palestinian authority comes under the hand of zionist elders

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(the title of this post is satirical, for those who are satire-impaired. -ts) Tearing hatred apart New works further discredit an old, anti-Semitic book – but it hardly matters to some 04:27 PM CDT on Saturday, May 28, 2005 By JEFFREY WEISS / The Dallas Morning News Last week, the Palestinian Authority made headlines in Israel when it deleted from its Web site a link to a notorious anti-Semitic tract. The same century-old tract is the target of the last major book by the late Will Eisner, the inventor of the graphic novel. It's the subject of a documentary that debuted this year at the Sundance Film Festival. And it's inspired a new satire of anti-Semitism by two editors of Heeb , the Jewish humor magazine. What is it about an old, bigoted screed that merits such attention? The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has been the Jew-hater's main manifesto for more than100 years. The Protocols purports to be the minutes of a clandestine meeting of Jewish leaders near the end of the 19th century. The book claims that these Jewish conspirators are planning to take over the world through secret control of the media, manipulation of the money supply and domination of all governments. (Plus, they're going to institute such "ultramodern" reforms as universal suffrage, a minimum wage, part-time legislatures, and a mandatory retirement age of 55 for judges. The conspirators would also ban drunkenness and use sports and entertainment as wildly hyped distractions.) The book is a total fraud. First published in 1902, it was plagiarized, scholars say, from sources that originally attacked the Masons, Jesuits and Napoleon III of France. Even though research debunking The Protocols is almost as old as the book itself, the danger it poses is absolutely current, said David Cook, an assistant professor of religious studies at Rice University. Dr. Cook, who has spent the past four months in Africa studying Islam, has found The Protocols to be "wildly popular" there. "Because liberalism and democracy are essentially the targets of The Protocols (the Jews being the scapegoat) societies that are coming out of a long history of authoritarian rule are particularly vulnerable to their influence," he wrote this week in an e-mail from Nigeria. The Protocols was publicly exposed as a forgery by The Times of London in 1921. But that didn't stop Henry Ford, a notorious anti-Semite, from publishing and distributing hundreds of thousands of copies in the early 1920s (though he later apologized). Or Adolph Hitler from giving the book a place of honor in Mein Kampf and using it to bolster the Nazi case for killing all Jews. The modern anti-Israel terrorist organization Hamas cites The Protocols as proof that "the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates." The Protocols can be found on dozens, maybe hundreds, of Web sites based in the Middle East, Europe, America and Australia. (The Palestinian Authority removed its link only after a complaint by the Anti-Defamation League.) Decades of scholarly debunking haven't prevented new translations from being produced and sold – a new Arabic edition came out in Syria this year. The book was on sale last fall at a Hamas book fair and "martyr's exhibit" in Israel's West Bank, said Scott Atran, an anthropology researcher for the National Center for Scientific Research in Paris. "One professor told me with an embarrassed smile (pointing to The Protocols) 'but this book is controversial,' " Dr. Atran wrote in an e-mail. The professor meant to show that he was being fair. But because he knew The Protocols is bogus, Dr. Atran said, the professor's tolerance of the book was an example of the same "banality of evil" ascribed to the Nazis. Even some Muslim leaders publicly acknowledge that The Protocols is a fake. But the truth is that many fans of the book's message simply don't care whether it's an actual record of an actual meeting. Hitler addressed that issue more than 60 years ago. Even if untrue, The Protocols is real, he wrote: "The important thing is that with positively terrifying certainty they reveal the nature and activity of the Jewish people and expose their inner contexts as well as their ultimate final aims." The true story of The Protocols is a compelling tale. Historians say it was created around the turn of the 20th century by a propagandist hired by Russian monarchists. The monarchists were afraid that Czar Nicholas was about to modernize the country, which would have eroded their power and stature. They figured that if it could be proven that "the Jews" were behind the movement toward freedom and democracy, the anti-Semitism of Nicholas – and of many in Russia – would do the rest. After all, what right-thinking Russian would want to join a movement that was actually created by and for Jews? In a forward to Mr. Eisner's graphic novel, the Italian scholar Umberto Eco traced the process that produced The Protocols: It started with two books written in France in the mid-1800s that suggested that the Jesuits were trying to conquer the world. The theme was borrowed in 1864 by Maurice Joly, a French political essayist and caustic critic of the emperor, Naploeon III. Mr. Joly used the anti-Jesuit books as the basis for The Dialogue In Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu, a satire that accused the emperor of betraying the ideals of the French Revolution. A few years later, a German anti-Semite swiped some of Mr. Joly's material for a novel that made Jews the enemy. He added a plot twist: a secret meeting of Jewish leaders in a Prague cemetery. When the Russian monarchists were looking for ways to demonize the Jews a few years later, they turned to Mathieu Golovinski, a Russian agent working in Paris. He took the German novel and some of Mr. Joly's original material and turned them into The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which he claimed was a nonfictional account of a real meeting of Jewish conspiracists. A careful reading of The Protocols side-by-side with Mr. Joly's satire turns up passage after passage of stolen material. The plagiarized stuff even appears in the same order in both books. "It was surprising that Golovinski was so lazy," said Christopher Couch, a comparative literature professor at the University of Massachusetts who helped Mr. Eisner with his book. The mishmashed provenance of The Protocols explains why parts are so incoherent, or improbable. Why would Jewish leaders, for example, compare their work to the Hindu god Vishnu? Why would Jews, in particular, be against backing money with gold? In any case, dissemination of The Protocols back in Russia failed to protect the czar and his court from revolution and assassination. Since then, the book has provided fuel for generations of conspiracy-seekers, and justification for brutality toward generations of Jews worldwide. The popularity of The Protocols has waxed and waned over the years in response to the politics of the day, said Stephen Eric Bronner, a political science professor at Rutgers University and author of A Rumor About the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. When people need a conspiracy to explain hard times, or when Israel's policy toward the Palestinians seems particularly harsh, the default answer for some people has been anti-Semitism and The Protocols, he said. Even so, some people today still hope that exposure can limit the damage The Protocols can inspire. "You can inhibit it, you can cage it," Mr. Bronner said. "The way you can contain it is by government and organizations and people of moral persuasion marginalizing it. A new book by the two editors of Heeb tries flat-out, sometimes sophomoric, ridicule. The authors, David Deutch and Joshua Neuman, watched the World Trade Center fall. Then – despite a mountain of evidence implicating Osama bin Laden – they heard wild tales that "the Jews" were responsible. Their magazine offers an irreverent take on Jewish culture, so their reaction may have been inevitable. "We realized if it weren't so insidious and sinister, this would be funny," Mr. Neuman said. "And then we thought – maybe it is just funny." The result was their satirical volume, The Big Book of Jewish Conspiracies. Explaining their idea to a literary agent was interesting. "Nothing quite prepares someone for the sentence 'It's a humorous look at Jewish conspiracy theories,' " Mr. Neuman said. The documentary shown this year at Sundance, Protocols of Zion, tries confronting real supporters of The Protocols on camera, Michael Moore-style. Filmmaker Marc Levin said he was inspired to make his movie after he was told by an Egyptian cab driver in New York City that the global conspiracy foretold in The Protocols explained why no Jews were killed in the Sept. 11 attacks – a lie still in wide circulation. "From my perspective, light is the great disinfectant," Mr. Levin said. Mr. Eisner's graphic novel, The Plot, is an easily absorbed retelling of some of the intricate real history of The Protocols, how it was debunked and how it has been used. Plenty of scholarly works – written by and for academics – had failed to kill The Protocols, Mr. Eisner wrote. He decided to try using the format he had pioneered: a graphic novel – basically a grown-up, supersized comic book. "With the widespread acceptance of the graphic narrative as a vehicle of popular literature, there is now an opportunity to deal head-on with this propaganda in a more accessible language," Mr. Eisner, then 86, wrote shortly before he died this year. One question that's vexing to scholar and satirist, filmmaker and illustrator alike: Why do modern anti-Semites persist in relying on The Protocols? Some agree with Hitler that The Protocols is true even if it isn't real. They connect the dots of history to find imaginary patter