Dangerous Thinking

I knew a former Soviet film professor and cultural official who as a boy lived across the way from Sergei Nilus, the former Czarist police spy credited with having written The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Beyond paying his rent on time (or whatever cliche you want), Nilus was an unapologetic anti-Semite, the real deal, not an angry phrasemonger. Seeing Jews as bloodsucking parasites was the least of it. Instead the Protocols tried to make the case that the Jews have a master plan to take over the world, year by year and nation by nation.

Interestingly, the "plan" involves "confusing the goyim" by promoting both revolution and plutocracy, the 99 percent and the 1 percent. It also involves (as Henry Ford's editor, Willia Campbell, promoted in his version, The International Jew) an elaborate plan to "infect" and destroy other "races" through sex and intermarriage with Jews.

Through it all the creation of a Jewish homeland does not receive any real focus. It's the Jews as a PEOPLE that the racialist masters -- Nilus, Chamberlain, Ford, Hitler -- vilify through phrases, images, and fantasies -- NOT a Jewish state.

Those who see criticism of Israel's policies as dangerous anti-Semitism are barking up the wrong tree. The discourse they should examine is that of international conflict. Some of us see Israel as a drain on the USA and most of us see it as an oppressor of the Palestinians. But then again, many Israelis see the USA as both a "weak and corrupt" country and an arrogant superpower. If there is dangerous thinking involved here, it is in the language of national identity...not that of racialism.

Barry Fruchter