Posted on 11/21/2003 8:32:29 AM PST by SJackson
Incredible conspiracy theories about Jews, Israel and Israelis are spreading like wildfire
Adolf Hitler was a senior British royal who is alive and well and living in Phoenix, Arizona. The real identity of Hitler, I can exclusively reveal, is none other than Prince John, the epileptic, autistic youngest child of King George V and Queen Mary, who was born in 1905 and supposedly died 14 years later.
It is nonsense, of course. But it is the passionately held belief of a well-educated, highly intelligent Englishman who has gambled, and lost, almost everything he ever possessed in his obsessive quest to prove his theory.
Since he tracked me down earlier this year, my "informant" has bombarded me with a mass of "evidence" he has accumulated around the world.
But, he is a relatively benign breed of the species who is only too anxious to tell his story on demand, without payment, to anyone who will listen.
Such uninvited "informants" are the occupational hazard of most journalists.
The advent of the Internet has, however, catalyzed the industry, giving access to hundreds of millions of Internet users in almost every home, office and school in almost every country on earth for a host of psychotics and conspiracy theorists.
But what is truly alarming about the phenomenon is the enthusiasm with which the delusionary tales of the world's fantasists are so eagerly embraced - not least by some sections of the mainstream media, only too happy to confer a degree of credibility and respectability on any crackpot theory if it promises to boost circulation and ratings.
The grim reality for many of us who labor in the world of grim reality is that whatever the facts, many consumers of information believe what they want to believe.
And Jews in general, and Israel in particular, are among the most frequent victims of this phenomenon.
Conspiracy theories about Jews are as old as conspiracy theories themselves. But the old notions of Christ-killers, political manipulators and financial controllers - still lethally prevalent throughout the Muslim world - have now metastasized into the most outrageous claims about Israel and Israelis.
THE THOUGHTS of Zbeir Sultan, writing in the weekly journal of the Syrian Arab Writers' Union, are instructive. Sultan recently set himself the task of educating his readers - who constitute the writers and intellectuals of the Arab world - about "the dirty satanic methods employed by the Zionist entity to destroy Egypt's society and economy, as well as its military, physical, spiritual and cultural powers."
How so?
One method, he wrote, involves the deliberate infection of Egyptian youth with AIDS by HIV-positive Zionist prostitutes: "The Egyptian police caught many of them and their stories were published in the Egyptian press."
But that is not the only threat the Zionists pose to their neighbors. The Egyptians also, according to Sultan, discovered "Zionist 'gifts' for children - animal-shaped chewing gum that was found to cause sterility." And worse: "The Zionists have also dispensed chewing gum that arouses sexual lust in university students."
When not infecting, sterilizing or libidinizing the youth of Egypt, the evil Zionists are encouraging them to indulge in Satan worship. Sultan also warns his readers, Israeli universities have opened their doors to Egyptian students "so that they can be instructed in Zionist espionage techniques."
Such claims are repeated not only in the many "newsgroups" that have sprung up on the Internet, but also in the mainstream Arab media.
When I challenged one senior Arab colleague about the stream of fantasy paraded as fact in the Arabic media, he replied disarmingly that this is a form of "journalistic license" which is intended to highlight widely held perceptions. It might not be the literal, he said, but it was the perceived truth.
In the media of the Arab world - newspapers, radio, television, books, theater - vituperation against Israel and Jews is as powerful as ever.
"They seem to have run out of words to describe their hatred," said an Egyptian friend this week. "Nothing is too wicked or too evil to ascribe to the Jews and Israel." And that in a country that has ostensibly made its peace with the Jewish state.
SUCH VIEWS are not confined to the wilder fantasies of Arab intellectuals. They are alive - and gaining currency - in a Europe that is fast adjusting to burgeoning Muslim populations
George W. Bush is depicted as wild, dangerous and venal, driven by Jewish lobbyists and accused of "double-standards" in dealing with Israel and its neighbors.
Ariel Sharon fares worse. In the minds of many, he actually eats Palestinian babies for breakfast, as he was depicted by a cartoonist for the Independent.
As the Twin Towers came tumbling down in New York on September 11, the BBC rushed one of its regular Arab analysts into its studio to declare that the atrocity was undoubtedly the work of the Mossad, a deliberate attempt to drive a wedge between America and the Islamic world.
His view went unchallenged by the usually robust BBC interviewer.
But despite later proof of a link with Islamic extremism, the theory took wings. In the minds of those predisposed to this view, it was embellished to include the claim that Jews were actually warned in advance of the attacks and none showed up for work in the Twin Towers on that fateful September 11.
It is all so patently ridiculous that it should be amusing. But it is not because even the most outrageous assertions are making the most profound impression on a broad swathe of apparently sophisticated European opinion that was once considered to be largely sympathetic to Israel and Jews.
No one seriously suggests that all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic in intent or effect, but there is no doubt that some anti-Israel sentiment has become a convenient and respectable form of expressing anti-Semitism for those who still have qualms about speaking openly.
Mavens who measure such phenomenon point to an irrefutable causal link between sustained attacks on Israel and manifestations of anti-Semitism, ranging from taunts to assaults, from synagogue daubings to cemetery desecrations and the torching of Jewish schools.
THE FRENCH media have never been known to pull their punches when it comes to vilifying Israel, so it was not altogether surprising to learn that a new Jewish school in the Paris suburb of St. Denis, was burnt down this week.
President Jacques Chirac boldly summoned an emergency cabinet meeting to condemn anti-Semitism in the most forceful terms, but the stable door had been left wide open and the horse had bolted.
In a country where presidential elections are usually balanced on a knife's edge, it is unlikely that any French leader would be prepared to lay down his political life to defend Jews and antagonize a Muslim population that now numbers some six million.
In 2002, statistics by the French Justice Ministry showed that six out of 10 acts of racism were directed at Jewish targets. At the same time, a poll revealed that just one French person in 20 believed this figure to be true.
"If racism and anti-Semitism are a daily reality in France today, it is not acknowledged," says Fran ois Zimeray, one of the few French members of the European Parliament who is concerned about anti-Semitism.
But France is not alone, and Europe's neo-religious drive toward "inclusion" and "multiculturalism" is lending credibility to fancies about Jews and fantasies about Israel that are also having a profoundly corrosive effect on the European grass-roots.
The now-celebrated opinion poll conducted for the European Union earlier this month showed that 59 percent of respondents believe that Israel poses the greatest threat to world peace, ahead of such people's democracies as North Korea, Iran, Libya, Syria or even Iraq.
To its credit, the European Union was so shocked by the findings of its own poll that EU President Romano Prodi raced to distance himself from its implications.
"To the extent that this may indicate a deeper, more general prejudice against the Jewish world, our repugnance is even more radical," he said. "There is no place for anti-Semitism and it cannot be tolerated."
That did not impress Mikis Theodorakis, composer of the sublime music for the 1964 film Zorba the Greek, who declared earlier this month that Jews were the cause of all that ails the world.
OLD NOTIONS of manipulative Jews pulling the strings are increasingly becoming the conventional wisdom in Europe.
Earlier this year, the venerable British legislator Tam Dalyell, announced that Bush was being led by the nose by "a cabal of Jews."
It is a view that continues to resonate around the world. Its most recent advocate was Malaysian president Mahathir Mohamad, who baldly informed an Islamic conference last month: "Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them."
Into this new and permissive environment stepped the intellectually elegant Tom Paulin, Oxford University professor of English and poet, to expose the fragility of that anti-Israel/anti-Semitic membrane.
He told the Egyptian daily al-Ahram that Jewish settlers "should be shot dead. I think they are Nazis, racists. I feel nothing but hatred for them." And, for good measure he added: "I never believed that Israel had the right to exist at all."
On a tactical level he counseled the Palestinians to meet force with force, though "It is better to resort to conventional guerrilla warfare [because] attacks on civilians simply boost morale."
When freedom of speech meets incitement to homicide - incitement to kill Jews, that is - there is, apparently, no contest. While Paulin protests he is actually a "philo-Semite," there was barely a murmur of protest from his university and no question of sanctions against him by the BBC, where he continues to star on its flagship weekly television arts program.
The lesson to be learned from Theodorakis, Bernard, Paulin, Mahathir, et al is that Jews (read: Israel) bear original sin for all the evils in the world.
Bombs exploding in a Jerusalem mall or a Netanya hotel, outside an Istanbul synagogue or an Argentinean community center are all portrayed as the response to some prior Jewish/Israeli misdeed. Reality is turned on its head: Victim becomes perpetrator.
EARLIER THIS month, George Bush - the first American president, remember, to advocate the establishment of an independent Palestinian state - attempted to inject a note of reason and realism into the Middle East debate, traversing territory that is a no-go area for European leaders. The Arab world, he said, must embrace democracy.
In a major address to the National Endowment for Democracy, he declared that the only beneficiaries of the Middle East's "freedom deficit" are poverty and ignorance.
"Whole societies remain stagnant while the world moves ahead," he said. "These are not the failures of a culture or a religion. These are the failures of political and economic doctrines."
His blunt, but realistic, message to the Palestinians was that "the only path to independence and dignity and progress is the path of democracy. And the Palestinian leaders who block and undermine democratic reform, who feed hatred and encourage violence, are not leaders at all. They're the main obstacles to peace, and to the success of the Palestinian people."
His message to European leaders was to stop seeking safety in appeasement: "Sixty years of Western nations excusing and accommodating the lack of freedom in the Middle East did nothing to make us safe because in the long run, stability cannot be purchased at the expense of liberty.
"As long as the Middle East remains a place where freedom does not flourish, it will remain a place of stagnation, resentment and violence ready for export. And with the spread of weapons that can bring catastrophic harm to our country and to our friends, it would be reckless to accept the status quo."
Instead of dwelling on past wrongs and blaming others, Bush urged Middle East leaders to "confront real problems and serve the true interests of their nations." Sadly, but predictably, the responses from the region have not been positive. Rather, the appeal from Washington was greeted with the traditional brew of suspicion and hostility, drawing deeply on the well of conspiracy.
Writing in the Palestinian Authority's official daily, al-Ayyam, the leading Palestinian political analyst Ali Sadek declared that, "in our view the worst Arab regime, with regard to freedom and constitutional rights, is more democratic than the US." He accused Bush of "searching for an excuse to intimidate the Arab governments so that they would agree to play functional roles that serve his imperialist policy."
Sadek declared American democracy to be "arrogant and offensive."
At the same time, the editorial on the Bush speech filled the entire front page of the Egyptian daily Al-Akhbar. It did not address the fundamental issues raised by Bush, but devoted itself instead to seeking out what it perceived to be the insidious, underlying causes of what it took to be an attack on the Arab world.
The essence of the editorial was that "the Israelis were the ones to have advised President Bush" to issue his "democracy invitation" to the Middle East.
And to ensure that all the bases were covered, the editorial added: "The US Jewish lobby also stands behind this invitation, which contains attacks against Arab governments, in order to damage those relations." In a world that seems poised on the brink of a nervous breakdown, it is time to ask if the real Prince John would please stand up.
</Protocols>
Ah. The author's been to the Democratic Underground, then.
"The Zionists have also dispensed chewing gum that arouses sexual lust in university students."
Scantily clad Mossad agents, the so-called Doublemint Twins, gyrating to the lascivious notes of "Double Your Pleasure."
We are not Jewish, we are Rigelian.
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