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.

The Quranic motifs began to grow in importance after the Iranian
Revolution of 1979, along with virulent anti-Americanism. In the
Islamic demonology, both America and Israel are now bonded together
as "Satanic forces" that threaten the core-identity, values and
existence of Islam. This has been especially the case since the
beginning of the Palestinian Al-Aqsa intifada in the autumn of 2000
and the massacres of September 11, 2001. Not only did an astonishing
number of Muslims seek to place the responsibility for this mass
murder onto the Jews, but Israel, more than ever, was execrated as a
dagger of the West poised to strike at the heart of the Muslim Arab
world. In the anti-Semitic script, America itself is depicted as
being run by Jews malevolently determined to subvert and destroy
Islam. This chorus of voices has grown even shriller with the
American war on Iraq, a conflict that has led to an ever closer
twinning of anti-American, anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic sentiment in
western Europe, as well as the Islamic world.

Driven by this ideology, Islamists see the fingerprints of the
all-powerful Zionist lobby everywhere, spreading its tentacles and
deadly lies, draining the life-blood of Arabs and Muslims,
gratuitously inciting war against Iraq, and carrying out its sinister
plans for global control. The current popularity of The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion--a forged Russian document from the beginning of
the 20th century in which many Muslims appear to believe--is
frightening testimony to the power of such myths. The recent
television series in Egypt dramatizing the "Protocols" and their
fantasy of "Jewish world domination" is a mark of how deeply this
anti-Semitic virus has already penetrated the thinking of political
Islam.

Fundamentalist and oil-rich Saudi Arabia, the same soil from which
Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda movement have sprung, is a major
hotbed of the type of Muslim jihad that specifically calls for the
terrorist murder of Jews and Christians. Government dailies even
print gory nonsense about the "well-established fact" that "Jews
spill human blood for their holiday pastries." But a no less
anti-Semitic outlook holds sway in more secular Arab societies such
as Egypt, Syria, Iraq and Jordan. This hysteria cannot be adequately
understood in terms of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Certainly, the
cause of Palestine has periodically been hijacked by radical
Islamists and pan-Arabists in order to broaden their political
support in the Muslim world. But the "Jewish Question" in radical
Islam (as with its Western totalitarian predecessors) is not centered
on Palestine, and certainly does not see Palestine as a purely
territorial issue amenable to rational bargaining. The ideological
anti-Semitism that characterizes Islamist thinking is driven by
something else: an irrational belief that history itself is
determined by the evil machinations of the Jewish people. In this
respect the Islamists seem to be directly following the Nazi model,
with its fixation on a mythical Jewish power that strives for global
hegemony.

Of course, the two models and the two situations are not identical,
and the context has changed as well. The "Jewish question" radically
changed its contours with the establishment of a Jewish state and
Israeli military power in the Middle East. Nonetheless, the creation
of Israel could not, on its own, blunt the potential of anti-Semitism
as a global phenomenon. It seems rather to have attenuated its force
for about two decades, even while a new version of the problem
metathesized. Zionism in effect has shifted the focus of postwar
anti-Jewishness to an assault on the dominant collective
representation of contemporary Jewish existence--the State of Israel
itself. Since 1948, the major ideological and political threat to the
survival of the Jewish nation gradually switched from Europe to the
Arab Islamic world, fueled by a politicidal "anti-Zionist" ideology
whose main thrust has always been the destruction of Israel as an
independent state.

The European Legacy

To grasp the origins of the demonology behind contemporary Islamist
versions of anti-Semitism, one needs to be aware of its
characteristics as they first crystallized at the end of the 19th
century. Fin de siècle European anti-Semitism was deeply pessimistic.
It was obsessed with the "decadence" of Christian and "Aryan"
civilization, supposedly in thrall to a newly emancipated and
"victorious" Jewry. From the radical journalist Wilhelm Marr's
prophecy of Finis Germaniae (1879) to Edouard Drumont's La Dernière
Bataille (1889) and the Teutonomaniac Houston S. Chamberlain's
Foundations of the 19th Century (1899), we find the same specter of
Jewish power and gentile demise invoked by a new class of
best-selling publicists and populist intellectuals. The anti-Semites
inhabited a murky fantasy-world imbued with quasi-apocalyptic visions
of European decline, colored by occult sectarianism and permeated
with notions of retributive punishment on a cosmic scale. They
elaborated negative millenarianism in secular garb--a "reactionary
modernism" that reluctantly adapted to democratic mass politics and
class conflict while preaching a backward-looking utopia based on
pre-modern feudal or even tribal models.

In this fin de siècle world of economic disorientation, rapid social
change and eroding traditional values, populist anti-Semitic
movements arose that became the seedplot of Nazism. They were
especially powerful in the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, where
the young Hitler acquired the "granite-like foundations", as he
called them in Mein Kampf, of his Weltanschauung. The main elements
of 20th-century ideological anti-Semitism were already in place by
1914, when Hitler was 25 years old. These elements included: the
beliefs that nationalism was an irresistible force and that race was
a secular equivalent of Destiny or Providence; the fear of pollution
by alien, inferior races; the angst provoked by Marxist class
struggle and the leveling tendencies of mass society; and the hatred,
nourished by movements of the radical Right and Left, of capitalism,
modern urban civilization and liberal democracy.

European anti-Semites usually shared a belief in occult, sinister
forces working to undermine social hierarchy, order, authority and
tradition. They were alarmed by the spiritual vacuum induced by the
declining hold of Christianity, and especially by the working
classes' attraction to apocalyptic, revolutionary Marxism. Above all,
they shared an obsession with the mythological figure of the satanic,
ubiquitous, immoral and all-powerful Jew. Here was, as Richard Wagner
put it, the "plastic demon of modern civilization", whose
unquenchable will to destroy gentile society lay behind all negative
processes of change, providing a coherent explanation for the
resulting anomie. "All comes from the Jew, all returns to the Jew."
This classic formula of Edouard Drumont in 1886 exemplified the
delirious causality embraced by modern anti-Semites. The principle of
evil is not in ourselves; it comes from outside. It is the product of
conspiracy and devilish forces whose incarnation is the mythical Jew.

The mass slaughter of World War I, with its destruction of
traditional elites, collapse of established monarchies and sudden
flurry of revolutionary coups in central Europe (above all the
Bolshevik triumph in Russia, whose autocracy had been the
fountainhead of the ancien régime in Europe), immeasurably envenomed
and radicalized anti-Semitism. The massacres of Jews by the White
Armies during the Russian Civil War (1918-20), the fierce
anti-Semitic backlash against Jewish participation in the German and
Hungarian revolutions, and the juxtaposition of the "Jewish" and
"Red" perils in east-central Europe were all alarming signals of
growing extremism.

These events greatly encouraged the mass dissemination of
19th-century anti-Semitic stereotypes and ideologies. The climate was
ripe for a far more effective translation of conspiracy theories into
political praxis than had been the case before World War I. German
defeat in that war, crushing economic reparations imposed by the
Allies, the resultant loathing for the democratic West, the
devastating inflation of 1923, chronic political instability in the
Weimar Republic, growing fear of communism, and the ravages of the
Great Depression were so many milestones on the road to Nazism. From
each one, the sense of helplessness grew, and the longing to blame
someone or something for it grew with it. Nazi anti-Semitism thus
sprang from popular fears, and at the same time stoked and organized
them.

The Nazi-Arab Nexus

Nazi doctrines exerted considerable fascination on the Arab world
during these years. Both pan-Arabism and pan-Islamic ideologies in
the Middle East looked to Hitler's Germany as a model for national
unification, a counterweight to Western imperialism and a source of
revolutionary dynamism. Anti-Semitic and anti-British feelings (which
anticipated some of the anti-Americanism rampant today) created a
powerful sense of affinity between German Nazis and Arab nationalists
in Egypt, Syria and Iraq. A former Syrian Ba'athi leader, recalling
the atmosphere of the late 1930s, wrote:

"We were fascinated by Nazism, reading its books and the sources of
its thinking, particularly Nietzsche, Fichte and Chamberlain. And we
were the first who thought about translating Mein Kampf. We, who
lived in Damascus, could appreciate the tendency of the Arab people
to Nazism which was the power which appealed to it. By nature, the
vanquished admires the victorious."

Arab nationalists, radicals and Islamic militants were clearly
influenced by the anti-liberal and anti-Western spirit of fascism,
its emphasis on youth, its pattern of organization and, above all,
its cult of power. In Iraq, the Director-General of Education, Dr.
Sami Shawkat, told students in Baghdad in the autumn of 1933:

"There is something more important than money and learning for
preserving the honor of a nation and for keeping humiliation at bay.
That is strength. . . . Strength, as I use the word here, means to
excel in the Profession of Death."

Seventy years later, Saddam's Iraq provided a sinister confirmation
of this outlook in its determination to develop weapons of mass
destruction and its readiness to use them against internal as well as
external enemies.

The idolization of power, together with the totalitarian mystique of
the nation, was already developed by many Arab radicals in the 1930s
and 1940s. Their visions of grandeur were exacerbated by a feeling of
deep malaise, and even trauma, which the encounter with Western
civilization had inflicted upon Arab society. The Muslim Brotherhood,
founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna in Egypt, represented the pristine
anti-Western and fundamentalist version of this backlash. From the
outset, the jihadists around al-Banna developed the cult of the
leader and preached fascist doctrines of "unity and discipline" and
"martial strength and military preparedness." Like Ahmad Hussein's
Young Egypt movement of the late 1930s, they were militantly
anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic, supporting the boycott and harassment
of the Jewish community in Egypt.

The Muslim Brothers, with their vision of a judenfrei Palestine as a
rallying-point for removing all Western influences from the Middle
East, belonged to the first wave of Islamic fascism. The second wave,
which swelled after the Six Day War, had as its leading ideologue one
Sayyid Qutb, a revolutionary Egyptian intellectual executed by Nasser
only a year before the Arab defeat. For Qutb and his followers, the
invasion of Western culture had thrown Muslims back into a state of
pre-Islamic barbarism (jahiliyya) dominated by social chaos, sexual
permissiveness, polytheism, apostasy and idolatry. His notorious text
of the early 1950s, Our Struggle with the Jews, portrayed the Jews as
the "eternal enemies" of Muhammad and the Islamic community who used
Christianity, capitalism and communism as weapons in their war to
subvert the Muslim religion. The Islamists of today have faithfully
followed Qutb in attributing Marxism, psychoanalysis, sociology,
materialism, sexual depravity, and the destruction of morals and the
family to "Jewish" influence. In this cultural war, they see Zionism
and Americanism as kindred expressions of an existential threat to
Muslim identity.

Anti-Semitism Today

Today, the identity crisis affecting millions of Muslims is spawning
its own brand of Islamic neo-fascism. That crisis is accentuated by
accelerating urbanization, overpopulation and endemic poverty, as
well as the prevalence of suffocating dictatorships throughout the
Arab world. Without the bogeymen of America and Israel, however, Arab
despots would be hard put to explain to their own peoples why the
modern world is passing them by. Why is Cairo infinitely poorer than
Tel Aviv? Why is heart surgery so much better in London than in
Damascus? Why do Arab immigrants prefer Los Angeles or Detroit to
Baghdad or Beirut?

The crushing of dissent, the repression of women, the scale of mass
illiteracy and underdevelopment and the oil riches of corrupt ruling
elites provide part of the answer. For decades, authoritarian Arab
regimes turned the bitter feelings of humiliation and rage among the
masses against the "colonialist" West. The Islamists have continued
in this vein, adding their own paranoid suspicions of modern secular
civilization. Fear of apostasy fuses with hatred of America, Jews and
non-Muslims in general. Rank homophobia and a fiercely puritanical,
repressive vision of veiled and enslaved womanhood are added to the
mix. Indeed, European fascism, for all its male-oriented warrior
barbarism, was almost liberating in its attitudes toward women
compared with the Taliban or Saudi Wahhabism.

Militarism, the glorification of force and a nihilistic cult of death
are, however, traits that Nazis, fascists and Islamists share
completely in common. The morbid addiction to destruction and revenge
drives them to paint the world red with blood in their mad rush to
introduce utopia in the here-and-now. Added to this is the
totalitarian belief, very much shared by Stalinists, in the
all-encompassing power of propaganda, party organization and
terror--a mystique reinforced by the seemingly limitless manipulative
possibilities of modern technology joined to ideological dogma. The
individual is considered totally malleable and subordinate to the
revolutionary cause, whether it be "living space", "racial purity",
the "Arab Renaissance", the "classless society" or the jihad.
Promethean doctrines, to which human life is so eagerly sacrificed,
can only be vindicated by the success of a global revolution that
grants political hegemony to true believers in the cause. Whether
millions die in the attempt is irrelevant in the light of either the
eternal laws of nature and history or the will of God.

Totalitarian anti-Semitism reached its genocidal extreme with
Hitler's ideology and a political praxis that, though it grew up on
Christian soil, was ultimately determined to replace and supplant
Christianity. National Socialism was racial politics carried out
under the sign of the Apocalypse, in which the global struggle
between the "Aryan" world and Jewry stood at the center of a closed
system of thought. Anti-Semitism was transformed into a crucial lever
in the restructuring not only of Nazi Germany but of the entire
international order--initially as a weapon for undermining Hitler's
domestic adversaries and then for subverting or neutralizing
opposition to his policies abroad. Hitler emphasized that the
destruction of world Jewry was a precondition for restoring the
natural hierarchy within the nation and between the races. The
Darwinian racism that he espoused was not the root of his
anti-Semitism; it was simply the "scientific" language he employed to
give more credibility to his eschatological political agenda. Its
deeper sources lay in a pseudo-religious, Manichean vision of a world
in which "the Jew" was the negative wellspring and dark side of
history driving mankind relentlessly toward the abyss.

Nazi ideology led to acts of murderous race-cleansing of varying
kinds during World War II, but only the Jews were singled out for
total extermination. The war against them was conceived as an
apocalyptic Vernichtungskrieg for global hegemony. What Hitler did
was to transform the demonological fantasies of both Christian and
anti-Christian anti-Semitism into a practical political program on a
universal scale. The choice of the target grew out of centuries of
Christian teaching that had singled out the Jews as a deicidal
people. But the Shoah was a modernized high-tech version of "Holy
War" carried out by totalitarian atheists. These atheists consciously
sought to eradicate both the Enlightenment legacy of reason and the
entire Judeo-Christian tradition of ethics.

The topography and lexicography of post-Holocaust anti-Semitism
changed dramatically after 1945, yet the essential elements of
ideological continuity have been remarkably tenacious. Today, the
geographical center of gravity is neither Germany nor the European
continent (despite the alarming revival of old prejudices) but the
Arab-Muslim world and its diasporic offshoots. Anti-Jewish rhetoric
in the new millennium tends to be Islamic, anti-globalist and
neo-Marxist far more than it is Christian, conservative or
neo-fascist. Whether the assault comes from the far Left or Right,
from liberals or fundamentalists, its focus now is above all the
collective Jew embodied in the State of Israel. Despite the incessant
hair-splitting over the need to separate anti-Zionism and
anti-Semitism, this has in recent decades become a distinction
without a meaningful difference. Whatever theoretical contortions one
may indulge in, the State of Israel is a Jewish state. Whoever wants
to defame or destroy it, openly or through policies that entail
nothing else but such destruction, is in effect practicing the
Jew-hatred of yesteryear, whatever their self-proclaimed intentions.

The Soviet Legacy

The case of Soviet communism is particularly interesting in this
regard. In 1931, Josef Stalin officially denounced anti-Semitism as
"zoological", a form of cannibalism. This was formally consistent
with the original internationalist policy of Marxist-Leninism and the
older communist view of anti-Semitism as a reactionary tool of the
ruling classes to divert attention away from the class struggle. By
1949, however, Stalin was beginning to sound like Adolf Hitler when
it came to "the Jewish question." He adopted the classic Nazi
mythology of "rootless cosmopolitanism" and applied it to Soviet
Jews. Stalinist accusations which developed out of this slogan
followed the pattern of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. This had
an obvious propaganda value in Soviet Russia, as it did in all of the
East European satellite countries that fell under communist control
in the late 1940s, where anti-Semitism already enjoyed great
popularity. The fictitious "world conspiracy" invented by the
Stalinists offered a suitable backdrop for totalitarian claims to
world rule alongside the crusade against Wall Street, capitalism and
imperialism.

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