ZGram - 8/20/2002 - "US News&World Report: Hooked on a Crooked Book"

[irimland@zundelsite.org]

ZGram - Where Truth is Destiny

August 20, 2002

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

A few years ago I read the "Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion." 
I don't remember that anything that I have ever read, before or 
since, has shocked me as much!  That is one scary publication!

I have since learned how controversial the "Protocols" are - that is, 
a controversy has raged for more than a century whether this is a 
forged document or not. 

Does authenticity even matter?  I think that argument is quite 
irrelevant.  If you have been robbed, or someone in your family has 
been murdered in the most gruesome fashion - and somehow, perhaps 
even by accident, you lay your hands on a map that points to who 
might have done it, and why - does it matter who printed the map? 
The point is:  does the lead check out?  When you look at the past 
century and see pattern after pattern after pattern, you draw your 
own conclusion about its "authenticity".

Keep that in mind as you read the article below - and others that 
will deal with aspects of the "Protocols" that you will come across, 
I am quite certain, in months and years to come.

[START]

US News & World Report | August 26, 2002

Hooked on a crooked book
An antisemitic fraud born a century ago wins new converts

BY NOAM NEUSNER

Last summer, a front-page column in the state-run Egyptian newspaper
Al-Ahram revealed a Jewish plot to destroy Islam and Christianity.
Radio Islam, a Web site run by a failed Moroccan revolutionary, has
24 chapters on the plot, along with photos of "Jews who run America"
(including Madeleine Albright, raised Catholic but with Jewish
roots). The charter of Palestinian terror group Hamas cites the plot
as well: "With their money [Jews] formed secret societies . . . in
different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies
and achieving Zionist interests."

And what's the evidence for this conspiracy? The Protocols of the
Elders of Zion.

That the Arab world now ponders this warmed-over fabrication is no
shock. Wherever antisemitism enjoys respectable public airing, the
Protocols is Exhibit No. 1. In 1920, Winston Churchill, a rising
political star in antisemitic Great Britain, echoed the book's
central theme of an alliance between Bolsheviks and "these
international and for the most part atheistical Jews." Auto industry
magnate Henry Ford championed the Protocols and used them as the
basis for articles later collected as The International Jew. Adolf
Hitler said the book "shocked" him, and he resolved to "strike at the
Jews with their own weapons." Even today, Protocols remains in wide
circulation (it can be purchased from major online booksellers) and
has been translated into dozens of languages.

Czar Nicholas II is the man behind the forgery. About 100 years ago,
his Russian secret police created the work to discredit the monarch's
Bolshevik enemies, many of whom happened to be Jewish. The book,
which echoes whole parts of a French parody written three decades
earlier, portrays a cabal of unnamed Jews bent on global domination.

Blame game. It took more than a decade for political allies of the
Russian monarchy to popularize the 1903 text, and it wasn't until a
German publisher translated and distributed it that it became
embraced as truth by millions. "When it comes to conspiracies, Jews
have always been at the top of the hit parade," says Abraham Foxman,
national director of the Anti-Defamation League, which monitors
antisemitism and bigotry. This hatred had reached a boiling point in
the 19th century, when war, economic depression, and the onset of
modern ideas and institutions -- the nation-state, universities,
socialism, capitalism -- overthrew monarchies and aristocracies and
pushed the power of the clergy to the periphery.

To Europeans of that age, the Protocols provided an organizing
principle for the rapid changes: Jews were behind it. "The Protocols
served an explanatory function [of] how bad things happen," says
Stephen Bronner, author of A Rumor About the Jews, a history of the
Protocols. "It really spoke to the mainstream." Particularly in the
period between the world wars, the thesis of a Jewish conspiracy to
control banking, arms, political power, and culture gained currency
in Germany. While most historians do not think the Protocols led
directly to the Holocaust, they say it clearly hardened the views of
many Europeans. Victor Marsden, whose 1922 English translation of the
Protocols is still widely used, offered this uncanny observation in
his introduction: "The Jews are now a world menace and . . . the
Aryan races will have to domicile them permanently out of Europe."

While the Holocaust gave lie to the central thesis of the Protocols --
namely, that Jews would wreak horrors upon the world -- the hoax
continued. To Stalin, the book proved the need to rout Jews out of
respected positions in the Communist Party. The creation of the state
of Israel in 1948 was seen as part of the plot (although the Protocols
doesn't mention Zionism or Palestine), and, in a twist, conspiracists
argued that the Holocaust itself was a hoax meant to drum up support for
the Zionist dream.

The Arab world has had the Protocols since 1920, but not until
Israel's establishment, and its success in several wars, was the book
widely distributed. "One might imagine people rationalizing a series
of unending humiliations at the hands of Israel by saying, 'The Jews,
they must run the world,' " says Michael Hudson, a professor of Arab
studies at Georgetown University. Each time truth breaks down the
fraud behind the Protocols, believers in the Arab world and elsewhere
have a simple explanation: When you're dealing with a secret plot to
rule the world, what would you expect but denials?

(Source:  http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020826/misc/26zion.htm )

Freemasons as Satanists?
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020826/misc/26religion.htm

Holocaust memoir that wasn't
http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020826/misc/26zion.htm

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