’: Antisemitic Policy.
[until 7 October this listener supported 2 People/2 States as a temporary condition of truce between Palestinians and Israelis. No more. No longer. No more.]
“Linkage—the belief that the Israeli-Palestine conflict is the root of all Middle East instability—is not only factually wrong and deleterious to peace, it is fundamentally antisemitic. Linkage attained a sacred status among American policymakers, and like so many religious beliefs, it remained impervious to facts. Believers in linkage [have] overlooked the Palestinians’ record of turning down offers of statehood—in 1937, 1947, 2000, 2001, 2008—almost always with violence. Linkage proponents also [have] ignored the Palestinians’ rejection of America’s own “two states for two peoples” formula, denying that the Jews had any historical connection to the land or were even a people at all. Supporting linkage meant forgetting the Palestinian Authority’s complicity in terrorist attacks that killed more than 1,000 Israelis or the viciously antisemitic and Holocaust denying speeches of its president, Mahmoud Abbas.
“In 2020 and 2021…the Palestinians received more aid per capita than the entire war-torn Europe under the Marshall Plan, yet much of that money was stolen by their own leaders and deposited abroad. The Palestinian Authority—the presumptive pre-state government—was riddled with corruption. [Nonetheless, in] the shadow of October 7th…President Joe Biden [declared], ‘We need to renew our resolve to pursue this two-state solution where Israelis and Palestinians can one day live side by side in a two-state solution. Two states for two peoples. And it’s more important now than ever.’
“Not only Washington but virtually every state in the world—including China, Russia, India, Germany, France, and Britain—adopted an identical policy. UN Secretary General António Guterres rejected Israel’s right to object to the creation of a Palestinian State while Joseph Burrell, the European Union’s foreign minister, went further by calling for Palestinian statehood to be imposed on Israel. ‘I don’t think we should talk about the Middle East peace process anymore,” he opined. “We should start talking specifically about the two-state-solution implementation process.’
“A half million Syrians could be massacred in recent years, hundreds of thousands of Yemenis and Sudanese can be killed, but for the disciples of linkage Israel’s conflict with the Palestinians remains the nucleus. [T]he signing of the Abraham Accords without the creation of a Palestinian state definitively disproved linkage. That dogma, defying all logic and flying in the face of thirty years of facts, calls to mind another irrational, myth-based belief: Jew-hatred. For what is antisemitism but the insistence on saddling the Jews with the responsibility for all of society’s ills, plagues, and wars? Similarly, by regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict as the nub of all Middle Eastern violence, and the Jewish state as that conflict’s core, linkage is itself linked to the world’s oldest hatred.”
[Michael Oren, “The Core Conflict and the Jews,” Clarity with Michael Oren, Substack (2/12/2024), https://claritywithmichaeloren.substack.com/p/the-core-conflict-and-the-jews. ]
Understanding the fixated thinking of antisemites in the modern age requires tracing the genealogy of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. As never before in its one hundred and twenty years of distribution, the content of this antisemitic invective infects media communicants on a global scale, which in turn feeds a global mass frenzy of hatred against the Jews. The following is one tracing of how this has happened.
The genealogy of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion: the founding fantasy of the new, global, and postsecular antisemitism of the twenty-first century.
“In 1939 the French scholar of antisemitism, Henri Rollin, concluded that the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion was probably the most widely distributed book in the world after the Bible. Indeed, there are few languages, including Hebrew, into which it has not been translated. Moreover, ‘its distribution was accompanied by a mountain of secondary literature comprising well more than one thousand titles.’ The Protocols is, as Norman Cohn has argued [in his 1967, 1981 publication, Warrant for Genocide, The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion], ‘the supreme expression and vehicle of the myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy.’ Pretending to be lectures, or notes of lectures, taken during twenty-four sessions of a congress held by representatives of “the twelve tribes of Israel,” the Elders of Zion, led by a Grand Rabbi – whom a later edition claimed to be the founder of modern Zionism, Theodore Herzl – it sets out a plot to take over the world and to subjugate gentiles. While not easy to summarize, the standard version of the Protocols expounds three principal themes: a critique of liberalism, an exposition of the methods by which Jews intend to take over the world, and an overview of the world government that the Elders of Zion intend to establish.”
[Christopher Partridge and and Ron Geaves. “Antisemitism, Conspiracy Culture, Christianity, and Islam: the History and Contemporary Religious Significance of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion,” in The Invention of Sacred Tradition, edited by James R. Lewis and Olav Hammer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). From Summary read at https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/invention-of-sacred-tradition/antisemitism-conspiracy-culture-christianity-and-islam-the-history-and-contemporary-religious-significance-of-the-protocols-of-the-learned-elders-of-zion/0E2AA1576054F229D6F97F6C5379DAFA.]
The Protocols found acceptance following World War I. Walter Lacqueur writes, “After many years of peace and prosperity the general optimism of Europe had been severely shaken. To many, the war came like a bolt from the blue. Millions had died in senseless slaughter and there had been unprecedented material destruction. Many Europeans found themselves at the end of the war without means and without much hope for the future. The was followed almost everywhere by unrest, revolution, civil war, inflation and mass unemployment. In these circumstances many looked for a clear and easily intelligible answer to their questions about the causes of these catastrophes and of the unrest in the world in general. They found an answer in documents such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the new Bible of the antisemites, a web of fantastic fabrications which, originally published in Russia well before the war, reached central and western Europe in 1919-1920. Following this and similar publications, writings about a Jewish world conspiracy attracted many avid readers in England and the United States, even among politicians and otherwise sane people. In Britain and America the impact of the ‘hidden hand’ bogey was short-lived, but elsewhere in Europe it fell on more fertile ground and became part of the ideology underlying popular antisemitic movements. This, in briefest outline, was the situation facing European Jewry after 1918.”
[Walter Laqueur, A History of Zionism (New York: Schocken Books, 1976, orig., 1972), p. 445.]
After World War II, his study of “Nazi and proto-Nazi ideologists and propagandists…reinforced by contact with SS who were undergoing interrogation and investigation” led Norman Cohn to suspect “that the drive to exterminate the Jews sprang from a quasi-demonological superstition” and “that the deadliest form of antisemitism, the kind that results in massacre and attempted genocide, has little to do with real conflicts of interest between living people, or even with racial prejudice as such. Instead, Cohn continually encountered “a conviction that Jews – all Jews everywhere in the world – form a conspiratorial body set on ruining and then dominating the rest of mankind.”
“There exists a subterranean world where pathological fantasies are disguised as ideas and are churned out by crooks and half-educated fanatics for the benefit of the ignorant and superstitious. There are times when this underworld emerges from the depths and suddenly fascinates, captures, and dominates multitudes of usually sane and responsible people, who thereupon take leave of sanity and responsibility. And it occasionally happens that this underworld becomes a political power and changes the course of history. It is an incontestable fact that the forgotten eccentrics built up a myth which, years later, the masters of a great European nation were to use as a warrant for genocide.”
Cohn traced these pathological fantasies back to the mentality of medieval western culture. Populace and periti alike believed during western Christendom’s Middle Ages that the Jews should be “treated not simply as strangers but as most dangerous enemies.” The Jews “were almost wholly without legal rights and were frequently massacred by the mob.”
Western White Folk of the Nations: Look at the Pictures, Go to a Museum, Open a Book
The image of the Jew reflected in the mirror of Western iconography “is a distorting mirror: grotesque, caricatural and frightening”:
The crusades beginning with 1095 “saw the beginning of one of the most tragic periods of existence of the Jewish people in the West. Theological anti-Judaism was thereafter accompanied by a popular antisemitism. The two combined with one another and with a frenzied imagination to create new myths, new legends (such as the desecration of the host or of holy images) and new ‘functions’ imposed on the Jews (such as usury, forbidden to Christians by the Church, but recommended for the Jews, who in any case were ‘lost souls’, and thus were only allowed this sole ‘permitted’ profession. Passing from discrimination to prohibitions and from accusations to the stake, the system of degradation reached its climax with the fourth Lateran Council of 1215. The conciliary decrees of the West were characterized by an originality which was unknown to the Greek Orient. Canon 68 stipulated that Jews and Saracens ‘in every Christian province and at all times shall be marked off in the eyes of the public from other peoples through the character of their dress.’
“Massacres and expulsions caused the Jews to set out once more on their way, and their wanderings gave rise to new legends, this time of a moralizing nature: the Jews, it was claimed, poisoned the wells, where they bathed and washed away their stench, the foetor Judaicus, and in this way gave material expression to their hatred of the Christians. They were held to be responsible for the Black Death, thus personifying in themselves the whole religious, political and moral symbolism of Evil. Nothing like this – in its deadly virulence, in the primal anti-Judaism of religious authorities, in the hatred of the populace, sustained by sermons, liturgy and mystery plays – nothing like this took place in the history of the Jewish community in the Byzantine world.
Conclusion: “Western art bears witness to the martyrdom of the Jewish communities in Catholic countries in the Middle Ages…
“[Western medieval] characteristics and attributes [that] typify the image of the Jew have their own value and significance. The most striking of these characteristics, and the commonest, is the deformation of the features of the face, a tendency to caricature which does not depend on the vicissitudes of the artists’ inspiration or the geographical area or the socioeconomic circumstances, but which has an element of constancy in its distortions. The hooked-nosed Jew of the scrawled English caricatures initiated the typical Jewish ‘profile’, of which there are frequent examples in French and English manuscripts. This representation showed the Jew with an open jaw, a gaping mouth, carnivorous teeth, a dark skin, a beak-like nose, facial blemishes and warts. The Jew is ugly, heavy, thick-lipped, bestial – in short, repulsive. Differentiated from others by physical characteristics which resemble those of animals, and this at a period when beauty was so highly prized, he is a human caricature who first draws one’s attention and then causes one to turn away in horror. Ugliness is one of the characteristics of the Devil, who is horrible and frightening. The Jew is ugly, so he must be a prey to Satan. It naturally had the expected ending: the punishment in store for the person in thrall to Satan – Hell. Western art multiplied occasions of reserving Jews a special place in scenes of the Last Judgment. There was not the slightest shadow of a doubt of the Jews’ guilt, for the justification of the punishment was there, in the Jews’ very attributes.
“Grotesquely stereotyped figures of Jews in Medieval art are sometimes further intensified by dark skin, which carried symbolic associations with sin and evil… Hooked noses, scraggly beards, hateful grimaces, dark skin, and horns are all key elements of medieval representations of demons.” [Portraying the Jew accordingly was] not a coincidence but rather a wordless way of linking Jews to the devil.
“Images of hell populated with Jewish figures wearing hats and/or money bags not only imply close relationships between Jews and demons but also corroborate the belief that Jewish souls are damned. . [Condemning actions] “leveled against [Jews] during this period included well-poisoning, image and host desecration, and the ritual murder of Christian children, all of which were endorsed by medieval artists in illuminated manuscripts, stained glass, wall painting, early printed books, and on at least one monumental world map.”
[Elisabeth Revel-Neher, The Image of the Jew in Byzantine Art, trans. from French by David Maizel (Oxford, New York, Seoul, Tokyo: Pergamon Press for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (SICSA), The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1992), pp. xix, 38-42, 103-104, 258-265.]
The facts Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide laid out do not change because they are little studied or not remembered. “In the eyes of most Christians these strange creatures were demons in human form – and some of the demonology that was woven around them in those centuries has proved extraordinarily durable.” Christians today before God should see, lament, and confess the baseless fears of the Jews and tendered hatred for the Jews that festered as an intrinsic malevolence toward the Jews within the traditions of the Latin Church. We must also acknowledge that the effects of these patterns of evil persist into the present, recognizing as Cohn put it that the “myth of the Jewish world-conspiracy” described in the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion “represents a modern adaptation of this ancient demonological tradition.” Walter Z. Laquerur in his review of the work shortly after its publication wrote, “What Cohn shows in this absorbing study is that the most deadly form of anti-Semitism, that which aims at and results in genocide, has little to do with real conflicts between living people or even with racial prejudice as such (“traditional anti-Semitism”); it is a secularized version of the medieval belief that the Jews are in league with the devil, and that all Jews form a conspiratorial body bent on ruining and dominating the rest of mankind.” What we are witnessing today is the desecularizing of this mythical fiction.
[Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide, The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981; orig. Harper & Row, 1967), pp. 13, 14, 22. See too, Joshua Trachenberg, The Devil and the Jews, The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Antisemitism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1943 and Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 2018). For affecting the thinking of Martin Luther see Richard S. Harvey, Luther and the Jews, Putting Right the Lies (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2017 and Thomas Kaufmann, Luther’s Jews: A Journey into Anti-Semitism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). For effects of Luther on later anti-Semitism: Christopher J. Probst, Demonizing the Jews: Luther and the Protestant Chruch in Nazi Germany (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2012). In an American context among others, the Institute for Historical Review through its publishing arm, Noontide Press, continues publishing the Protocols as well as its edition of Henry Ford’s The International Jew — The World’s Foremost Problem with its focus upon an American context. For Laquerur’s review see “‘Warrant for Genocide’ by Norman Cohn,” Commentary (July 1967),https://www.commentary.org/articles/walter-laqueur/warrant-for-genocide-by-norman-cohn/ ]
“Throughout Israel’s history, it has been the constant object of conspiracy theories and a means by which Arab states and others have kept their populations focused on a supposed outside evil rather than on the failings of their own regimes. The United Nations has been the key player in this look-hey-squirrel distraction game. Every year, more than half the General Assembly’s resolutions dealing with individual countries are attacks on Israel—which is only one of 193 member nations at the UN and whose population makes up less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the people of the earth.
“But for most of the state’s existence, that gamesmanship was largely played out in international organizations and at meetings and publications sponsored by the foreign-policy establishment. The least-read op-ed columns of the world’s newspapers have also been fixated on the “question of Israel” for decades—but it was an elite fixation without a grassroots component. It was bad, don’t get me wrong. But it was a specific concern of a specific class of people—influential people, to be sure, but not a mass movement.
“That changed during the 2010s, when the social-media landscape increasingly became fertile ground for resurrected conspiracy theories and long-discredited ideas that could be fed to young people who had not lived through the events they sought to pierce and knew no better. This we all knew from the social-media wars of 2015 and 2016, and the media retailing of the preposterous idea that Facebook had somehow hypnotized ordinary Americans into choosing Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton.
“But what most of us old folk didn’t know was that apps with particular appeal to young people, notably Instagram and TikTok, were being swarmed by “content creators” whose purpose was to “message” these new Protocols of the Elders of Anti-Zion and make them familiar and uncontroversial around the world. And all those efforts were fertilized by hundreds of millions if not billions of dollars spread around for this very purpose by the sovereign funds and large donors living in Persian Gulf satrapies—and by the algorithms designed by ByteDance, the owner of TikTok and effectively a subsidiary of the Chinese military. No one was being asked to choose a president here, or even to pay attention for more than 15 seconds at a time. All that was being conveyed was a vibe. And that vibe was: Palestinians are oppressed, Israelis are the oppressors, and Israel is backed by Jews worldwide.”
[John Podhoretz, “They’re Coming After Us,” Commentary (January 2024), https://www.commentary.org/articles/john-podhoretz/antisemites-coming-after-jews/. ‘IHAVE NEVER FELT LIKE THIS BEFORE’ — I have lost count of the number of times the phrase “I have never felt like this before” has been spoken in my ear, texted to me, or sent to me in an email, in the three months since the Hamas attack on October 7, 2023.]
“Anti-Semitism surges, even in the West, which shows why Israel exists.
“This global war on Jews…clarifies what is at stake for Western societies in this fight. The West spent the decades after the civilizational catastrophe of the Holocaust vowing never again to allow itself to slide into such barbarism. What we see now in the attacks on Jews is how that slide began.”
[The Editorial Board, “The Global War on the Jews,” Wall Street Journal (10/30/2023), https://www.wsj.com/articles/israel-hamas-jews-pogroms-russia-u-s-europe-germany-anti-semitism-1a74109c.]
“I am a 70-year-old Jewish man, but never in my life have I seen or felt the antisemitism of the last few weeks.”
[Erwin Chemerinsky, Dean of University of California, Berkeley School of Law,”Opinion: Nothing has prepared me for the antisemitism I see on college campuses now,” Los Angeles Times (10/29/2023), https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2023-10-29/antisemitism-college-campus-israel-hamas-palestine.]
The West should acknowledge the shame it has earned through its Christian, nationalist-based, and racist-scientific/secular strains of antisemitism, understanding it as a debt it owes all Jews everywhere, paid by adamantly condemning the new antisemitism spreading across America and the world today. The pudendum of the nations is far less than the pudor — shame — of the church because the least sin of the church grieves the Holy Spirit far more than the worst sin committed by those of the world: corruptio optimi pessima — the corruption of the best is the worst. God has taken all of us in these last days and put us into the first postsecular global moment of modern history. We are experiencing together the end of the make-believe age of homo sapiens which sprang from the white cultural womb of Western Christendom. The new antisemitism is global, aimed at the Jewish state of Israel, and is rooted in a religious mentality. Postsecular antisemitism like secular modern and medieval Christian before it, ascribes to “the Jew” an essential nature that is detrimental to all nations on a worldwide scale. Therefore, the longest lie of antisemitism again rears its ugly head, but this time for the first time Satan’s prodding has ignited a global pogrom against the Jews, with whom God chose to enter into a covenant, promising them a land, a kingdom, and Messiah, whose rule will endure forever. Witnessing how the sadistic murder, mutilation, and rape of Jewish men, women, and children is celebrated throughout the world with ghoulish delight followed by drummed up rage against the Jewish state of Israel confirms that God is permitting demonic forces to drive us into the new modern age of homo idololatrae: the age of postsecular man, the idolator.
“The new antisemitism projects traditional conceptions of ‘the Jew’ onto Israel as the collective Jew. For this reason, traditional definitions of the ideology of antisemitism apply fully to its new manifestation.” Accordingly, antisemitism remains “a set of negative attitudes, ideologies, and practices directed at Jews as Jews, individually or collectively, based upon and sustained by a repetitive and potentially self-fulfilling latent structure of hostile erroneous beliefs and assumptions that flow from the application of double standards toward Jews as a collective, manifested culturally in myth, ideology, folklore, and imagery, and urging various forms of restriction, exclusion, and suppression.”
[Kenneth Marcus, “The Ideology of the New Antisemitism” in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed., Deciphering the New Antisemitism (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), p. 23]
Horrifically, postsecular antisemitism also urges the fourth category of extermination.
“Recognizing the ‘New Anti-Semitism’”
“[T]he so-called “new anti-Semitism” poses a unique challenge. Whereas classical anti-Semitism is aimed at the Jewish people or the Jewish religion, “new anti-Semitism” is aimed at the Jewish state. Since this anti-Semitism can hide behind the veneer of legitimate criticism of Israel, it is more difficult to expose. Making the task even harder is that this hatred is advanced in the name of values most of us would consider unimpeachable, such as human rights.
“Nevertheless, we must be clear and outspoken in exposing the new anti-Semitism. I believe that we can apply a simple test – I call it the “3D” test – to help us distinguish legitimate criticism of Israel from anti-Semitism.
“The first “D” is the test of demonization. When the Jewish state is being demonized; when Israel’s actions are blown out of all sensible proportion; when comparisons are made between Israelis and Nazis and between Palestinian refugee camps and Auschwitz – this is anti- Semitism, not legitimate criticism of Israel.
“The second “D” is the test of double standards. When criticism of Israel is applied selectively; when Israel is singled out by the United Nations for human rights abuses while the behavior of known and major abusers, such as China, Iran, Cuba, and Syria, is ignored; when Israel’s Magen David Adom, alone among the world’s ambulance services, is denied admission to the International Red Cross – this is anti-Semitism.
“The third “D” is the test of delegitimization: when Israel’s fundamental right to exist is denied – alone among all peoples in the world – this too is anti-Semitism.”
[Natan Sharansky, “3D Test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double Standards, Delegitimization,” Jewish Political Studies Review, 16:3-4 (Fall 2004), read at Jewish Center for Public Affairs (10/21/2004), https://jcpa.org/article/3d-test-of-anti-semitism-demonization-double-standards-delegitimization/.]
9/11 served as the trigger event for ushering us into the first globally postsecular modern social reality. 10/7 beyond exhibiting complete and absolute hatred for the Jews, galvanizes, emboldens and sanctions that further atrocities be perpetrated against them, while at the same time giving such massacres a normative standing as being both good and necessary for the flourishing of humankind — universal human salvation — according to Islamist theology, demonology and eschatology. Western Christendom provided the logistics and staging ground for the twentieth-century secular reading of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. The House of Islam has become the medium through which thrives on a global scale the twenty-first century postsecular religious reading of the Protocols.
“A part of Islamist antisemitism is the adoption of the idea, taken from the fabricated Protocols of the Elders of Zion, that attributes to the Jews the aspiration to rule the world. Today this view is combined with anti-Americanism, as Islamists believe that the Jews rule the world from New York and Washington. Thus the Islamic world order envisioned by Islamism is seen as directly threatening, and threatened by, ‘world Jewry.’ The necessity of ‘countering the Jews’ is thus central to the worldview of Islamism and not related to any specific conflict, not even the conflict with Israel. The Islamist internationalist agenda, poised to undermine the ‘master plan of the Jews’ who want to rule the world, is the substance of a religionized and powerful ideology.
“With the exception of Europe, the retreat from secularism is global. However, Islamic migration to the West brings religion and the related conflicts back to Europe. Europeans fail to understand this. Religious fundamentalism characterized by purity and desecularization is a hallmark of our age, and it thrives in the Islam diaspora in the West … Support for the retreat from secularism in the name of purity and authenticity is often accompanied by no proper knowledge of the Islamist agenda of authenticity. Islamists understand their jihad against the ‘wicked master plans of the Jews’ as a defensive fight for purity against a Jewish conspiracy to undermine the umma. Part of this ‘Jewish master plan’ is an agenda of secularization meant to discredit Islam by depriving it of authenticity, thus steering people away from God. Islamists believe that ‘Jewish genius’ is a ‘hidden hand’ acting ‘in the dark,’ by proxy. In the past, the proxy was the ‘European crusaders’; at present it is the United States, allied with the Westernized Muslim elites. This conspiracy-driven narrative may be found in dozens of widely disseminated books by major Islamists, who propose an agenda to thwart this ‘devilish Jewish plan’ aimed at secularizing Islam.”
[Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 18, 179 . According to Tibi, “The significance of [Sayyid] Qutb to Islamism is comparable to that of Marx to Marxism.” Tibi identifies him as “also the mastermind of the antisemitism inherent in Islamist ideology.” “In Ma’rakutna ma’a al-Yahud (Our struggle with the Jews), he laid out all the essential features of the Islamization of antisemitism. … “Qutb believes that ‘the Jews’ have never been other than ‘evil’ and wicked.’” … “Qutb’s “murderous ideology supported by the imagery of ‘the Jew’ as a ‘wickxed, bloodthirsty, inhuman’ monster who is and does evil to all humanity and therefore should be exterminated. What makes this antisemitism more dangerous than its predecessors in the Arab world is that it is presented in specifically Islamized terms, as an expression of religionized politics.” … “This religionized antisemitism is then extended to a strategy to fight the alleged ‘Jewish-Christian’ agenda that targets the entire Islamic umma. Christians act as salibiyyun (crusaders) in their capacity as proxies for the Jews, who are ‘the real instigators.’” “Qutb maintains that ‘there is a crusader-Zionist harban salibiyya-sahyuniyya (war) against the roots of the religion of Islam.’ The interchangeability of ‘Zionist’ for ‘Jewish’ and ‘world Zionism’ for ‘world Jewry’ leads to the conclusion that for Qutb world Jewry and world Zionism are the same. He does not look at Zionism as a modern phenomenon but extends it back to Crusades: ‘The Jews were the instigator from the very first moment. The Crusaders followed next.’” … “Historically, the crusaders were Europeans, but Islamists relocate them to America. The Islamist book by Salah A. al-Khalidi entitled America Viewed from the Inside through the Lenses of Sayyid Qutb explicitly extends Qutb’s antisemitism to implicate the United States. It describes the Jews as virtually ruling the world through their domination of the United States. Seen in this light, the perception of ‘Islam under siege’ manages to unite anti-Americanism with the Islamization of antisemitism.” Ibid., pp. 63, 66.
Bassam Tibi is Professor Emeritus of International Relations, University of Göttingen and former A. D. White Professor-at-Large, Cornell University. In 2010, he was the Resnick Scholar for the Study of Antisemitism at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. He is the author of three dozen previous books, including most recently Islam’s Predicament with Modernity. It is troubling that as a scholarly expert on Islam, William E. Shepard’s “Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966)” published by Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy fails to even mention Qubt’s essential doctrine of antisemitism. Accessed at https://iep.utm.edu/qutb/.]
“Antisemitism is but one of many ideological and intellectual currents that have been imported into the Arab world from Europe in modern times, along with Western goods, technology, and fashions. As with many of the European cultural imports, its adoption over the past century or two has been irregular, even haphazard, and it has not infrequently been syncretized with genuine, native intellectual traditions. … As early as the 1920s, Palestinian nationalists began citing the infamous Protocols of the Elders of Zion in their propaganda.”
[Norman A. Stillman, “The Response of the Jews of the Arab World to Antisemitism in the Modern Era,” in Living with Antisemitism, Modern Jewish Responses, ed. by Jehuda Reinharz (Hanover and London: Published for Brandeis University Press by University Press of New England, 1987), 349.]
“Anti-Semitism is, in fact, a relatively new phenomenon in the Arab world, gaining ground particularly since the eruption of the Arab-Israeli conflict in the mid-twentieth century. Nazi-style anti-Semitic books and publications have been published openly. For example, there are at least nine different Arabic translations of the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ which was translated into Arabic for the first time in the 1920’s. The argument that the Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic since they themselves are Semites is irrelevant, not only because “Semite” is a linguistic, not a racial or a national classification, but because the term anti-Semitic has traditionally referred to Jews only.”
[Esther Webman, “Anti-Semitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizballah and Hamas,” International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (7/9/1998), p. 3, https://www.ict.org.il/UserFiles/Webman-9-7-1998.pdf.]
“Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem under the British Mandate was by far the most respected and powerful leader of the Palestinian Arabs from the 1920s through the 1940s. In 1937, Hajj Amin al-Husseini issued a “Proclamation to the Muslim World” as a way of rallying Muslim opposition to the Zionist project in Palestine. Already in the 1920s, Husseini had begun invoking the Protocols to foment violence against the Jews in Palestine, but his 1937 ‘Proclamation’ draws almost entirely on the Islamic tradition for its anti-Jewish polemics. The opening line of this document states: ‘Since the earliest days of their history, the Jews have been an oppressed people and there must be good reason for that. As far back as the Egyptian pharaohs, energetic oppressive measures had to be taken against the Jews….’ The Mufti places the struggle with the Zionists in the context of Islamic history. “This battle of Jews against Arabs is nothing new; the venue has just changed over time. The Jews hate Muhammad and Islam…. The Mufti concludes as follows: ‘I present to my Muslim brothers in the entire world the history and the true experience which the Jews cannot deny. The verses from the Koran and hadith prove to you that the Jews have been the bitterest enemies of Islam and continue to try to destroy it. They know only hypocrisy and guile. Hold together, fight for Islamic thought, fight for your religion and your existence! Do not rest until your land is free of the Jews” (emphasis added). Here we see al-Husseini addressing not only Palestinians and Arabs but Muslims the world over, telling them that they are involved in a fight for their religion and their very existence against a Jewish (not Zionist) enemy whose goal is to destroy Islam.”
[Joseph S. Spoerl, “Parallels between Nazi and Islamist Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 31, no. 1/2 (2020), p. 212-213. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26870795.]
“Haj Amin al-Husseini (1897-1974) collaborated extensively with Nazi Germany. Before, during and after his presence in Berlin from 1941 to 1945, Husseini played a central role in shaping the political tradition of Islamism by offering an interpretation of the religion of Islam as intrinsically antisemitic and anti-Zionist and in connecting that version to the antisemitic conspiracy theories of modern European history.
“Husseini had a profound impact on Nazi Germany’s Arabic language propaganda to the Arab societies during Holocaust. He left a legacy of antisemitism and anti-Zionism that remains an enduring element of Palestinian and Arab politics. If we are to understand his importance for the history of politics and ideas in the Middle East, we must [realize]…the Mufti was an important regional leader and Nazi propagandist. In this capacity, he engaged in lethal incitement against the Jews, and this is now recognized under international law as a crime because it is an essential step in the process leading to genocide.
“Husseini was a leading figure of the Palestinian national movement from the time of his appointment as the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem in 1921 to his leadership of the Palestinians during the first Arab-Israeli war of 1948.
When called before a British Commission for his part in the 1929 pogrom against Jews in Palestine, “Husseini involved The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to prove the existence of a Jewish plot in Palestine and explained, ‘The House of Commons is nothing more than a council of the Elders of Zion from which we can expect no justice!’ Thus, the most resilient document of modern anti-Semitism – a literary forgery…that supposedly confirmed a Jewish conspiracy to achieve world domination – came under discussion in Palestine as well, where it had circulated at least since 1921.
“In the late 1930s ‘the nucleus of modern Islamism, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, grew into a mass organization. The movement, founded in 1928 by the cleric Hassan al-Banna, a friend of the Mufti, had only 800 members in 1936; two years later that number had jumped to 200,000. The driving force behind this increase was mobilization for the Arab revolt in Palestine, in which the anti-Jewish passages of the Koran were interwoven with the anti-Semitic combat methods of the Third Reich, and hatred of the Jews was transformed into jihad. Boycott campaigns and violent demonstrations with the rallying cry ‘Jews out of Egypt and Palestine’ were the result. In October 1938, anti-Jewish treatises, including Arabic versions of Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, were distributed at an Islamic parliamentarians’ conference ‘for the defense of Palestine’ in Cairo.
“During World War II and the Holocaust, having been chased out of the Middle East by the British, Husseini found refuge in Hitler’s Berlin. His rejection of Zionism was inseparable from his enthusiasm for National Socialism. … In Hitler and the Nazis he recognized ideological soulmates who shared his profound hatred of the Jews, Judaism and Zionism.
“Between 1941 and 1945, Husseini became a major contributor to the Third Reich’s Arabic language propaganda aimed at North Africa and the Middle East. In the process, his speeches and essays of the 1930s and 1940s became canonical texts of the tradition of Islamism and were distributed in thousands of print editions and to hundreds of thousands of listeners through Arabic language radio broadcasts of the Nazi regime.
“With his March 1944 Berlin radio broadcast calling for Arabs to rise up and ‘Kill the Jews wherever you find them’, Husseini joined Goebbels as one of the first political actors to use means of mass electronic communications to support genocide.
“Following World War II, Husseini received a hero’s welcome in Egypt and Palestine. In 1946, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, called Husseini a ‘hero who challenged an empire and fought Zionism with the help of Hitler and Germany. Germany and Hitler are gone, but Amin al-Husseini will continue the struggle.’ … Following the Arab-Palestinian defeat of 1948, Husseini’s political fortunes declined, yet he remained a revered figure in parts of Arab and Palestinian societies. The evidence of his collaboration with the Nazis was either forgotten, ignored, excused as a form of justified anti-colonialism in an alliance of convenience, not shared ideological passion, against a common enemy. … One precondition for a peaceful end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict lies in an Arab and Palestinian rejection of the reactionary Islamist political theology that Husseini did so much to create. A frank and well-grounded coming to terms with the history of his collaboration with Nazi Germany should be part of that reckoning.”
[Jeffrey Herf, “Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Nazis and the Holocaust: The Origins, Nature and Aftereffects of Collaboration,” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 26, no. 3/4 (Fall 2014), pp. 11-16, 26, 31, 33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43922000. See too Jeffrey Herf, “Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Aimed at Arabs and Muslims During World War II and the Holocaust: Old Themes, New Archival Findings,” Central European History, vol. 42, no. 4 (December 2009), https://www.jstor.org/stable/40600977. Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). Joel Fishman, “The Recent Discovery of Heinrich Himmler’s Telegram of November 2, 1943, the Anniversary of the Balfour Declaration, to Amin al-Husseini, Mufti of Jerusalem,” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 27, no. 3/ 4 (Fall 2016), https://www.jstor.org/stable/44510573.:
To the Grand Mufti Amin El Husseini, Berlin
From its beginning the National Socialist Movement of Greater Germany has inscribed the struggle against World Jewry on its banner. Therefore it has always followed with special sympathy the struggle of the freedom-loving Arabs, foremost in Palestine, against the Jewish intruders. The recognition of this enemy and our common struggle against him form the firm foundation of the natural alliance between National Socialist Greater Germany and the freedom-loving Muslims of the world…
Signed Reichsfuehrer—SS Heinrich Himmler”]
“Beyond the discussion of Himmler’s telegram to Amin al-Husseini, the basic challenge of honest history-writing is to place the greater problem of Amin al-Husseini’s partnership with Nazi Germany on the agenda. As of the present, one would look in vain for mention of the Mufti in school textbooks or in museums commemorating the Holocaust, both in Israel and abroad.”
[Ibid., p. 83. See too, Joel Fishman, Problem of Haj Amin al-Husseini, ‘Grand Mufti’ of Jerusalem,” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 26, no. 3/4 (Fall 2014), pp. 5-12. Published By: Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.]
Two points follow from these historical facts.
One, “World-views matter: Hitler’s world-view led to war and genocide. There is no reason to expect less from Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, and similar Islamist groups (Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah, the Iranian regime, Al-Queda, Lashkar-e-Taiba, etc.).”
Two: “[T]he claim that Palestinians and Arabs had nothing to do with the Holocaust is false. In fact, Arab and Palestinian leaders played a significant role in aiding and abetting the Nazi plan to exterminate the Jews in Europe and they hoped to implement the genocide in the Middle East. … A careful examination of this history shows that it is neither fair nor accurate to portray the Arab-Israel War of 1947-49 as an unprovoked war of aggression by Zionists bent on the ethnic cleansing of Palestinian Arabs. In fact it was a war of self-defense against a ruthless, pro-Nazi, and openly genocidal Palestinian leadership that enjoyed enormous popularity among the Arab and Palestinian masses.”
[Joseph S. Spoerl, “Palestinians, Arabs, and the Holocaust,” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol.26, no. 1/2 (Spring 2014), pp. 34, 15. https://www.jstor.org/stable/44289822. ]
“Anti-Zionism has become the most dangerous and effective form of anti- Semitism in our time, through its systematic delegitimization, defamation, and demonization of Israel. Although not a priori anti-Semitic, the calls to dismantle the Jewish state, whether they come from Muslims, the Left, or the radical Right, increasingly rely on an anti-Semitic stereotypization of classic themes, such as the manipulative “Jewish lobby,” the Jewish/Zionist “world conspiracy,” and Jewish/Israeli “warmongers.” One major driving force of this anti-Zionism/anti-Semitism is the transformation of the Palestinian cause into a “holy war”; another source is anti-Americanism linked with fundamentalist Islamism. In the current context, classic conspiracy theories, such as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, are enjoying a spectacular revival. The common denominator of the new anti-Zionism has been the systematic effort to criminalize Israeli and Jewish behavior, so as to place it beyond the pale of civilized and acceptable conduct.”
[Prof. Robert Wistrich, “Anti-Zionism and Anti-Semitism,” Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs (10/21/2004), https://jcpa.org/article/anti-zionism-and-anti-semitism/.%5D
“The Palestinian Authority successfully used the Protocols libel, together with other hate propaganda, to transform the killing of Jews from immoral murder into legitimate self-defense and even a service to humanity.
“The consistent and tragic conjunction of belief in the Protocols, a sense of apocalyptic urgency, and the genocidal urges that we see in the Nazis…and the Palestinian Authority become all the more problematic as we move further into the 21st century. Here we find the Protocols not only reactivated within the mainstream of one of the largest religious movements on the planet — Islam — but reentering the Western public sphere from both secular and religious sources.”
[Richard Landes and Steven T Katz, “Introduction, The Protocols at the Dawn of the 21st Century” in The Paranoid Apocalypse, A Hundred-Year Retrospective on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), p. 13. See too, Itamar Marcus and Barbara Cook, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, An authentic document in Palestinian Authority ideology,” Palestinian Media Watch (n/d/), https://palwatch.org/STORAGE/OpEd/Protocols_of_the_Elders.pdf.]
“We often hear that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are not the same. In principle, they don’t have to be. But in practice, and this is what history teaches us, most of the time, they are. They are the same in the most critical way possible because both lead to antisemitic outcomes for Jews. There is a reason for that, and the reason is that the kind of anti-Zionism that we hear today that dominates the discourse today on the left very much relies on the tropes and ideas of antisemitic conspiracy theory as laid out in the Protocols of Zion.”
[Izabella Tabarovsky, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion — Why the Jews?” Center for Jewish Civilization, Georgetown University (6/28/2023), https://cjc.georgetown.edu/2023/06/28/the-protocols-of-the-elders-of-zion-why-the-jews/. Izabella Tabarovsky is the Kennan Institute Senior Advisor on Regional Partnerships and Programming. The Kennan Institute is the premier U.S. center for advanced research on Russia and Eurasia and the oldest and largest regional program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. The Kennan Institute is committed to improving American understanding of Russia, Ukraine, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the surrounding region though research and exchange.]
German artist Otto Dix in his 1933 painting of the Seven Deadly Sins portrayed envy as a hunchbacked Adolf Hitler riding on the back of greed, which he depicted as an old hag clutching a handful of money. The image he created also well represents the dependence of postsecular Islamist antisemitism upon the West’s long history of demonizing the Jews, thus riding on the back of that history that culminated in producing and distributing the Protocols of Zion.
Hatred of Jews, violence against Jews, the bloodlust to murder Jews, demands for the abolishment of the Jewish state of Israel and even calls for the extermination of the Jewish people are all symptomatic of a horrific outbreak of a new kind of antisemitism. This social psychosis is global. Its final pathological stage manifests itself in a social imaginary that arouses pleasure from fantasizing over the total extermination of the Jews. Postsecular antisemitism spawned through Islamist ideology has taken what was once a racialized nationalist imagination, a Nazi imagination, and has transformed it into a religionist envisioned social imaginary on a global scale.
[For the Nazi nationalist imagination wishing for a world without Jews see Alon Confino, A World Without Jews, The Nazi Imagination from Persecution to Genocide (Yale University Press, 2015). ”The social imaginary is the imaginary system that holds society together. It provides the web of meanings and structures that guide our collective and individual actions and values.” Samantha Earle PhD, social philosopher and founder of The Social Imaginaries Project, https://socialimaginaries.org/about/ ]
“The first half of the 20th century witnessed the emergence of two distinct strains of especially virulent hatred for Jews, the “scientific,” pseudo-Darwinian racism of Adolf Hitler and the Nazis, and the theological anti-Semitism of the nascent Islamic revival, represented by such groups as the Muslim Brotherhood. These two groups had much in common ideologically and made natural allies during the Second World War. There is one especially striking and important belief that they had in common and that deserves attention because of its relevance to current events in the Middle East, namely, the view of global Jewry as an enemy conspiring to subjugate and ultimately destroy non-Jews.”
[Joseph S. Spoerl, “Parallels between Nazi and Islamist Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Political Studies Review, vol. 31, no. 1/2 (2020), p. 210. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26870795.]
The ideologies of the two separate hate groups — racist Nazis and religionist Islamists — are still tied together by their mutual reliance upon the fabricated screed against the Jews, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as proof justifying their absurd obsession with a Jewish conspiracy to rule and ruin humankind.
Saleh Riqab, Hamas Deputy Minister of Religious Endowment (2008):
“The goal of the Zionist movement is to establish a state in Palestine, which would become a base for ruling the entire world. Its other goals are to destroy the religions it opposes, particularly Islam; to corrupt values and morality; to spread permissiveness and sex; and to generate moral decline. They have come up with many means to achieve this, such as inventing philosophical theories that destroy religion and morality. [G]lobal Jewry…established destructive movements to fight religion and morality, to corrupt the leaders throughout the world, and to break down social relations among nations. This was led by global Freemasonry, which was founded by three prominent Jews, the first of whom was Herod. This is a long well-known story – the role of the Jews in creating the Masonic movement. The Freemason movement used various methods to bring the political, philosophical, and literary leaders worldwide to their knees. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which are a product of the 1897 Basel Congress, discuss how the Jews should seize control of the world. In Europe, and especially in the U.S., there was a quick Jewish takeover of the major mass media, because in the West, the mass media shapes their mentality and their views. They don’t read very much, they just listen.”
[“Hamas Deputy Minister of Religious Endowment on Jewish History and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” MEMRI, (8/1/2008), Palestinian Authority | Special Dispatch No. 1944, MEMRI, Excerpts from an interview with Saleh Riqab, Hamas deputy minister of religious endowment, which aired on Al-Aqsa TV on May 14, 2008. To view this clip on MEMRI TV, visit http://www.memri.org/legacy/clip/1776. To view the MEMRI TV page on Hamas, visit http://www.memritv.org/subject/en/95.htm. ]
Marc Neugroschel, “Are Hamas Terrorists Nazis?” The Jerusalem Post (11/25/2023), https://www.jpost.com/arab-israeli-conflict/gaza-news/article-774816.
Adolf Hitler (1924)
“The extent to which the entire existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown in an incomparable way in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, which are so hated by the Jews. They are said to be based on a forgery, the “Frankfurter Zeitung” moans to the world again and again: the best proof that they are genuine. What many Jews may do unconsciously is deliberately made clear here. But that is what matters. It does not matter from whose Jewish head these revelations originate, but what is decisive is that they reveal the nature and activities of the Jewish people with almost horrifying certainty and present their inner connections and ultimate goals. The best criticism of them, however, is reality. Anyone who examines the historical development of the last hundred years from the point of view of this book will immediately understand the outcry of the Jewish press. For once this book has become the common property of the people, the Jewish danger can be considered to have been broken.”
[Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, Zwei Bände in einem Band Ungekürzte Ausgabe(München: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., Frz. EherNachf., G.m.b.H., 1943), p. 337. For use of Protocols for propaganda purposes during Hitler’s Nazi rule of Germany see Randall L. Bytwerk, “Believing in ‘Inner Truth’: The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Nazi Propaganda, 1933–1945,” Holocaust and Genocide Studies, Volume 29, Issue 2, Fall 2015, https://doi.org/10.1093/hgs/dcv024. ]
It is eerie, surprising and sobering how closely Islamist-rooted antisemitism follows the same path of propaganda that Kenneth Burke explicated from Hitler’s Mein Kampf. First, Islamist antisemites follow the same rhetorical principle of having a “centralizing hub of ideas” geographically located towards which all eyes could turn at what Burke called “the appointed hours of prayer-in-reverse, the hours of vituperation.” In his 1939 essay titled “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’,” Burke quoted Hitler who wrote: “The geo-political importance of a center of movement cannot be overrated. Only the presence of such a center of a place, bathed in the magic of a Mecca or a Rome, can at length give a movement that force which is rooted in the inner unity and in the recognition of a hand that represents this unity.” For antisemitic Islamists today and those who support their cause that magical place is the land of Palestine, with the holy city of Jerusalem its capital.
Second, Hitler believed it necessary to make a common enemy to unite his listeners as crucial to the success of the style of propaganda he developed. Again, quoting Hitler:
“As a whole, and at all times, the efficiency of the truly national leader consists primarily in preventing the division of the attention of a people, and always in concentrating it on a single enemy. The more uniformly the fighting will of a people is put into action, the greater will be the magnetic force of the movement and the more powerful the impetus of the blow. It is part of the genius of a great leader to make adversaries of different fields appear as always belonging to one category only, because to weak and unstable characters the knowledge that there are various enemies will lead only too easily to incipient doubts as to their own cause.”
Burke understood Hitler followed in the footsteps of medieval mentality by using its important ingredient in building unity, which was “the symbol of a common enemy, the Prince of Evil himself.” Hitler demonized the Jews, making the ‘international devil,’ to be the ‘international Jew.’ “This materialization of a religious pattern” Burke notes was a “terrifically effective weapon of propaganda in a period where religion has been progressively weakened by many centuries of capitalist materialism.” Similarly, today in a postsecular world, we are witnessing the terrible effectiveness of Islamist demonization of the Jews in igniting a global outbreak of antisemitism that is again religiously based after the secularization of the West.
Third, Burke found the instigating catalyst for Hitler’s anti-Semitism to be the disunity and misery he saw and experienced in Vienna as a young man. Once Hitler “had discovered the ‘cause’ of the misery about him, he could confront it. Where he had had to avert his eyes, he could now positively welcome the scene.” Burke quotes Hitler as he related the ‘internal happiness’ that descended upon him with his realizing the Jews were responsible for all the divisiveness and suffering: ‘This was the time in which the greatest change I was ever to experience took place in me. From a feeble cosmopolite I turned into a fanatical anti-Semite.’ Seeing this single cause for the suffering of the German people Hitler saw his “vision of the end of the world — out of which in turn he emerges with his slogan: ‘I am acting in the sense of the Almighty Creator: By warding off Jews I am fighting for the Lord’s work (italics his).'”
As did Hitler who blamed the Jews for German suffering, antisemitic Palestinian propaganda blames only the Jews as the root cause for the Palestinian people’s plight of suffering, displacement and poverty, when in part certainly it was “the failed Palestinian Arab attempt to destroy the state of Israel at birth that caused “the attendant flight of some 600,000 Palestinian Arabs.” Thus, the term “Nakba” or catastrophe “originally coined to describe the magnitude of the self-inflicted Palestinian and Arab defeat in the 1948 war” became a “synonym for Palestinian victimhood, with failed aggressor transformed into hapless victims and vice versa.” Again, like Hitler who claimed a divine calling to kill the Jews, antisemitism serves a similar vein in the Islamist vision of the world. To kill Jews is to do the work of the Islamist “Allah,” with their success in ridding the world of the Jews they remove the greatest hindrance to the salvation of humankind. Seeing all of history through the lens of what Saul Friedländer calls “redemptive anti-Semitism,” Hitler gave himself over to the false certainty that he must destroy all Jews in fulfillment of his divine calling to preserve the sacred purity of Aryan blood from their contamination in order to assure the building of the great Aryan civilization. Similarly, Islamists believe their Allah commands them for the sake of world submission to Islam that they must thwart the Jews’ plans to rule the world by eliminating all Jews.
[Col (Res.) Dr. Raphael G. Bouchnik-Chen, “The False ‘Nakba’ Narrative,” The Begin-Sadat Cent for Strategic Studies, Bar-Ilan University (4/16/2019), https://besacenter.org/nakba-false-narrative/#:~:text=The%20%E2%80%9CNakba%E2%80%9D%20is%20not%20a%20fact.%20It%20is,creation%20of%20the%20refugee%20problem%20onto%20the%20state. About the Palestinian refugee problem this writer would align himself along the lines of the following assessments: “In our view, the horrors and ravages of war and the war psychology of fear are the principal causes of the Palestinian civilian population’s search for safe haven.” Authors quote Palestinian Professor Ibrahim Abu-Lughod as having acknowledged a “sufficient” cause was “the fact that a bi-communal war occurred and that, as in all such wars, some people were dislocated as a result.” The authors point out he also maintained however, that “even with the best of intentions, control of the data, and skilled analysis, it is doubtful that Palestinian and Israeli scholars – or third party scholars – can arrive at a consensus either on the facts or on their interpretation.” Mohammed S. Dajani Daoudi and Zeina M. Barakat, “Israelis and Palestinians: Contested Narratives,” Israel Studies, vol. 18, no. 2 (Summer 2013), pp. 65, 66. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2979/israelstudies.18.2.53. Historian Avi Shlaim quotes Benny Morris, [The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 286]: “The Palestinian refugee problem was born of war, not by design, Jewish or Arab. It was largely a by-product of Arab and Jewish fears and of the protracted, bitter fighting that characterized the first Arab-Israeli war; in smaller part, it was the deliberate creation of Jewish and Arab military commanders and politicians.” Avi Shlaim, “The Debate about 1948,” International Journal of Middle East, vol. 27, no. 3 (August, 1995), p. 295. Israel, A Concise History of a Nation Reborn (New York, N.Y.: HarperCollinsPublishers, 2016) by Daniel Gordis orients this writer’s view of the 1948 founding of the Israeli state. For more on “redemptive anti-Semitism,” see Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, Volume I, The Years of Persecution, 1933-1939 (New York, NY: Harper Perennial, HarperCollins Publishers, 1997).]
Burke said Hitler was effective because above all else his appeals relied “upon a bastardization of fundamentally religious patterns of thought.” Burke added, “There is nothing in religion proper that requires a fascist state. There is much in religion, when misused, that does lead to a fascist state.” Burke accordingly concluded, “the corruptors of religion…are a major menace to the world today, in giving the profound patterns of religious thought a crude and sinister distortion.” Repeating this corruption but reverting back to a religious basis instead of a nationalist one, Islamist terrorists in this postsecular age have poisoned Islam, making their rendition of it a toxic spreader of antisemitism to justify indiscriminate killing of innocent civilian men, women, and children.
[Kenneth Burke (1897-1993), “The Rhetoric of Hitler’s ‘Battle’,” in The Philosophy of Literary Form, Studies in Symbolic Action, revised edition, abridged by the author (New York: Vintage Books, 1957, pp. 165, 169-170, 172, 188). Burke relied upon an English translation of Mein Kampf, complete and unabridged, fully annotated with editorial sponsors: John Chamberlain, Sidney B. Fay and others (New York, Reynal & Hitchcock, 1939).]
As much as Jesus is the root and the offspring of David, equally so the global Jewish hatred now manifest while being rooted in the West’s anti-Jewish tradition is the direct offspring of Islamist ideology. The prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah who teach us from the Scriptures that God forgets the sins He forgives (Isaiah 43:25; Jeremiah 31:34) are the same prophets who record those very sins that we might remember them and be instructed by them. Western Christians as good stewards of the racialized legacy of partiality we have inherited from the past should remember this deformed medieval depiction of the Jews and the nations. The Western mind and thus, the theological faculties of Western Christendom, is infused with an idolatrous affinity for the absorptive appeal of whiteness as a mode of imagination that excluded the Jews — and Muslims too, from its vision of human origins. Supralapsarian white Adam and whiter Eve in the Garden of Eden guaranteed that in a creation without sin the age of innocence would have been populated only by white children. The great western project of its universal sense of enlightenment and progress, the advancing of its white civilization for the betterment of humankind, is a work-based system of salvation waged on a grand scale. This idolatrous fantasy is manifested in Western iconography’s preference for seeing and depicting the forms of the divine, the angelic, and the virtues of human perfection through the medium of whiteness. A cursory examination of the history of Western Christian art confirms that the church’s collective doctrinal identity is dressed in whiteness, and as such, sanctions a distortive aesthetic celebrating whiteness. Beholders see the images presented in the aura of whiteness that the church approved and taught were imbued with and displayed as elements and agents of the holy. Western Christians through this systemic practice are conditioned to understand that the sense of the divine and appearance of sacred beauty are synonymous with whiteness as a delight to the eyes that should please the heart. Although Christians must assume responsibility for this intersectional idolatry, the focus of this post is the new postsecular form of antisemitism that has been cultivated through the rubric of Islamist ideology and has spread worldwide.
* * * *
Why are the nations in an uproar, and the people’s devising a vain thing? The kings of the earth take their stand, and the rulers take counsel together against the Lord and against His Anointed — the Messiah: ‘Let us tear their fetters apart, and cast away their cords from us!’ He who is enthroned in the heavens laughs, the Lord scoffs at them. Then He will speak to them in His anger and terrify them in His fury: ‘But as for Me, I have consecrated My King upon Zion, My holy mountain.’ Psalm 2:1-6
The hearts of those engulfed in the fantasy of postsecular antisemitism believing in its foundational document, The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, religiously read, are rehearsing the culminating performance of idolatry yet to come as recorded in the last book of the Bible, The Revelation of Jesus Christ 13:14-15. The star performer of the present blood libel ritual of child-murdering idolatry is the terrorist group Hamas, the overlords of Gaza. The star producer of the ritual killings is the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Hamas
“Many Muslims living in the West remain under the influence of Islamist movements and the hatred of Israel and Jews that permeates their countries of origin. Hatred of Jews and Israel is therefore markedly present in Muslim communities in the West.
“The recent pro-Hamas demonstrations in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia show that hatred of Jews and Israel among Muslims living in the West has reached a degree where many of them openly support genocidal atrocities not only against Jews in Israel but against Jews anywhere…. These demonstrations also show that support for the ‘Palestinian cause’ sometimes also leads Westerners to support genocidal atrocities so long as they are committed against Jews.
“Calm will temporarily return in the streets of Western cities, but if nothing is done to respond to the forces seeking to overturn Western civilization, all in the name of “democracy” of course – and Western values such as equal justice under law, equality of opportunity rather than of result, education from facts rather than from propaganda, a media that actually challenges authority rather than allowing itself to be suborned by it, freedom of speech with which one disagrees, the sovereignty of the individual rather than of groups — the worst is bound to come.”
[Guy Millière, “Genocidal Hatred of Jews and the West,” Gatestone Institute International Policy Council (11/29/2023), https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/20188/genocidal-hatred-jews-west. Dr. Guy Millière, a professor at the University of Paris, is the author of 27 books on France and Europe.]
“The global scope and scale of Hamas’s antisemitic influence dramatically exceeds even the Nazis from whom it takes much of its own inspiration. Hamas is by far the most successful antisemitic entity in the world today. Beyond all competition, it has mobilized Jew-hatred around the world, using the State of Israel both as its target and its primary weapon. By waging war against Israel over many years, Hamas has inspired and energized international organizations such as the UN and the EU; governments and parliaments; the Western media; university authorities, professors, and students; human rights groups; businesses; and large sectors of the general population.
“The current conflict has caused a profound spike in Jew-hatred in the West, and there is no doubt that after the war, the steady-state level of antisemitism will settle at a new high. That should be of immense concern to governments in Europe, the US, and elsewhere, with their Jews facing this growing prejudice. It is their responsibility to suppress antisemitic hatred by defunding or shutting down those groups that are responsible, and taking a much harder line against the arch-offenders – the UN bodies in New York and Geneva.”
Richard Kemp, “Hamas’s antisemitic influence is even bigger than the Nazis’ – opinion,” The Jerusalem Post (12/22/2023), https://www.jpost.com/opinion/article-779122. The writer is a former British Army colonel, who commanded British forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.
“When Hamas took over the Gaza Strip by force of arms in 2007, it faced an ideological crisis. It could focus on governing Gaza and addressing the needs of the Palestinian people, or it could use the Gaza Strip as a springboard from which to attack Israel. Even then, Hamas understood these two goals were mutually exclusive. And while some anticipated Hamas would moderate, or at least be co-opted by the demands of governing, it did not. Instead, Hamas invested in efforts to radicalize society and build the militant infrastructure necessary to someday launch the kind of attack [like the October 2023 massacre] that in its view could contribute to the destruction of Israel. The group’s explicit targeted killing and kidnapping of civilians baldly contradicts Hamas’ articulated revised political strategy since it took control of the Gaza Strip in 2007. Ironically, Hamas’ sharp tactical shift only underscores that the group never abandoned its fundamental commitment to the creation of an Islamist state in all of what it considers historical Palestine and the destruction of Israel.”
[Deborah Margolin, Matthew Levitt, “The Road to October 7: Hamas’ Long Game, Clarified,” CTC Sentinel, Combatting Terrorism Center at Westpoint, vol. 16. Iss. 10 (October/November 2023), https://ctc.westpoint.edu/the-road-to-october-7-hamas-long-game-clarified/.]
“As in all ideologies driven by Jew hatred, from Hitler to Hamas, where the Jew is the enemy, Judaism is the enemy. Beverley Milton-Edwards writes, ‘The Hamas view of the Jewish people is not drawn solely from the pages of the Qur’an and hadith. Its myopia is also the product of Western anti-Semitic [primarily Nazi] influences. While Hamas, like other modern-day Islamic Jihadists, has developed its argument on the Jewish question by relying on Qur’anic and other Islamic sources, it also… [borrows] from such classical Western anti-Semitic sources as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’ What Hamas has in common with Hitler is not merely the desire to exterminate the Jews. No, it is this: exterminationist Jew hatred forms a definitive, foundational basis for their entire worldview. Both for Nazis and for Islamic Jihadists, both for Hitler and for Hamas, exterminationist Jew hatred is a first principle defining the very essence of their thinking.”
[David Patterson, “From Hitler to Hamas, A Genealogy of Evil,” The Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism & Policy (10/17/2023), https://isgap.org/flashpoint/from-hitler-to-hamas-a-genealogy-of-evil/. See too, Beverley Milton-Edwards, Islamic Policies in Palestine (London, New York: I. B. Tauris Publishers, 1999, 1st publ., 1996).]
The Hamas Document, 1988, Extract from Article Thirty-Two:
“World Zionism, together with imperialistic powers, try through a studied plan and an intelligent strategy to remove one Arab state after another from the circle of struggle against Zionism, in order to have it finally face the Palestinian people only…
“The Islamic Resistance Movement calls on Arab and Islamic nations to take up the line of serious and persevering action to prevent the success of this horrendous plan, to warn the people of the danger emanating from leaving the circle of struggle against Zionism. Today it is Palestine, tomorrow it will be one country or another. The Zionist plan is limitless. After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates. When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.
“Leaving the circle of struggle with Zionism is high treason, and cursed be he who does that. ‘for whoso shall turn his back unto them on that day, unless he turneth aside to fight, or retreateth to another party of the faithful, shall draw on himself the indignation of Allah, and his abode shall be hell; an ill journey shall it be thither’.”
[Hamas Covenant 1988, “The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (8/18/1988). In The Name Of The Most Merciful Allah. The Avalon Project, Documents in Law, History and Diplomacy, Yale Law School, Lillian Goldman Law Library, https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.]
“[T]he Hamas Covenant of 1988 focused its anti-Semitic language on Zionists, for example, describing The Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the blueprint for the Zionist project (Article 32) and accusing the Zionists of aiming to ‘annihilate Islam’ (Article 28). The May 2017 ‘Document’ continues in this vein, albeit in somewhat less florid language, asserting that ‘the Zionist project does not target the Palestinian people alone; it is the enemy of the Arabic and Islamic Ummah posing a grave threat to its security and interests. It is also hostile to the Ummah’s aspirations for unity, renaissance, and liberation and has been the major source of its troubles. The Zionist project also poses a danger to international security and peace to mankind….’ (#15). As in the 1988 Covenant, the 2017 ‘Document’ merely takes all the classical tropes of anti-Semitism and focuses them on Zionism, noting that ‘it is the Zionists who constantly identify Judaism and the Jews with their own colonial project and illegal entity’ (#16). In effect, Hamas is saying that it is at war with all Jews except those who are anti-Zionist, thus it is not anti-Semitic. This can hardly be regarded as a serious repudiation of anti-Semitism.”
[Joseph S. Spoerl, “Parallels between Nazi and Islamist Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 31, No.1/2 (2020), pp. 216-217. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26870795. pp. 216-217.]
As it did in its 1988 covenant statement (article 2), Hamas does not mention the “Day of Judgment” in its 2017 Principles and Policies statement. This does not mean that its Islamist members no longer believe in the Day of Judgment. Similarly, it would be a foolish fantasy to presume because there is no mention of the Protocols in the 2017 document that Hamas no longer holds the antisemitic invective to be a pivotal part of their eschatological vision.
Iran
Then Haman the Agagite said to Kiing Ahasuerus of Persia and Media, “There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of all other people, and they do not observe the king’s laws, so it is not in the king’s interest to let them remain. If it is pleasing to the king, let it be decreed — written — that they be destroyed, and I will pay ten thousand talents of silver into the hands of those who carry on the business, to put into the king’s treasuries.” Then the king took his signet ring from his hand and gave it to Haman, the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the enemy of the Jews. And the king said to Haman, “The silver is yours, and the people also, to do with them as you please.” Esther 3:8-11.
“The anti-Jewish component in Islamist doctrine is by no means restricted to Palestinian Arabs and the neighboring countries. It appeared prominently in Iran after the Khomeini revolution, when the Protocols were given wide publicity; among other accusations, the Jews were made responsible for homosexuality and lesbianism.”
[Walter Laqueur, The Changing Face of Antisemitism (New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 198.]
“Iran’s antisemitism…is a revolutionary antisemitism, and Iran’s foreign policy is a revolutionary policy. Its scope is global, its program chiliastic, and its goal revolutionary.
“Its scope is global: The Islamic revolution was publicly characterized as being neither Iranian nor Shiite, but rather Islamic and universal. ‘We will export our revolution to the whole world because it is an Islamic revolution,’ declared Khomeini in February 1980. ‘The struggle will continue until the calls ‘there is no god but God’ and ‘Muhammad is the messenger of God’ are heard all over the world.’ This missionary zeal is not only embodied in the emblem of the Islamic Republic – the word ‘Allah’ written in Arabic script so as to form a stylized globe – but is also dictated by Iran’s constitution, which outlines ‘the country’s foreign policy on the basis of the Islamic criteria: fraternal alignment towards all Moslems and unsparing support’ for ‘any rightful struggle of the weak against the strong on the face of the globe.’
“Its program is chiliastic: Ali Khamenei describes the Islamic revolution as ‘the turning point in modern world history’ that carries a precise message: ‘the message of salvation of humanity.’ And he adds, ‘Our historical movement is creating a new civilization.’ The creation of this new civilization depends – as always – on the annihilation of its enemies – in this case Israel and United States.’
“Iran’s attitude vis-a-vis Israel is based on an antisemitic world view, which is older than the Islamic revolution. It tries to incite nations and peoples against Israel and seeks to spread antisemitism worldwide. The crucial question, however – why does Tehran wants to wipe Israel off the map? – is not raised with the West, and Iranian antisemitism is downplayed or ignored. The absence of clarity, however, is the beginning of complicity. The greatest success of Iranian foreign policy to this date is the fact that the international community seems to believe Tehran’s bogus claim to be ‘opposed to antisemitism.”
[Matthias Kūntzel, “Tehran’s Efforts to Mobilize Antisemitism, The Global Impact,” in Alvin H. Rosenfeld, ed., Deciphering the New Antisemitism, ed. by Alvin H. Rosenfeld(Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015), pp. 516-517, 527-528.]
“The Iranian regime, which practices strict control of the press, nevertheless permits the publication of Persian translations of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf. Meir Litvak, a leading expert on modern Iran, notes that state-run Iranian television regularly broadcasts documentaries and drama shows based on The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Such programs claim that the State of Israel was founded on the basis of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which exposed the Jewish plot to take over the world. The programs also depict Jews as murderers, bloodthirsty demons, and criminals.”
[Joseph S. Spoerl, “Parallels between Nazi and Islamist Anti-Semitism,” Jewish Political Studies Review, Vol. 31, No.1/2 (2020), p. 223, https://www.jstor.org/stable/26870795.]
The Iranian website Dehlinks.ir sells copies of a book titled A Presentation and Review of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” by ‘Ajaj Nuwayid, translated by Hamid Reza Sheikhi and published by the Islamic Research Fund. The following is the site’s review of the book: “This book is not for enjoyment, fun or entertainment, and it is not a novel, a story or a collection of anecdotes. It is exclusively devoted to one topic, from beginning to end: exposing global Zionism, which encompasses Zionism and freemasonry. Global Zionism is a demonic force and is an open secret. It likens itself to a viper and has a nine-stage plan for achieving its objectives. This plan began in the days of the Babylonian [Exile of the Jews], some 24-25 centuries ago, and its final stage was in the late 20th century in Palestine. This is how the Jews think!… The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is one of the most valuable books for knowing about global Zionism and Jewry, and it changes the reader’s worldview about global politics…” A. Savyon Inquiry & Analysis Series No. 1687 – A. Savyon, “‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ As Part Of Iranian Antisemitism,” MEMRI (4/17/2023), https://www.memri.org/reports/protocols-elders-zion-part-iranian-antisemitism#_edn8.
“The ‘Jewish people are the greatest enemy of Islam’ and Jews are ‘the most corrupt’ and ‘seditious group among all human beings’ are but two of the many harsh statements against the Jews and Judaism raised in the post-1979 Shī’ī discourse. The prevalence of anti-Jewish statements and the extensive preoccupation with the Jews in modern Shī’ī discourse reflects the role of anti-Semitism alongside anti-Zionism as an important building block in the Islamic Republic’s official ideology.
“Anti-Jewish expressions and motifs appear in the writings and statements of clerics, in scholarly books and articles published by the Qom learning complex, in pseudo-scholarly TV programs, and in tens if not hundreds of semi-official websites and blogs focusing on Judaism. The two most blatant expressions of the confluence between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism in Iran are the dissemination of the notorious anti-Semitic tract, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and Holocaust denial. In recent years, the Protocols have been widely cited by numerous clerics and other writers as an authentic historical document exposing Jewish machinations.
“'[T]he Jews’ as a collective are identified with modern threats such as capitalism or the Freemasons. The most ominous manifestations of this trait is the myth of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and the presentation of the Jews as the enemies of the future Mahdī who want to prevent humanity and the Shī’a from attaining salvation at the end of time.”
[Meir Litvak, Know they enemy: evolving attitudes towards “others” in modern Shi’i thought and practice (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2021), pp. 73, 80, 82, 110. See too: “Hamas Deputy Minister of Religious Endowments: Jews are Bacteria, Not Human Beings,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 2415, February 28, 2010, http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/24l5.htm. “Deputy Hamas Minister of Religious Endowments Abdallah Jarbu: Only a Madman Would Think Jews Are Human,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 2430, March 19, 2010, http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/2430.htm. “Article on Hamas Website: Our War Against the Occupation is A Religious War Against the Descendants of Apes and Pigs,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 5885, November 18, 2014, http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/8230.htm. “Hamas Sermon: We Pledged Before The Commanders Of The Jihad To Die For The Sake Of Allah; We Have Gathered The Zionists From All Corners Of The Globe So That It Will Be Easier To Slaughter And Kill Them,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 4442, August 22, 2014, http://www.memritv.org/clip/en/4442.htm. Itamar Marcus, “Hamas TV: Every Muslim mother must nurse her children on hatred of the sons of Zion,'” Palestinian Media Watch, August 3, 2014, http://www.palwatch.org/main.aspx?fi=157&doc_id=12237. “Top Hamas Official Osama Hamdan: Jews Use Blood for Passover Matzos,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 4384, July 28, 2014, http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/4384.htm. “Hamas Sermon from the Gaza Strip: Our Doctrine Entails Exterminating the Jews,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 4376, July 25, 2014, http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/4376.htm. ”Editor of Hamas Paper: Murder of Palestinian Teen in Jerusalem Reminiscent of Jews’ Custom of Baking Matzos With Blood,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 5788, July 3, 2014, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print8061.htm. “Former Hamas Official: In the Past, the Jews Slaughtered Christian Children on Passover; Today They Torment and Kill Palestinians Instead,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 5295, May 6, 2013, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print7166.htm. “Advisor To Hamas Government In Gaza: Israel Must Disappear,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Special Dispatch No. 5000, October 11, 2012, http://www.memri.org/report/en/print674l.htm. “Hamas MP Marwan Abu Ras: The Jews Are Behind Every Catastrophe on Earth,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 3598, September 12, 2012, http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/3598.htm. “Hamas MP Sheikh Yunis Al-Astal: Allah Punished the Jews throughout history and Will Use the Islamic Nation to Punish Them Again,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 3484, June 12,2012, http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/3484.htm. “Hamas Preacher from Khan Yunis, Gaza: Al-Aqsa Cannot Remain under the Control of ‘Apes and Pigs,’ Asses carrying Books,’ and ‘Panting Dogs,'” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 3347, February 24, 2012, http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/3347.htm. “Deputy Speaker of Hamas Parliament Ahmad Bahr: We Will Sweep the Siblings of Pigs and Apes out of Our Land,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 3146, September 23, 2011, http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/3l46.htm. “Hamas MP and Cleric Yunis Al-Astal: The Jews Were Brought to Palestine for the ‘Great Massacre’ through which Allah Will ‘Relieve Humanity of Their Evil,'” Middle East Media Research Institute, Special Dispatch No. 3840, MEMRI, May 16, 2011, http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/2934.htm. “Former Hamas Minister of Culture ‘Atallah Abu Al-Subh: ‘The Jews Are the Most Despicable and Contemptible Nation to Crawl upon the Face of the Earth,’* Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 2897, April 8, 2011, http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/2897.htm. “On Hamas TV Friday Sermon: Calls to Annihilate the Jews, Who Are Compared to Dogs,” Middle East Media Research Institute, MEMRI, Clip No. 2080, April 3, 2009, http://www.memri.org/clip_transcript/en/2080.htm.
Further Reading See:
Zvi Elpeleg, The Grand Mufti: Haj Amin al-Hussaini, Founder of the Palestinian National Movement, trans. David Harvey, ed. Shmuel Himelstein (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd.,1993); ———-, “The Anti-Semitism of Hamas,” Palestine-Israel Journal of Politics, Economics, and Culture, 12:2-3 (2005); http://www.pij.org/details.php?id=345, ———-, Through the Eyes of the Mufti: The Essays of Haj Amin, Translated and Annotated, trans. Rachel Kessel (London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2009)
Meir Litvak and Esther Webman, From Empathy to Denial: Arab Responses to the Holocaust (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
Klaus Gensicke, The Mufti of Jerusalem and the Nazis: The Berlin Years, trans. Alexander Fraser Gunn (London and Portland, Oregon: Vallentine Mitchell, 2011). First published in German as: Der Mufti und die Nationalsozialisten: Eine Politische Biographie Amin el-Husseinis (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2007).
Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2009 paperback edition 2010); ———-, “Nazi Propaganda to the Arab World during World War II and the Rise of Islamism,” in Global Antisemitism: A Crisis of Modernity, Volume IV: Islamism and the Arab World, ed. by Charles Asher Small (New York: ISGAP, 2013), pp. 81-90.
Matthias Küntzel , Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism, and the Roots of 9/11, trans. Colin Meade (New York: Telos Press, 2007). First published in German as: Djihad und Judenhaß: Über: den neuen antijüdischen Krieg (Freiburg: Ca Ira, 2002).
Klaus-Michael Mallmann and Martin Cüppers, Nazi Palestine: The Plans for the Extermination of the Jews in Palestine, trans. Krista Smith (New York: Enigma Books and the United States Holocaust Museum, 2010). First published in German as: Halbmond und Hakenkreuz: Das Dritte Reich, die Araber, und Palästina (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2005); ———-, “Elimination of the Jewish National Home in Palestine: The Einsatzkommando of the Panzer Army Africa, 1942,” Yad Vashem Studies 35 (2007), pp. 111-142.
Barry Rubin and Wolfgang G. Schwanitz, Nazis, Islamists, and the Making of the Modern Middle East (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2014).
Esther Webman, Anti-Semitic Motifs in the Ideology of Hizballah and Hamas (Tel Aviv: The Project for the Study of Anti-Semitism at Tel Aviv University, 1993).]
And the descendants of Israel separated themselves from all foreigners, and stood and confessed their sins and the iniquities of their fathers. Nehemiah 9:2
God calls Western Christians in general and white evangelical Amercian Christians in particular to listen to His word and turn from our evil way of syncretism, mixing pure and undefiled religion with our civil religious idols. It is time for us to put down the “three hounds of Hell” that Howard Thurman in his book Jesus and the Disinherited named “fear, hypocrisy and hatred.” We must learn to see and disavow ourselves from the deformed tradition of Christianity that came to us as a “religion of the powerful and the dominant, used sometimes as an instrument of oppression.” To enjoy the fulness of fellowship of the Holy Spirit with our brothers and sisters of color we must cast out what is harmful to us all in walking in truth. “The experience of power has no meaning aside from the other-than-self reference which sustains it. If the position of ascendancy is not acknowledged tacitly and actively by those over whom the ascendancy is exercised, then it falls flat.” Therefore, let us flee from idolatry, listen to our Lord and turn from our evil way that we may be useful to Him in proclaiming the gospel, the power of God for salvation and knowledge of truth to those who are held captive to the devil to do his will. Only as we conduct ourselves in a manner worthy of the Gospel are we useful to our Master in proclaiming it as the righteousness of God that reveals the Islamist antisemitic template as a vicious and viral lie against the Jews as God’s covenant people.
[Howard Thurman, Jesus and the Disinherited (New York, Nashville: Abington-Cokesbury Press, 1949), pp. 28, 73.]
“The return of antisemitism to Europe via Islamic migrations happens in the context of the activities of diaspora Islamists who are at pains to hijack the Muslim diaspora in Europe and abuse it for their own purposes.
“The challenge of Islamism for Europe is tougher than for the United States, and there is no wind of change. Europe is host to a tremendously growing yet barely integrated Islamic diaspora, and Europe is next door to the Islamic world.” Through this Islamic diaspora, “the politicized umma that Islamism aims to mobilize against the kuffar (unbelievers) is subjected to adherence to a fictitious world. The Islamists argue that Islam is under siege by an imaginary enemy, Jews and crusaders. … Islamism adopts from Nazi ideology the idea that ‘the Jews’ present an existential threat, and life the Nazis they employ The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to support this view. The threat of ‘world Jewry,’ as depicted in the Protocols, must be impressed on the movement’s followers. Indoctrination is essential inside the movement when it is still in opposition, but when the movement takes over and possesses control of government institutions, indoctrination becomes official policy and gains effect throughout society. It functions not only to control and discipline followers but to sustain their loyalty. This feature is characteristic of totalitarian movements, which demand total, unrestricted, unconditional, and unalterable loyalty and in which indoctrination is combined with terror to prevent deviance. The movement equates deviation with treason. All followers who fail to comply are punished with execution.”
[Bassam Tibi, Islamism and Islam (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012), pp. 86, 213-214, 230]
“In examining the history of the Protocols in the United States, one cannot underestimate the impact of the concept of the International Jew. Building on centuries of anti-Semitism, it has set the framework for much of the conspiracy theory about Jews in the United States. There were, of course, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories before the Protocols, but, of this genre of anti-Semitic literature, the Protocols — despite being almost laughable — has had the longest and most active shelf life. … The Protocols and the conspiracy theories they have spawned continue to spread in the United States. … The Protocols have shaped the Holocaust deniers’ Weltanschauung. At the heart of deniers’ arguments is the global conspiratorial view inherent in the Protocols. … The growth of anti-Semitism that we have seen in other countries has not been replicated in the United States. At the same time, we must wonder whether, as the United States becomes a more ethnically diverse society, some of those who come from different lands will bring with them an adherence to Protocol-like ideas. This is particularly a matter of concern with regard to the growing Arab and Muslim population in this country; many of these immigrants come from places where the Protocols and its conspiracy theories are taken seriously.”
[Deborah Lipstadt, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion on the Contemporary American Scene, Historical Artifact or Current Threat?” in The Paranoid Apocalypse, ed. by Richard Landes and Steven T. Katz (New York and London: New York University Press, 2012), p. 177-178, 180, 183.]
Today’s circumstances demand a new sense of urgency in fulfilling our moral responsibilities to handle our past with integrity as part of our holding fast to the faith once delivered to all the saints. Evangelical Christians, in particular white evangelical Americans, must return to the Bible to find their postsecular voice in condemning the global pogrom against the Jews that we are witnessing today. The statement of the National Association of Evangelicals is a case in point. All of the concerns expressed, and actions taken or recommended are embedded anachronistically within a secular immanent frame of reference. The statement is to be commended for its call for prayers for peace and for affirming God’s love for all and for mentioning His offer of salvation to everyone through Jesus Christ. However, its generic rhetoric is banal and bureaucratic. The lukewarm statement lacks the salt of fire, failing to declare that the righteousness of God by way of reminder and warning is manifested through fire as eternal punishment of those who do not obey His Son and as temporal chastisement, the sorrowful discipline of suffering in dealing with His saints. (Revelation 20:11-15; Mark 9:49; 1 Corinthians 3:13; Hebrews 12:4-13; 1 Peter 1:7) Each of us for ourselves and one another ought recall, “It is a terrifying thing to fall into the hands of the living God.” (Hebrews 10:21)
[NAE Condemns Violence in Middle East, OCTOBER 9, 2023 | STATEMENT. https://www.nae.org/nae-condemns-violence-in-middle-east/. The focus here upon white evangelical leaders and institutions should not be misconstrued to mean Black antisemitism is nonexistent or non-threatening. See Eunice G. Pollack, “Black Antisemitism in America: Past and Present, Special Publication,” The Institute for National Security Studies (6/1/2023), https://www.inss.org.il/publication/black-antisemitism/. See too, Stephen H. Norwood and Eunice G. Pollack, “White Devils, Satanic Jews: The Nation of Islam From Fard to Farrakhan,” Modern Judaism – A Journal of Jewish Ideas and Experience, Volume 40, Issue 2, May 2020, Pages 137–168, https://doi.org/10.1093/mj/kjaa006. Abstract excerpt: “This article explores how the American white far right—including the Christian Front, Christian Mobilizers, and Gerald L. K. Smith—helped shape the Nation of Islam’s (NOI) antisemitism during the 1930s and 1940s. It also examines the strong influence of Harlem’s pro-Axis Black Fuehrers on the NOI during World War II. Nation of Islam and white far-right propaganda were remarkably similar. Both embraced the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, denied or minimized the Holocaust, and were virulently anti-Zionist.”]
It is unbiblical to insulate evil perpetrators from hearing the full understanding of the evil they are doing — its demonic source, deceitful motives and eternal consequences — by reducing their behavior to a strictly secular plane of reality. The public postsecular voice of evangelical Christianity must not be reticent in making it clear that God hates evil. As the one true God who is righteous, He will judge the world, inflict His wrath, and administer His punishment of eternal fire upon any who do not believe in His Son. Each of us will give an account of him- or herself to Him who is ready to judge the living and the dead. The Lord Jesus Christ will deal out retribution to those who do not know God and to those who do not obey His gospel. And these will pay the penalty of eternal destruction away from the presence of the Lord and from the glory of His power. As debtors to God’s mercy, it is our responsibility to communicate the gospel in public without compromise as the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jews first and also to the peoples of the nations. We proclaim Christ to the Jews declaring to them Christ became a servant to the circumcision on behalf of the truth of God to confirm the promises given to their fathers, reminding them that His gifts and calling are irrevocable. We proclaim Christ to the nations to glorify God for His mercy, reminding them we stand only by our faith, to fear God and not be conceited, for God has shut up all in disobedience that He might show mercy to all. None of us are worthy. All of us deserve to hear:
What if God, although willing to demonstrate His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction? And He did so in order that He might make known the riches of His glory upon vessels of mercy, which He prepared beforehand for glory even us, whom He also called, not from among Jews only, but also from among Gentiles [the nations].
Perhaps as some may argue God permitted a shroud of silence to cover the complicity of evangelical individuals and evangelical institutions of education that in generations past endorsed and exploited the content of The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion for their own agendas. That time is over. The time to keep silent has passed. Now is the time to throw away silence and speak to the sins of the past. White evangelical Americans such as this writer, who ascribe to a futurist reading of the Book of Revelation awaiting a premillennial rapture of the saints, especially must take this as a divine mandate in obeying our Lord’s Great Commission when proclaiming the gospel in the twenty-first century. Have we hope? What hope do we have?
Reflections from Rep. Ritchie Torres (D, Bronx) during Central Synagogue NYC’s MLK Shabbat service on January 12, 2024. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4u3B_feOUUU&t=74s.
Fruit of His Lips 
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