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Hooked on a crooked book
More articles on this topic: Protocols of the Elders of ZionAn antisemitic fraud born a century ago wins new converts
U.S. News & World Report, Aug. 26, 2002
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020826/misc/26zion.htm
Last summer, a front-page column in the state-run Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram revealed a Jewish plot to destroy Islam and Christianity. Radio Islam, a Web site run by a failed Moroccan revolutionary, has 24 chapters on the plot, along with photos of “Jews who run America” (including Madeleine Albright, raised Catholic but with Jewish roots). The charter of Palestinian terror group Hamas cites the plot as well: “With their money [Jews] formed secret societies . . . in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests.”
And what’s the evidence for this conspiracy? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
That the Arab world now ponders this warmed-over fabrication is no shock. Wherever antisemitism enjoys respectable public airing, the Protocols is Exhibit No. 1. In 1920, Winston Churchill, a rising political star in antisemitic Great Britain, echoed the book’s central theme of an alliance between Bolsheviks and “these international and for the most part atheistical Jews.” Auto industry magnate Henry Ford championed the Protocols and used them as the basis for articles later collected as The International Jew. Adolf Hitler said the book “shocked” him, and he resolved to “strike at the Jews with their own weapons.” Even today, Protocols remains in wide circulation (it can be purchased from major online booksellers) and has been translated into dozens of languages.
Czar Nicholas II is the man behind the forgery. About 100 years ago, his Russian secret police created the work to discredit the monarch’s Bolshevik enemies, many of whom happened to be Jewish. The book, which echoes whole parts of a French parody written three decades earlier, portrays a cabal of unnamed Jews bent on global domination.
Blame game. It took more than a decade for political allies of the Russian monarchy to popularize the 1903 text, and it wasn’t until a German publisher translated and distributed it that it became embraced as truth by millions. “When it comes to conspiracies, Jews have always been at the top of the hit parade,” says Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors antisemitism and bigotry. This hatred had reached a boiling point in the 19th century, when war, economic depression, and the onset of modern ideas and institutions–the nation-state, universities, socialism, capitalism– overthrew monarchies and aristocracies and pushed the power of the clergy to the periphery.
To Europeans of that age, the Protocols provided an organizing principle for the rapid changes: Jews were behind it. “The Protocols served an explanatory function [of] how bad things happen,” says Stephen Bronner, author of A Rumor About the Jews, a history of the Protocols. “It really spoke to the mainstream.” Particularly in the period between the world wars, the thesis of a Jewish conspiracy to control banking, arms, political power, and culture gained currency in Germany. While most historians do not think the Protocols led directly to the Holocaust, they say it clearly hardened the views of many Europeans. Victor Marsden, whose 1922 English translation of the Protocols is still widely used, offered this uncanny observation in his introduction: “The Jews are now a world menace and . . . the Aryan races will have to domicile them permanently out of Europe.”
While the Holocaust gave lie to the central thesis of the Protocols–namely, that Jews would wreak horrors upon the world–the hoax continued. To Stalin, the book proved the need to rout Jews out of respected positions in the Communist Party. The creation of the state of Israel in 1948 was seen as part of the plot (although the Protocols doesn’t mention Zionism or Palestine), and, in a twist, conspiracists argued that the Holocaust itself was a hoax meant to drum up support for the Zionist dream.
The Arab world has had the Protocols since 1920, but not until Israel’s establishment, and its success in several wars, was the book widely distributed. “One might imagine people rationalizing a series of unending humiliations at the hands of Israel by saying, ‘The Jews, they must run the world,’ ” says Michael Hudson, a professor of Arab studies at Georgetown University. Each time truth breaks down the fraud behind the Protocols, believers in the Arab world and elsewhere have a simple explanation: When you’re dealing with a secret plot to rule the world, what would you expect but denials?
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