Pausing during holy season to spread hatred in Egypt

“To what extent the whole existence of this people is based on a continuous lie is shown incomparably in ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ so infinitely hated by the Jews.... What many Jews may do unconsciously is here consciously exposed.”

-- Adolf Hitler

“Mein Kampf,”

Chapter 11, Volume 1

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Discussing hateful speech is distasteful. Discussing a book filled with such virulent hatred that it literally has contributed to the deaths of millions is loathsome.

As the passage cited above demonstrates, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a notorious anti-Semitic forgery concocted more than a century ago by the Russian czar’s secret police, is such a book. We are obliged to plumb its malicious depths yet again because the Egyptian government has decided to permit the televising of a sprawling historical drama whose producers drew their inspiration from the “Protocols.”

The series, “Horse Without a Horseman,” purports to be a re-creation of Mideastern history from 1855 through World War I. Its protagonist is an Egyptian who fights first the British imperialists and then Zionists struggling to establish a Jewish homeland. The 41-part narrative, reported by the New York Times on Saturday, not only conceptually incorporates the “Protocols’ ” various slanders but also features as one of its dramatic high points the main characters’ discovery and translation into Arabic of the book itself, which alleges a convoluted plot by nonexistent Jewish leaders to dominate the world.

Though it was produced by one of Egypt’s ostensibly independent channels -- Dream TV -- the series was approved by Cairo’s official censors and will air on state television over consecutive nights during next month’s holy season of Ramadan. The broadcasts are timed to coincide with the hour at which Muslims traditionally gather with family and friends to break their daylong fast, thereby guaranteeing a potential audience in the tens of millions. And, since many in that audience are young and illiterate, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” may gain a larger and more credulous audience than it ever has enjoyed in its long and tormenting history.

Certainly, that is the hope of the production’s co-author and star, Egyptian actor Muhammad Sobhi. He recently told the Arab-language television station Al Jazeera that, even if the “Protocols” are forged, “Zionism exists and it has controlled the world since the dawn of history.” Sobhi called it “stupid” not to consider whether the book’s allegations are true, even if the chances are “one in a million.”

Hala Sarhan, vice president of Dream TV, was quoted by the New York Times as saying “In a way, don’t [Jews] dominate? Of course, what we read from the ‘Protocols,’ it says it’s a kind of conspiracy. They want to control; they want to dominate .... We will see whether this happened throughout history or not.”

Egyptian authorities deny that their approval of “Horse Without a Horseman” involves anti-Semitism. They are lying. Airing such a program in this fashion to such an audience is the single most significant act of anti-Jewish propaganda since the heyday of the Third Reich.

And, according to former Harvard professor Daniel Jonah Goldhagen, author of “Hitler’s Willing Accomplices,” it “reflects in the clearest possible way the peculiar persistence of this malevolent form of fantastical belief called anti-Semitism. Historically, the charges contained in the ‘Protocols’ are -- to any rational person -- out of this world. But they remain useful as a way of making concrete the demonization of Jews that already has occurred in the minds of believers.”

As evidence of this process, Goldhagen cites recent surveys he says show that measurable numbers of Austrians, Germans and Italians continue to believe that Jews are cursed as Christ killers -- this despite the fact the so-called “deicide” libel was officially condemned by the Catholic and Lutheran churches decades ago.

“Because anti-Semitism has permeated Western civilization for 2,000 years and because all Western ideas and notions -- good and evil -- now are spreading through the globalization of information,” Goldhagen said, “a new substructure of prejudice with no basis in reality is spreading through the ether.”

Goldhagen’s latest book, “A Moral Reckoning: The Role of the Catholic Church in the Holocaust and Its Unfulfilled Duty of Repair,” explores the historic roots of this particular bigotry. “A text like the ‘Protocols,’ ” he said, “seems crazy to anybody who doesn’t believe in these things, but to those who have already given themselves up to self-delusion, it seems like proof.

“Local political leaders can put something like this forward to cynically manipulate those already in thrall to these delusions -- or to implant them where they don’t exist. Imagine an average 12-year-old Egyptian kid with no other form of information seeing this drama. This is being done for cynical reasons by the Egyptian government to distract attention from its own problems. That too is a tactic almost as old as anti-Semitism,” Goldhagen said.

Leon Wieseltier, literary editor of the New Republic, noted that the persistence of works like the “Protocols” does not “raise a historical question, but a diagnostic one since the taste for this stuff constitutes a mass psychological disorder. To leave it at that, though, is too passive a response, since it is a disorder that has been of enormous political utility to certain political regimes at certain times.

“Egypt, for example, does not suffer from a surfeit of free speech. The government controls the media and President Hosni Mubarak could have winked this thing out of existence, had he wished to do so. He does not wish to forbid this sort of filth because promoting anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are the cornerstones of the Faustian bargain he has struck to maintain his regime.”

Today, according to Wieseltier, “prejudice of this sort is like contemporary famines -- political not natural facts. The immediate problem is not the history of anti-Semitism, but the current government of Egypt. Mubarak is directly culpable for allowing the dirtiest form of hatred of Jews and Americans to become common currency in his society.”

Since it was published publicly in 1905, “Protocols” has cast a sinister influence unequaled by any similar work. It fueled the pogroms of Russia’s Black Hundreds and, a few decades later, those of the White Armies in that country’s civil war. It helped inspire the Holocaust and an American neo-Nazi fantasy called “The Turner Diaries.” Domestic terrorist Timothy McVeigh slept with that book under his pillow.

While such chilling examples crop up from time to time, Goldhagen noted “it also is true that, throughout the West, modernity has helped wean people away from anti-Semitism and other racist prejudices. Modernity generally is a friend of people opposed to prejudice of all kinds. Closed, pre-modern societies of the sort that prevail today throughout the Arab world are friends to the sorts of prejudices open, democratic societies reject.”

Free expression rooted in reason is the foundation of the open society. The Egyptian authorities who have sanctioned this profanation of Islam’s holy season must be confronted with the fact that their decision is unacceptable. Truth, freely and fearlessly expressed to those who need to hear it, is the best -- and only sure -- antidote to hateful speech.