April 27, 2002 -- NEW YORK TIMES

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.

Yet in many Muslim countries the hatred of Jews as Jews, and not only as citizens of Israel, has been nurtured through popular culture for generations.

Take for instance an official Jordanian government textbook for high school students. It describes Jews as innately deceitful and corrupt. "Up to the present," it states, "they are the masters of usury and leaders of sexual exhibitionism and prostitution."

In the view of many scholars of Islam, such texts are a sign that the Arab-Israeli conflict has been transformed in Muslim culture from a political, nationalist and territorial battle into a cosmic war between religions and, indeed, between good and evil.

The length of the Middle East conflict has contributed to this shift.

"You see a certain level of anti-Semitism that you look at and think, how can smart people really believe this?" said John L. Esposito, a professor of religion and international affairs at Georgetown University. "Part of the explanation is that they grew up with this, but part is also that they grew up in a confrontational situation. You make the world into `us and them,' and therefore you buy into every possible caricature of the other."

Both Jews and Muslims engage in hatemongering based on skewed readings of their holy books, said Professor Esposito, author of the recent book "Unholy War: Terror in the Name of Islam."

Islamic fundamentalists frequently refer to Jews as either the sons or the grandsons of apes and monkeys. These sorts of descriptions can sometimes be heard in sermons at mosques in the Palestinian territories as well as from some Saudi religious leaders.

The reference is drawn from a verse in the Koran that, taken in context, refers to Jews and Christians who break the Sabbath and who mock the early Muslims for their beliefs. The Koran says that God made those people as despicable as monkeys, pigs and idol worshipers.

"In all faiths, more exclusivist or militant verses are taken out of context by some and amplified in popular culture," Professor Esposito said. The Koran also contains complimentary verses about law-abiding Jews, at one point saying that the "believers and the Jews" who do right will be rewarded by God.

Islamic doctrine concerning Christians has also been reinterpreted in recent decades in an effort to forge a bond between Muslims and Christians against the Jews.

Literal Islam recognizes Jesus as a prophet but does not believe that he was crucified. The Koran says that Jews tried to crucify him, but that God rescued Jesus and that the Jews instead killed only a likeness of Jesus.

Yet a common charge from Muslims these days is that the Jews did indeed kill Jesus. When Pope John Paul II visited Damascus last year, President Bashar al-Assad greeted him with a speech accusing Jews of just that. Mr. Assad's minister of religion affairs, Muhammad Ziyadah, later embellished the remarks, saying, "We must be fully aware of what the enemies of God and malicious Zionism conspire to commit against Christianity and Islam."

The pope did not respond directly but called for reconciliation and peace.

That Jews would be demonized by some Arabs, and Arabs demonized by some Jews may not be surprising after nearly a century of conflict over Palestine. Even in less enduring wars, nations have engaged in vicious and sometimes racist wartime propaganda against the enemy. And since Israel was founded as a Jewish nation, the issue of religion has always been an element in its relations, or lack of relations, with its Arab neighbors.

Still, the breadth and viciousness of the anti-Semitism is striking.

Recent attacks on Jewish centers in France and an ancient synagogue in Tunisia have been attributed to Arabs or Muslim fundamentalists.

Last month the Saudi daily Al Riyadh published an article that accused Jews of consuming the blood of Christian and Muslim children during the holiday of Purim. The author, a lecturer at King Faisal University in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, called this medieval fiction a "well-established fact."

After the article was translated from the Arabic and publicized by an Israel-based group called the Middle East Media Research Institute, the editor of the newspaper repudiated the article, saying it was nonsense and should not have been published.

The recycling of such stories has become a fixture of Muslim discourse, said Bernard Lewis, a historian of Islam and the Middle East, who has called this trend the "Islamization of anti-Semitism."

Its literature, he has written, includes classic European anti-Semitic writings like "Protocols," introduced to the Middle East in the late 1800's and now easily available in Arabic throughout the region and in English. In recent decades this material has been supplemented by a home-grown body of work, ascribed to Islamic teachings, that describes what it calls the innate wickedness of the Jewish people throughout the ages.

Yet Jews were minor players in Islamic theological writing for centuries, Professor Lewis wrote in "Semites and Anti-Semites."

They figure in the Koran, which Muslims call the final and perfect revelation of God, as obstinate antagonists to the prophet Muhammad's efforts to bring Islam to the people of the Arabian Peninsula. Of the tribes he encountered, the Jews were the most hostile to his message. But in the end, the Jewish tribes were defeated, and the Koran refers to them as a people whose rebelliousness had always been punished by God.

In more modern Islamic teachings, which can be found in Arab textbooks and mainstream newspaper articles, the Koran's description of the Jews' opposition to Muhammad takes on monumental importance. The Jews corrupted the word of God from the start, the more recent interpretations say, and their scheming against the prophet was an expression of their innate wickedness.

"Some people confuse certain verses of the Koran attacking the Jews of that day, as an attack on Judaism," said Seyyed Hossein Nasr, a professor of Islamic studies at George Washington University. "It's not innocent confusion. It's deliberate confusion, and it happens on both sides."

This is a modern development, less theological than emotional, and leaves as its casualty a long tradition of amity between Islam and Judaism, he added.

"If religious authorities in both religions put the demands of God above nationalistic and ethnic feelings," Professor Nasr said, "then maybe something can be done."