One of the more consequential themes in Nazi antisemitic propaganda was the accusation that Jews had a plan to conquer the world and enslave mankind. This accusation was based on a text, widely accepted among gentiles at the time as “true.” Entitled The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, it claimed to be the translated copy of a secret discussion among a cabal of rabbis, who behind the scenes of the first Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, worked out a plan for world domination. For decades, while the courts weighed the (abundant) evidence of forgery, the Protocols meme – “the Jews were conspiring to control the world” – spread far and wide. It fueled a paranoid anxiety about Jewish influence that would explode a few decades later in a continent-wide movement to exterminate Jews throughout Europe.
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a forgery by gentile authors who feared and hated democracy. They systematically projected their “dominating imperative” – rule or be ruled – onto Jews, whom they accused of exploiting democracy to enslave mankind. Under the guise of unlocking the key to the Jews’ ambitions, these forgers were covering up their own sinister ambitions.
Through this lens, ideologues for the predatory gentile aristocracy perceived the spread of modernity, and therefore democracies, all being encouraged by Jewish progressives, as a sinister plot. It was seen as part of a vast, global plot to alienate the “dumb masses,” from their natural protectors, the “gentile aristocracy” and in the chaos that must inevitably ensue, take over. After the Bolsheviks did just that in the late 1910s, the inflationary crisis of the early 1920s made it look like Germany was next. The Nazis had no problem convincing their countrymen that the document was genuine and the threat imminent. Within a decade, the Protocols became a “warrant for genocide”: exterminate those who would enslave you.
This lethal projection onto the Jews exculpated the forgers. They claimed they were the good, beneficent aristocracy, the protectors of society; they pointed the finger away from themselves. Hitler knew the dominating imperative well; he preached it. He assumed that everyone else thought the same. As early as 1919, he dreamed of conquering the world and enslaving the inferior races, making the Protocols the perfect cover for his mad dream. Yet, who among his admirers in the 1930s, thought he’d end up killing seven million Germans in pursuit of that thrilling, tausendjähriger Reich?
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This projection has its roots in the Christian doctrine of supersession, in which Christians replaced the Jews as the chosen ones of a God who, after they killed his Son, cast his earlier favorite aside. Christian teaching was the new teaching; the Old Testament was a key to unlock the New Testament, the true key to salvation.
To maintain the sense of superiority that this reading of history both provided and demanded from the Christian believer, proved difficult. The Jews, allegedly discarded, did not disappear as anticipated; on the contrary, they offered an alternative understanding of what the One God wants from his Chosen. Particularly after the mutual conversion of Rome to Christianity and Christianity to imperialism, the faithful (led by the bishops) found themselves increasingly drawn to marry Church and State. This victory of “right makes right” demanded that the “True” religion (i.e. the one in power) has formal privilege and honor in the public transcript, with corresponding formal dishonor and disgrace of the Jews.
This notion of chosenness reflects a strong, triumphalist religiosity, characteristic of monotheistic, but still shame-honor cultures. This imperialist religiosity characterizes both Christian and Islamic replacement narratives by which the derivative movement claims to replace, to “sit on top of” (supersedeo) its predecessor(s). They, the new True faith, have the public honor of their faith’s dominion. They take their predecessors’ loss of sovereignty and honor as proof of their own superiority, their own truth. Only one faith can be chosen, and the arrival of new, superior variant means the rejection of the older candidate(s).
Robert Wistrich places this issue at the heart of the tale, the woefully long history of Jew-hatred.
As the most ancient repositories of chosenness, the Jews almost inevitably become a lightning rod for rival claims of election, whose psychological dynamics all too easily trigger boundless envy and an irrational hatred. (Lethal Obsession, p. 99)
The reassurance this visible, social superiority provided believers (so at odds with both Christian and Jewish values), was powerful. Repeatedly, when Christian society faced a Jewish culture that challenged their self-image, rather than rethink supersessionism, they chose instead to wax eloquent on the danger the Jews posed to Christians. Here was fertile ground for the supersessionist to project their own notion of chosenness onto the Jews. ‘We, the chosen, are free to do whatever we want to the gentiles no matter how terrible for them.’
If projection is attributing to others “motivations, drives, or other tensions that are repudiated and intolerable in oneself,” then Jews have, in their two millennia-long conflict, repeatedly served as the Christian shadow: the receptacle of their dark, denied, desires and fears.
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Ironically, Jews are the only monotheistic religion that does not engage in this triumphalism, does not promote libido dominandi, does not pursue empire, does not claim a monopoly on salvation. Judaism is the only monotheism with boundaries. And yet, it has come to embody the worst of imperialism.
From the outset, the Abrahamic project is positive-sum: “through you all the families…nations of the world will be blessed” (Genesis 12:3, 22:18). For Jews, chosenness is emphatically not a sanction to misbehave but a responsibility to behave morally. Their mission’s success manifests itself in the blessings to the world’s families; not in the conversion of others, let alone their extermination. Unlike the imperial monotheisms, most Jewish worship of the one God has no need to claim a monopoly on salvation.
On the contrary, Jews have endured for two millennia, not just loss of sovereignty, but the ensuing dishonor imposed on them by their imperialist successors. But Jewish culture figured out ways to bypass, despite its pains, the loss of autonomy and taunting disdain of their supersessionist descendants. Jewish religiosity is more attuned to the demotic formula that prefers changing social mores by setting an example that others adopt willingly. The Jews, faithful to these principles, were able to survive thousands of years of having neither autonomy nor dominion. This accomplishment is beyond the reach of all the other peoples and religions from the ancient world, including the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans.
So this great and lethal projection onto the Jews falsifies reality and inverts it. The very people who want to dominate accuse the Jews of their own sins: apartheid, racism, imperialism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing, religious supremacism, dehumanization, rape, torture, war crimes, crimes against humanity, genocide. Instead, the very people committed to positive-sum outcomes, the people eager to participate in any experiment in freedom, equality, and meritocracy, these are the people accused of everything they are not.
The Lethal Projection in the 21st Century
If one looks for evidence of the Protocols’ appeal since the Holocaust, the most notable case is in the Arab world, especially the states surrounding Israel. The Arab world welcomed Nazi ideologues, fleeing the failure of their genocidal convulsion and willing to convert to Islam. Together they resurrected a long-dormant apocalyptic hadith about how, at the at the approach of Judgment Day – about which Muhammad had much to say – the Muslims would slaughter every last Jew. In 1988, the founders of Hamas, in their founding charter, citied both the Protocols as an historical fact (¶32), and expressed the pious wish that the day promised in the hadith would soon come, when:
[T]he Muslims will rise up and kill all the Jews, and they shall flee behind trees and rocks, the rocks and trees would cry out and say, ‘oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him’ (¶34).
First introduced by Amin al Husseini in 1937, the hadith formed the Islamic bridge to Nazi exterminationist discourse. But unlike Nazi Germany, where priests and ministers – regardless of how enthused by the Nazis – did not do so, Palestinian preachers regularly call for genocidal war from their pulpits, sermons are carried by TV to the homes of Palestinian viewers, swept into the global Umma via Arab-speaking networks (including the BBC and France24 Arabic services). Wahhabi preachers are sent to radicalize diaspora Muslim communities and social media.
The utter silence about this terrifyingly violent Arabic-language hate speech, stands out as one of the most flagrant and vital examples of the many failures of information professionals in the 21st century. This failure is especially notable among the liberal-progressive mainstream news media. No reader of the NYT, listener of NPR, viewer of CNN or the BBC would have any idea of its existence. On the contrary, when Hamas speaks of wiping out the Jews, the BBC, on principle, translates al-Yahud as “Israelis.”
Like many other Jihadi organizations in the 15th century Annus Hejira (the equivalent of 1979-2076 CE), Hamas is an active cataclysmic millennial movement. It believes that only catastrophic destruction will lead to the global Caliphate and that they are the chosen agents of that destruction. They systematically demonize their chosen enemies whom they see through the lens of paranoid conspiracy theories. Whenever they can do so, they kill as many enemy civilians as they can. The deeds of October 7, 2023, which the doers displayed for all the world to see, reveal a movement that radically dehumanizes its enemy and seeks to inflict the most unimaginable sadistic suffering and humiliation on them.
Yet, even as an appalled recognition swept some of the international community in the wake of October 7, an elation, a celebration of a mighty blow against the Empire arose among jihadis and their revolutionary allies in the West. Youth, claiming to be progressive, shouted “From the river to the sea…” without knowing what river and what sea. They cried: “Globalize the intifada!” without realizing that the intifada was the first war of suicide terror by jihadis on an infidel democracy.
From these “revolutionary” enthusiasts for genocidal violence, the first cries arose denouncing Israel for committing genocide against the Gazan people even before Israel responded. They were aided by a chorus of post-colonial historians willing to stretch the meaning of genocide to risible lengths. This opened the way for accusations of genocide against Israel to be taken to the ICC, corrupting yet another international institution originally created with the noble ambition to sustain peace and to bring war criminals to justice, now turned to newspeak.
Raphael Lemkin coined the term genocide in order to create a category for the worst crime imaginable in which the Nazis were the exhibit A. At peak genocidal output, Nazis killed 14,700 Jews per day for over 100 days. Lemkin could not have imagined that his definition might someday be turned on his own people to misdescribe a war in which some 110 people including combatants per day die, less than one percent of the Nazi genocidal rate. Indeed, even for normal warfare that’s a very low rate. The Gaza campaigns (2008/9, 2012, 2014, 2021, 2023-?) all rank low on the scale of civilian casualty rates in the history of urban warfare (around 1:1 vs. a norm of 3:1 civilian/combatant).
Yet suddenly, even these casualties have become intolerable. Those watching CNN and reading the NYT are inundated with Hamas-supplied casualty numbers presented as facts, close up narratives of Palestinian pain and grief, a parade of guests who drive home Hamas’ propaganda – the poor suffering Palestinians, the mean brutal Israelis.
Suddenly, this conflict is the only relevant one: it not only eclipses the suffering of blacks and women (in the Arab world), but it also eclipses all other tragedies around the globe. Far greater rates of civilian deaths prevailing in other conflicts (Syria, Sudan, Yemen), far more deliberate assaults on civilians (Boko Haram, Chinese), do not rate screen time. Whereas before, no one ever raised genocidal accusations against armies in battle, even in cases with high rates of civilian casualty (Dresden, Hiroshima-Nagasaki) or civil wars (Syria, Sudan, Nigeria), suddenly this lethal word was especially apt for Gaza. In 2007, Jimmy Carter and Desmond Tutu found the word genocide “unhelpful” in describing the Arab slaughter of about 300,000 Black Muslims in Darfur. But suddenly, in 2023, the term became most helpful in describing Israel. The appropriate question to ask when such wild inconsistency appears, is: helpful to what cause?
Supersessionist Projection in the West
This accusation of genocide, however unmoored from any meaningful relationship to its meaning or the reality it claims to describe, plays a central role in the widespread movement to bring Israel’s war campaign against a genocidal foe to a halt. For many this is a purely humanitarian concern: flooded by both legacy and social media with images of Palestinian suffering, what caring person would not cry out, “Enough! Make it stop!” ?
The outburst of “compassion” we have witnessed over the course of these last 600 days comes with a strong dose of outrage, of anger, of hatred directed at the alleged inflictor of this “genocidal” violence. The non-reactive evidence alone makes it clear that this outraged compassion targets Israel specifically, indeed obsessively. Far worse behavior – indeed the very savagery and sadism displayed on October 7 – when conducted by Arab Jihadis against Black Africans of all faiths fails to produce any sense of outrage or urgency.
One cannot become more morally and empirically disoriented than to affirm this diabolical inversion that, in the name of opposing genocide, empowers the very haters who want to commit genocide – in this case Hamas and Hezbollah. Why do so many miss the key point that the people whose lethal projection progressives adopt also target them? Like the German working classes swept up in Hitler’s wave of hatred, today’s Western progressives put themselves at the mercy of those with the worst intentions and the most contempt for life.
Hamas Absconditus
This narrative only makes sense, however, because the key actor is rarely to be seen. The news audiences are not told that that when Israel struck a particular location, Hamas terrorists were there. Instead, journalists will more likely deny Hamas’ presence. What looks to the viewer like a map of IDF strikes that target civilian sites (hospitals, schools, refugee camps) doubles as a map of Hamas movement through the population it has systematically forced to be the shields of their aggression for two decades. The audiences of western newsfeeds rarely if ever get a glimpse of the genocidal hate-speech in Arabic that runs on Palestinian media outlets. On the contrary, news agencies caution their journalists not to use the word terrorist for Hamas, because some consider them resisting for freedom. Would it not be worthwhile to consider this commitment to killing civilians when we assess their accusations against Israel?
The recent Amnesty International Report accusing Israel of genocide embodies both the disappearance of the genocidal actor and the projection of his traits onto Israel. The opening line of the report states: “On 7 October 2023, Israel embarked on a military offensive on the occupied Gaza Strip (Gaza) of unprecedented magnitude, scale and duration.” October 7, 2023: the very day Hamas attacked in a savage, sadistic, genocidal assault on civilians in Israel, weeks before an Israeli counterattack. Similarly, the UN hosts an exhibit entitled: Gaza, Palestine: a Crisis of Humanity, a Cry for Justice with no trace of Hamas.
If sincere people want to look for a place to honestly confront past mistakes, there are few better ways to start figuring out what’s gone wrong than to ask the news agencies why they report so little on Hamas? If there were Gazans who despised Hamas and blamed them for their suffering, surely intrepid journalists would seek them out, no? If Gazans were to dare demonstrating in the streets of Hamas-controlled Gaza, surely this would be the great story of hope for a decent future.
But most Westerners, including journalists, either know little about Hamas, and even less about global Jihad, or prefer not to discuss it too loudly. And as a result of this silence, we have student youth shouting “We love Hamas!,” thinking they’re fighting for freedom.
In my book, I warned about Y2KMind, a mindset that took hold at the turn of the millennium when global jihad first took the offensive against the democratic world. When Jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy. In response to 9-11, Europeans were quick to blame America; and Americans, especially progressives, asked: “What have we done to cause them to hate us so?” The alternative question: “What do they believe that makes them hate infidels so?” was quickly suppressed as Islamophobic, leading to the public’s current gross ignorance of jihadi genocidal antisemitism and anti-westernism.
A quarter century later, in the mid-2020s, Y2KMind has bound the Jewish state in nets of international condemnation and restraint. Israel’s should be allies in the battle for decency and freedom are somehow transfixed by this jihadi fantasy of a genocidal Jewish state. And in so doing, they mindlessly repeat the lethal projections of an enemy they unknowingly share with Israel.
Notes Pat Johnson, one of the more astute observers of current madness about the Jews:
In Western civilization, Jews have always been the empty vessel upon which we project our messy socio-psychological crap. Today, the Jewish state is that empty vessel. Israel has replaced Jews as the scapegoat of choice for the current generation. This differentiation, of course, is a paper-thin disguise. The only people convinced are those committed to self-deception. Our great-grandparents may have falsely accused Jews of every sin under the sun, but when we accuse the Jewish state of being the modern incarnation of comprehensive sins, there’s not a doubt in our activist minds we are not making a mistake.
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I was raised not to jump to accusations of antisemitism, to give the other the benefit of the doubt before considering that the person with whom I am interacting might simply hate Jews. But this pattern of information unprofessionalism, sustained for more than a quarter of a century, is consistently practiced, consistently denied, consistently lethal. It’s either malice or stupidity, and it’s hard to believe all those smart people are that stupid. Surely the present situation calls for some self-reflection.
During the 20th century the dark joke defined antisemitism as hating Jews more than absolutely necessary. The darker joke of the 21st century has become antisemitism is hating Jews even when it’s suicidal.
Can sound and courageous minds step back from the brink? Or will deluded virtue-signalers, convinced they are on the right side of history, stampede? I know how the Jihadis are rooting.
This monthly series is presented by George Violin.
Richard Landes was trained as a medievalist at Princeton University (MA 1979, PhD 1984). His work focuses on apocalyptic and millennial beliefs at the turn of the first and second millennium (1000 and 2000 CE). Among Landes many books are The Apocalyptic Year 1000 (2003), Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience (2011), and Can the “Whole World” be Wrong? Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism, and Global Jihad (Academic Studies Press, 2022). Landes coined the term “Pallywood” while investigating the Muhammad al Durah affair and maintains “The Augean Stables,” a blog critical of western journalism. He recently published two articles: “The Demopath’s Lexicon: A Guide to Western Journalism between the River and the Sea” in Israel Affairs (2020), and “Oslo’s Misreading of an Honor-Shame Culture” in Israel Journal of Foreign Affairs (2019). Since retiring from Boston University in 2015, where he was a Professor in the History Department, he lives happily with his wife in Jerusalem, where he can write free of politically correct pressures.