From today's NY Times:

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April 27, 2002

Anti-Semitism Is Deepening Among Muslims
By SUSAN SACHS
 
Stay in a five-star hotel anywhere from Jordan to Iran, and you can buy the 
infamous forgery "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Pick up a newspaper in 
any part of the Arab world and you regularly see a swastika superimposed on 
the Israeil flag.

Such anti-Semitic imagery is now embedded in the mainstream discourse 
concerning Jews in much of the Islamic world, in the popular press and in 
academic journals.

The depictions are not limited to countries that are at war with Israel but 
can be found in general-interest publications in Egypt and Jordan, the two 
countries that have signed peace agreements with Israel, as well as in 
independent religious schools in Pakistan and Southeast Asia.

Arab leaders, for their part, have long rejected the accusation that their 
state-controlled press, universities and television stations promulgate 
anti-Semitic views. Islamic history, they say, contains nothing like the 
anti-Semitic horrors that occurred in Christian Europe, and Islam as a 
religion accepts many of the revelations embodied in Judaism.

The use of Nazi imagery, the newspaper caricatures of Jews with fangs and 
exaggerated hook noses, even the Arab textbooks with their descriptions of 
Jews as evil world conspirators — all of that, Arab leaders often insist, 
reflect a dislike for Israelis and Zionism but not for Jews and Judaism.

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It's rare to catch the NY Times in a major faux pas, but it's difficult, if 
not essentially impossible for Arabs to be anti-semitic. The semitic people 
*are* the Arabs, as well as the Phoenicians, the Akkadians, and the Hebrews. 
For all of the nonsense that goes on in the Mid-East, the great majority of 
the people there share the same basic language, the same basic culture, the 
same basic religion, the same basic history and the same basic genes.

In fact, if it weren't for these conditions, I don't think that they would be 
able to kill each other with such joy.

Nevertheless, a more proper title for the article would be: "Anti-Zionism Is 
Deepening Among Muslims."

Wirt Atmar

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