The 20th century may well be seen by future historians as the age par
excellence of ideological politics. Millions were slaughtered on the
altar of false messianisms and their salvationist logic, and in some
places the killing still continues unabated. In the totalitarian
nightmare of the last century the secular political religions of
Nazism and Marxist-Leninism undoubtedly occupy a special place. So,
too, does the oldest and darkest of ideological obsessions--that of
anti-Semitism--for which over a decade ago I coined the term, "the
longest hatred."
For Adolf Hitler, in particular, anti-Semitism was the axis and
raison d'être of the Nazi movement he created. His dream of global
hegemony was overcome only through the combined military might of the
United States, the British Empire and the Soviet Union. Nazism as a
vital force in world politics was indeed destroyed in the flames
engulfing Berlin at the end of April 1945, but the anti-Jewish poison
it spread to far-flung corners of the globe has yet to be eradicated.
The legacy has proven to be especially potent in the former Soviet
Union and the Arab-Islamic world, where anti-Semitism is once again
acquiring a potentially lethal charge.
There is currently a culture of hatred that permeates books,
magazines, newspapers, sermons, video-cassettes, the Internet,
television and radio in the Arab Middle East, which has not been seen
since the heyday of Nazi Germany. Indeed, the dehumanizing images of
Jews and Israel that are penetrating the body politic of Islam are
sufficiently radical in tone and content to constitute a new "warrant
for genocide." They combine the blood libel of medieval Christian
Europe with Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jewish drive for
"world domination" and slanderous Islamic quotations about Jews as
the "sons of apes" and donkeys.
