A Lethal Obsession : Anti-Semitism from Antiquity to the Global Jihad

Future historians may well regard the past seven decades as a golden age of ideological politics. Millions have been slaughtered on the altar of false messianisms and their salvationist logic. In the totalitarian nightmare of the past seventy-five years, a special role has undoubtedly been played by the political religions of Nazism, Stalinism, and Islamism. It is certainly no coincidence that in all three cases, a remarkably similar anti-American and anti-Jewish demonology has been manipulated in the cause of destroying Judeo-Christian values, individual freedom, and liberal democracy. All three anti-Western ideologies have shared the same penchant for conspiracy theories of history, society, and civilization; they are equally characterized by a similarly closed system of belief, addiction to historical inevitability, and an unquenchable will to power. At their very heart we can find the oldest and darkest of ideological obsessions—that of anti-Semitism—for which nearly twenty years ago I coined the term “the longest hatred.”

In the case of the Nazi movement, there is by now a consensus among most serious historians concerning the axial role of “eliminationist” anti-Semitism in the domestic and foreign policies of the Third Reich. However, much less attention has been given to the postwar aftermath. Hitlerism did not really die in April 1945 nor, unfortunately, was Auschwitz truly “liberated.” In the mid-1980s, I had occasion to point out that the Nazi poison was by no means extinguished, having infiltrated the former Soviet Union and especially the Arab-Muslim world—where hard-core anti-Semitism systematically defaming Israel and the Jews was widely (and officially) propagated. These pages expose the intensity of the “culture of hatred” that currently permeates books, magazines, newspapers, sermons, videocassettes, the Internet, television, and radio in the Middle East on a scale unprecedented since the heyday of Nazi Germany. Indeed, the demonic images of Jews

…