Contemporary Re-Emergence
Anti-Semites around the globe still actively circulate the Protocols. It has appeared
in Japan-where bestsellers by anti-Semite Masami Uno cite them as evidence of a
"Jewish conspiracy to dominate
the world-and in Latin America (including
Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia and Paraguay). The document is also favored by such
U.S. right-wing extremists as the Ku Klux Klan and Aryan Nations. The most common U.S.
edition was published by hatemonger Gerald L. K. Smiths Christian Nationalist
Crusade.
The Protocols have become a major source of Arab and Islamic propaganda. Between 1965
and 1967 alone, approximately 50 books on political subjects published in Arabic were
either based on the Protocols or quoted from them. In 1980, Hazern Nuseibeh, the Jordanian
delegate to the United Nations, spoke about the Protocols as a genuine document. In
October of 1987 the Iranian Embassy in Brazil circulated copies of the Protocols, which it
said "belongs to the history of the world."
During the 1980s Muslim groups peddled the forgery worldwide. The Muslim Student
Associations at Wayne State University in Michigan and at the University of California at Berkeley
disseminated the document. American Black Muslim groups have sold it. The Protocols were
for sale at an Islamic exhibition in Stockholm and in Londons Park Mosque, and
during a 1986 conference sponsored by the Islamic Center of Southern California the
Protocols were prominently displayed. Based on a perverse "interpretation" of
the Protocols, the Saudi Arabian government blamed Israel for an attack on a synagogue in
Istanbul in 1986.
With Glasnost there has also been a reappearance of the Protocols in the Soviet Union.
A Soviet book released in 1987 called "On the Class Essence of Zionism" revived
insidious canards contained in the Protocols, and made repeated references to Jews
engaging in "constant efforts to gain control of the world." And sections of the
Protocols have reportedly been read during meetings of the anti-Semitic Russian
nationalist movement Pamyat (Memory).
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