The question isn't all that baffling if you look back at the historical context of the Protocols which emerged from the poison pens of two secret police agents of two different countries seeking ways to stifle reform by associating their opponents with a vast Jewish conspiracy. It took place in a century where the left and the right spent a good deal of time accusing each other of working for the Jews. That century gave way to the next one where they stopped writing essays and began running death camps.
The Muslim world is still backward enough to be besotted with the worst lunacy of the period, the Masonic conspiracy is an article of faith for most Islamists, right up there with the Koran, Mein Kampf is a bestseller and Fascism and Communism are admired in a way that horrifies the Eurocrats who visit from time to time. Grand conspiracy theories explain everything and everyone is assumed to have a complex secret agenda.
But those aren't the sources of the Anti-Semitism in the Arab Spring. Nor is Israel. The fundamental error that is made over and over again is to assume that Muslim attitudes toward the Jews emerge out of politics rather than theology. While Israel certainly looms large in the Muslim imagination, the image of the Jews as the nemesis of Islam is of ancient theological provenance dating back to Mohammed's efforts to ethnically cleanse the region of non-Muslim minorities.
When Arab Spring mobs paint the Star of David on pictures of dictators or call them Jews, they are using an old insult. To call someone a "Jew" in the Arab world is the equivalent of calling him a dog. There is no special racial slur needed, "Jew" is already enough. Read the rest on:
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