values they themselves profess in other contexts. Those elements include religious fanaticism, support of suicide bombing (including the use of children as suicide bombers), rabid misogyny, hatred of gays, and in general, the contempt of Hamas and similar Islamist organizations for everything in which the Western left has traditionally believed, including human rights, democracy, and socialism. Blatant political opportunism of this kind is widely considered to extend at time of writing to the current leadership of the British Labour Party. “In 2009, when Jeremy Corbyn [recently the leader of the Labour Party in parliamentary opposition—BH] invited ‘friends’ from Hezbollah and Hamas to speak in Parliament, he said of Hamas: ‘The idea that an organization that is dedicated towards the good of the Palestinian people, and bringing about long-term peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region should be labelled as a terrorist organization by the British government is really a big, big historical mistake.’”3
In addition to its other unsavory characteristics, Hamas has traditionally advertised its commitment to a type of antisemitism differing in no significant respect from that espoused by the Nazis. Article 22 of the movement’s 1988 charter, or covenant, contains the following passage:
For a long time, the enemies [the Jews] have been planning, skilfully [sic] and with precision, for the achievement of what they have attained. They took into consideration the causes affecting the current of events. They strived to amass great and substantive material wealth which they devoted to the realisation of their dream. With their money, they took control of the world media, news agencies, the press, publishing houses, broadcasting stations, and others. With their money they stirred revolutions in various parts of the world with the purpose of achieving their interests and reaping the fruit therein. They were behind the French Revolution, the Communist revolution and most of the revolutions we heard and hear about, here and there. With their money they formed secret societies, such as Freemasons, Rotary Clubs, the Lions and others in different parts of the world for the purpose of sabotaging societies and achieving Zionist interests. With their money they were able to control imperialistic countries and instigate them to colonize many countries in order to enable them to exploit their resources and spread corruption there.
You may speak as much as you want about regional and world wars. They were behind World War I, when they were able to destroy the Islamic Caliphate, making financial gains and controlling resources. They obtained the Balfour Declaration, formed the League of Nations through which they could rule the world. They were behind World War II, through which they made huge financial gains by trading in armaments, and paved the way for the establishment of their state. It was they who instigated the replacement of the League of Nations with the United Nations and the Security Council to enable them to rule the world through them. There is no war going on anywhere, without having their finger in it.4
The 1988 Hamas covenant makes a good starting point for our purposes, not least because of the refreshing openness with which it parades views that in the West tend, except in the relative anonymity of the street or social media, to be expressed only in ways designed to disguise their real nature. The above passage from Article 22 serves to illustrate, with bracing directness, the bulk of what we shall find in this book to be leading components of antisemitism considered not as a mere matter of personal contempt or dislike but as a body of pseudo-explanatory theory capable of directing the political outlook of believers.
First, it asserts the Jews to be the deliberate authors of evil on a world scale. In this case, it construes them as the unique and sole cause of every war and every revolution that has taken place since 1793. Second, it takes Jews to be conspiratorially organized in the pursuit of these appalling aims. It assumes there to exist, in other words, a coherent system of Jewish “control” extending across the whole world. Third, it asserts this system of control to be occult, wrapped in a degree of secrecy sufficient to render it in practice utterly inscrutable and hence inviolable, operating beneath or “behind” all the apparently (but only apparently) non-Jewish institutions, great and small, from the media to the United Nations to the Lions Club, that appear (but only appear) each to exercise an influence independent of the others over what happens in the world. This extraordinary web of Jewish influence is exercised through the mysterious power of money. This makes it terrifyingly opaque to any form of scrutiny available to non-Jews and thus to any form of control that might be exercised over Jewish power by non-Jewish political institutions. All of these (except, inexplicably, for those constituted by the antisemite and his friends) are anyway themselves totally under the control of the Jews. Fourth, the passage powerfully conveys the impression that the world would be to all intents and purposes perfect—no wars, no revolutions, the Islamic Caliphate that expired at the end of World War I still in existence—if only the Jews did not exist. That, together with the first three claims, strictly entails the remaining contention of this type of antisemitism: that the only viable way of restoring the world to that happy state is to remove, to eliminate, in the last analysis to exterminate the Jewish people in its entirety.
EUROPEAN ECHOES
The Hamas charter of 1988, echoing in detail as it does the main claims of prewar Nazi antisemitism, might seem so extreme in this respect as to justify the consoling belief that antisemitism—at least that kind of antisemitism—is essentially dead in Europe.
That would be a mistake. In 2003, the European Union (EU) commissioned Gallup to carry out a public opinion poll aimed at discovering what European citizens considered to be the main threat to world peace. The results were startling enough to cause concern around the world:
A Flash Eurobarometer survey carried out in October 2003 for the European Commission in the fifteen member states of the EU found that nearly 60 percent of European citizens believe Israel poses the biggest threat to world peace. Iran is considered the second biggest threat, North Korea the third and the United States the fourth. The survey was carried out by EOS Gallup Europe.
The European Commission survey asked the public in all 15 member states to look at a list of countries and say which they considered potential threats to peace. Israel was selected by a majority in almost all the EU member states, with 74% of Dutch citizens putting the country at the top of the list as a threat to peace and 69% of Austrian citizens. Italy is the only country where opinions are divided with 48% of respondents confirming that they perceive Israel as a threat to peace in the world and 46% of the opposite opinion.
In all member states, with the exception of Italy, the majority of citizens believe Israel presents a threat to peace in the world with “yes” results in the EU as a whole as 59%. Iran, North Korea and America were all selected by 53% as a threat. The survey also listed Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Pakistan, China and Russia as potential threats.5
What makes these results startling is the extent to which they reveal European opinion to be in accord, in certain important respects, with the outlook so ingenuously presented in Article 22 of the 1988 Hamas covenant. It is not clear from the terms of the Eurobarometer poll whether what was “deemed … a threat to world peace” was, in the minds of the assenting 59 percent, the policies of the government of Israel or the very existence of the State of Israel itself. Given the democratic cast of Israeli politics, however, that is perhaps a distinction without a difference.
Either way, to consider “Israel” the single most important threat to world peace is, necessarily, to consider it a very considerable force for evil in the world. While some Jews on the left share this view, a large number of Jews do not. It is in any case a commonly held view that most, if not all, Jews support Israel. It follows that it is a very short step from considering Israel to be the main threat to world peace to regarding Jews in general as supporters of evil—or at the very least, as people who place Jewish interests above the interests of humankind at large.
It follows that for those Europeans who view Israel as the chief threat to world peace, the general support for Israel manifested by a number of Western nations, with the United States
