Mick Hartley

Kathleen Hayes reviews Dave Rich's Everyday Hate: How antisemitism is built into our world – and how you can change it, at Fathom:

Antisemitism does more than provide a scapegoat. Uniquely among forms of racism, it provides adherents a seemingly all-encompassing explanation for why evil exists. From the time of the first blood libel, Jews have been cast as not only an enemy, but an ordinately powerful, sinister, scheming one. (As Theodor Adorno put it in a nutshell, ‘Anti-Semitism is the rumour about the Jews.’) Covid has inspired a spike in conspiracy theories that blame the pandemic on Jews. Those who spread this lie unwittingly invoke the 14^th century, when Jews in continental Europe were blamed for spreading the plague by poisoning wells.

The lodestar of present-day conspiracy theories, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, ‘built a bridge into modernity’ for Europe’s traditional anti-Jewish mythology. The idea that all Europe’s problems were caused by Jews just seemed to make sense on a visceral level. The Protocols were tremendously popular in Britain, with respectable newspapers enthusiastically asking if it was genuine. The fact that it was soon proved a Russian fake did little to stem its appeal; it remains all too alive today. Conspiracist theories around Brexit, with George Soros deployed as a demonic figure seeking to undermine democracy, invoke the same tropes. At the same time, conspiracy theories about Israel gain traction in the popular imagination because Israel is Jewish: ‘They latch onto pre-existing beliefs about how Jews behave, like a climber using footholds cut into the rock by those who have scaled the same mountain centuries before.’…

Rich calls himself an optimist, but as he writes in his final chapter ‘Things Can’t Only Get Better,’ there’s plenty to worry about. It isn’t ‘only’ that polls and tallies of hate crimes consistently show antisemitism to be rising, but there’s a troubling generational shift: today’s teenagers, millennials and young adults are much more likely than their parents to subscribe to antisemitic conspiracy theories. One of many opinion polls, for instance, found that British adults under the age of 34 were up to five times more likely than those over 55 to agree that ‘Jews have disproportionate control of powerful institutions, and use that power for their own benefit and against the good of the general population.’ The concern isn’t so much the overall numbers, which are currently small, so much as ‘the direction of travel’.

This seems like a paradox, because British adults under the age of 34 are also the least likely age group to describe themselves as racially prejudiced and were most likely to support the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. This points to a huge shift in the popular understanding about what racism is, and it’s a shift that leaves the door wide open to antisemitism. According to the thinking which has taken hold over the past couple decades, racism is a system perpetrated by privileged white people against dark-skinned ones. According to this framework Jews, whatever their skin colour, are cast as privileged and white, rendering them eminently hate-worthy. The Israel-Palestine conflict is also claimed to be a manifestation of Western colonialism, so Israel and its Jewish supporters are condemned for ‘racism’, the ultimate sin.

This helps explain young people who simultaneously declare themselves anti-racist and hold antisemitic beliefs that would have appalled people fifty years ago. As Rich writes: ‘At its core, the difference between racism and antisemitism is the difference between a prejudice and a conspiracy theory; and while prejudice is out of fashion for today’s youth, conspiracy theories are all the rage.’

Popular they may once have been here, but the Protocols are now known to be fake – in the West, at least. Not so in the Middle East, where it's notable how frequently they're still cited. A couple of recent examples from MEMRI:

Moroccan Islamic scholar Sheikh Abou Younes Elfraani, December 2022:

"Those Jews have schemes that are well-documented and have been published. They are known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Protocols… Schemes… […]

"They write their schemes down and have them published. [These protocols] were translated from Hebrew into Arabic and other languages. The Muslims have read them and maybe even understood them but they are not doing anything. The peculiar thing is that I have read a quote by one of the most important Jews, Menachem Begin, who is dead now. The Jews plan for their country to spread from the Nile to the Euphrates. They are not satisfied with Palestine. They want a country from the Nile to the Euphrates. The two stripes on their flag signify those two rivers. The two stripes you see on their flag – one stripe signifies the Nile, and the other the Euphrates. [Begin] was reproached by his people who said: 'The Muslims might wake up and seek confrontation.' That villain calmed them down. He said: 'Relax, the Arabs do not read, and if they read, they do not understand much, and if they understand, they do not do too much.' This is a villainous and cunning Jew who had studied the mentality of the Arabs.

And Mahmoud Salem, an Egyptian Islamic researcher of history and civilisation, February 2023:

"A group of notes fell into the hands of a French woman. She was friends with an assistant of the famous rabbis. As a result, a bunch of notes fell into the hands of that woman. When she examined them, she saw that these were the minutes of a meeting. To the minutes of that meeting, protocols were attached – and these would later become to be known historically as 'The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion.' These Protocols included taking control of religion – the fifth protocol was dedicated to that, or maybe it was the fourth… They included the globalization of religion. This is an integral part of those Protocols. The French woman published these notes in Russia. From there, they were published further, and [the Jews] denied them in an extremely violent manner, to the point that anyone talking about the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, has his channel or his social media accounts shut down immediately. Even Wikipedia starts its discussion of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by saying that they are a forgery."

It's one of the more damning indications of the bankruptcy of so much current Islamic culture.