The Party Line

The party line: "Ahmadinejad seems to have moved to a more stump-speech style of anti-Semitism that bears a strong resemblance to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda from the 1930s." (A hard line on Iran, Greg (Jerusalem Prize) Sheridan, The Australian 18/10/08)

The reality: "Zionism, which brought 'the people without land to a land without people', in fact implied the dispossession of Palestine's Arabs. Previously, anti-Semitism had been a negligible factor among the Arabs; there was little trace of it in the Ottoman world, where Jews and Muslims coexisted harmoniously. But even as European anti-Semitism dwindled, so it seemed to grow in the Middle East, fed by racial and religious myths imported from the defeated European Right. What has emerged is not at heart a racial antagonism but a political one - an anti-Zionism which takes Israeli rhetoric at face value by conflating Israelis and Jews. This is very different from the old inter-war European variety. The Nazis were not much bothered with Jews' political opinions; what counted was race. If anything, Zionists were the one kind of Jew that right-wing Europeans were prepared to deal with, since both sides desired the same thing - the departure of the Jews from Europe. Precisely the opposite is true for Arab opinion: conspiracy theories flourish, and so does Holocaust denial, but the real target is Zionism as a political doctrine." (Anti-Semitism is not the real danger to Jews today, Mark Mazower*, The Times, 27/11/03)

[*Professor of History at Columbia University & author of Hitler's Empire: Nazi Rule in Occupied Europe]