Stalin's shift toward the Nazi paradigm became transparent in the
Slansky show trial in Czechoslovakia (1952-53), which proceeded as if
all Jews were potentially Zionists and all Zionist groups were
"agents" of American imperialism. This was followed by the extinction
of Soviet Jewish culture and a planned "final solution" of the
"Jewish question" by mass expulsion to Siberia. This disaster was
only averted by Stalin's sudden death (on Purim, incidentally) fifty
years ago.

Under Nikita Khrushchev's somewhat erratic but bold de-Stalinization
policy, there was a temporary respite, though Soviet adventurism in
the Third World and domestic campaigns against religion ensured that
prejudices against Israel, the Jews and Judaism continued to fester.
After the Israeli victory in the Six Day War, a new Soviet-style
version of the Protocols emerged behind a thin veneer of
Marxist-Leninist verbiage. Relentless Communist Party propaganda
unleashed a massive campaign portraying Zionism as "Fascist", "Nazi",
"racist", driven by "hatred toward all peoples" and a "chosen people"
superiority complex. It was no accident that Moscow played such a
major role in masterminding the infamous UN resolution equating
Zionism with racism.

These ideological fictions had little to do with the actual policies
of the Jewish state. They assumed the existence of a dark Jewish
conspiracy, linked to America and freemasonry, that sought planetary
domination. The Zionist goals were allegedly to overthrow the
communist systems in the USSR and Eastern Europe, to dominate the
economy of the largest capitalist states, and to liquidate
national-liberation movements throughout the Third World. The
so-called Zionist "bourgeoisie" aimed to reduce the Arabs and the
Third World to servitude. The "socialist" camp, led by the USSR, saw
itself as the main obstacle to this perfidious design.

By the 1970s, Zionism was considered one of the darkest forces of
world reaction, an ideology and an organization no less dangerous
than Hitlerism and "Aryan" racism. History was rewritten by Soviet
propagandists to make Zionism the source of inspiration for the
Nazis! It was even branded as an active agent of "collaboration" in
the German implementation of the Holocaust. In the Brezhnev era of
Soviet expansion, "anti-Zionist" anti-Semitism became a cardinal
feature of the official chauvinist ideology. This was the first major
political campaign to totally defame Zionism as the incarnation of
evil and to discredit the Torah as a book of hatred, preaching
genocide. The Jewish religion was systematically slandered as a
teaching of racial exclusion and its messianic ideals smeared as a
justification for Lebensraum. As in contemporary Islamic and Arab
literature, the grand sweep of Jewish and Zionist history was twisted
into a narrative of pure criminality, sadism and immorality.

The Soviet anti-Semitic demonology of Zionism did not immediately
collapse with the fall of communism. In the early 1990s, the
so-called "Red-Brown" alliance of neo-Stalinists and Russian
ultra-nationalists, animated by their belief in the international
Zionist conspiracy, continued to preach anti-Jewish doctrines of
hate. The alliance claimed that Jews controlled the channels of mass
communication throughout the world, insisted that they had
deliberately ruined Russia through the Communist Revolution, and
proclaimed that Jewish oligarchs were now delivering the nation into
the hands of a rapacious cosmopolitan clique working on behalf of
American imperialist designs. This was the credo of Vladimir
Zhirinovsky, who, ten years ago, won a quarter of all ballots cast in
the Russian elections. Depicted in the media as the Russian Hitler,
he specialized in ethnic slurs against Balts, Armenians, Caucasians
and blacks as well as Jews; he established close ties with the German
and Austrian radical Right (including neo-Nazis) and talked openly of
restoring a Greater Russian dominion. Just as he execrated Jews and
Zionists, so he identified strongly with Arab nationalist dictators
like Saddam Hussein.

Pan-Arabist and Islamist Versions

The Russian communist model, like that of German Nazism, was an
important formative influence in Saddam's version of Ba'athism. The
Iraqi leader grew up in the framework of this dogmatic ideology,
which not only glorified the Arabs as a "master race" but also
emphasized the need for relentless struggle and perpetual revolution
in the name of the pan-Arab cause. Saddam imbibed his radical
nationalism from Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian born in
Damascus who had turned his back on all Western ideas to create the
Arab Renaissance in the 1940s. In the Aflaqian concept, the Arab
nation was the culmination of spiritual perfection, far superior in
its traditions and culture to the superficiality of Western
civilization. But Arab unity would remain a dream without sacrifice,
conflict, martyrdom and bloodshed.

Saddam adopted Aflaq's highly charged ideological style while
accentuating the Leninist party structures of Ba'athism in order to
consolidate his grip on power. He embraced a quasi-mystical view of
the Arabs which assumed that an exalted eschatological mission had
been assigned to them by God himself. Saddam added to this belief a
tremendous emphasis on the will to power, the need to crush a world
of enemies, to prepare for endless war and perpetuate the revolution
as a sacred task of the Ba'ath Party. For the Iraqi leader there was
never any question about his right to murder "inferior" groups such
as the Kurds or anyone defined as an internal "enemy" of the regime.
It was also an axiom that America and its civilization must be
humiliated. It was no less self-evident to him that the "Zionist
entity" must be eradicated.

For the Ba'athis, Israel was always an artificial "implant" in the
Middle East, a multi-tentacled "octopus", a "deadly cancer" or an
"aids virus" to be burned up, as Saddam Hussein publicly threatened
to do shortly before the first Gulf War. Only two years ago he
declared on Iraqi television: "Palestine is Arab and must be
liberated from the river to the sea and all the Zionists who
emigrated to the land of Palestine must leave." The fact that Saddam
filled his speeches with references to Nebuchadnezzar (the Babylonian
ruler who destroyed the first Jewish Temple) and Saladin,
demonstrated not only megalomania but also his determination to
destroy the Jewish State and teach the Western "Christian" Crusaders
a lesson they would never forget. In Saddam's totalitarian version of
pan-Arabism, Jews were by definition "outsiders", "aliens" and
enemies of the Arab nation. Hence it is no surprise to find that
Israelis are completely dehumanized as murderers, criminals and the
scum of the earth in Iraqi (as well as in Syrian) Ba'athi literature.
Wiping out Israel meant expelling or killing a collection of
"rootless nomads" who stole a land that was not their own.

For Islamic fundamentalists, the "liberation of Palestine" is no less
of an ideological and political imperative than it is for the
Ba'athis, but it is also a "war of civilizations" in a more
far-reaching and even apocalyptic sense. In their confrontation with
Israel and Zionism, the Islamists appeal to a 1,400 year-old history
and repeatedly invoke Quranic precedents. Muhammad's war with the
Jews in 7th-century Arabia is for them a vitally important guideline
for the present. But this return to the distant past has not
prevented Islamists from borrowing extensively from the much
execrated Western culture's most extreme anti-Semitic motifs. Thus,
fundamentalist Muslims have enthusiastically revived the blood libel
of medieval Christianity and adopted the scenario of a "final
struggle" with the Jews as part of their Islamic Heilsgeschichte.

The September 11, 2001 attack on America escalated such trends to new
heights of defamation. The Al-Qaeda assault on the World Trade Center
in New York was not only a declaration of war against the greatest
metropolis of international capitalism. It was also seen by its
perpetrators as a blow against the nerve-center of "world Jewry."
There is a line of continuity running from Hitler to Ramzi Yousef,
who planned the World Trade Center bombings of 1993, and Mohamed
Atta, who masterminded the 9/11 atrocity. The Islamo-fascists, like
the Nazis before them, are genuinely convinced that a corrupt America
is in Jewish hands. Hence, the jihad to liberate Muslims across the
world from oppression and injustice is simultaneously anti-American
and anti-Jewish. It is also viscerally opposed to liberalism,
individualism and modernity as such. It goes without saying that the
Islamists reject laissez-faire principles in economics, politics and
culture. It is axiomatic that they deeply despise the political
liberties of the West, such as freedom of speech, freedom of thought
and freedom of association and assembly. In these respects they often
find common ground with anti-globalist leftists and right-wing
radicals in the West today, who concentrate all their spleen on the
"sins" of America and Israel while dismissing the threat posed by
international terrorism.

In its attitude toward the Jews, Islamic fundamentalism displays many
parallels with Nazism and Stalinist communism as well. The
identification of Judaism with threatening forces of modernity such
as secularism, capitalism, liberalism and moral lassitude is a
pattern that applies to each of these ideologies. There is the same
obsession with Jews as a revolutionary, subversive and corrosive
force; with t