[Congressional Record Volume 149, Number 136 (Tuesday, September 30, 2003)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1922-E1923]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]
INFAMOUS ANNIVERSARY: A CENTURY OF THE ANTI-SEMITIC ``PROTOCOLS''
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HON. TOM LANTOS
of california
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Mr. LANTOS. Mr. Speaker, 100 years ago one of the most infamous and
most outrageous forgeries in all of history first appeared--``The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion.'' The outrage is not simply because
this document was plagiarized or because it was absolutely and patently
false. It is because this forgery was an important element in
generating the vicious and mindless anti-Semitism that led to the
Holocaust.
Mr. Speaker, we in this House recently condemned and criticized the
rising flood of anti-Semitism that has stained Europe in the last
decade when we adopted House Concurrent Resolution 49. It is shocking
and sickening that just 5 decades after 6 million innocent children,
women and men were brutally murdered by the Nazi thugs, we are seeing a
sharp escalation in anti-Semitic rhetoric and anti-Semitic violence. We
have witnessed vicious racist propaganda and physical assaults, the
burning of synagogues and the desecration of cemeteries.
This outburst of anti-Semitic violence has its roots in anti-Semitic
propaganda, and unfortunately the lies of the ``Protocols'' still
continue to play a pernicious role in inciting vicious acts. The fact
that this felonious and fallacious document is still cited and
distributed even by governments which ought to know better is evidence
of its evil influence and the ease with which hate, bigotry and racism
are spread.
Although scholars, historians, and anyone who would take the time to
look seriously at the ``Protocols'' knows that the document is patently
false, but there are still willing purveyors of this destructive
drivel. It truly boggles the mind that Arab Radio and Television of
Saudi Arabia just 2 years ago produced a 30-part series entitled
``Horseman Without a Horse'' which portrays the ``Protocols'' as
historical fact and the basis of Israeli government policies.
Furthermore, that entire 30-part series was broadcast by a number of
television stations in Egypt.
Unfortunately, Mr. Speaker, a full century after the first appearance
of the fraudulent ``Protocols,'' the forgery is alive and well.
Recently, to mark this infamous anniversary, Forward (August 22, 2003)
published an excellent article by my friend William Korey entitled
``Century of Hatred: `Protocols' Live to Poison Yet Another
Generation.''
Bill Korey brings his extraordinary scholarly perspective to this
issue, and he is uniquely qualified for the task as the former Director
of International Policy and Research at B'nai B'rith. The forgery of
the ``Protocols'' was perpetrated by the Czarist secret police, and
Bill has an international reputation as a scholar of anti-Semitism in
Russia. He is the author of The Soviet Cage: Antisemitism in Russia
(Viking, 1973) and Russian Anti-Semitism, Pamyat and the Demonology of
Zionism (Hebrew University/Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995).
Mr. Speaker, I ask that Bill Korey's excellent article from Forward
be placed in the Record, and I urge my colleagues to give it careful
and thoughtful attention.
[From Forward, Aug. 22, 2003]
Century of Hatred: ``Protocols'' Live To Poison Yet Another Generation
(By William Korey)
History's most virulent antisemitic propaganda essay, ``The
Protocols of the Elders of Zion,'' was first published 100
years ago this week. Though the Protocols turned out to be
both a notorious plagiarism and a shocking forgery, the essay
would exercise a powerful impact upon the modern era,
principally as a critical factor in generating the Holocaust.
Despite its gross falsehood and the horrors it sparked, the
Protocols strikingly continues to be promoted today, most
alarmingly in such important institutional settings as the
United Nations and Middle Eastern governmental media.
The first publication to print the Protocols was the St.
Petersburg newspaper Znamya--Russian for Banner--from August
26 to September 7, 1903. Pavel Krushevan, editor of the
paper, was known for his ultra-rightist antisemitic views and
found common cause with the so-called Black Hundreds, a group
active on behalf of extremist causes.
Krushevan, however, was not the author of the Protocols. It
was drafted under the prodding and guidance of Piotr
Rachkovsky, director of the Paris branch of Okhrana, the
Russian secret police. Sinister and wily, he cultivated the
art of forging letters or documents in which Jews were
targeted as revolutionaries and anarchists striving for
democracy in czarist Russia. As early as 1891, he revealed
his intentions in a private letter.
The published Protocols were said to be the secret
decisions reached at a gathering of Jewish leaders. That
gathering was initially held to be the First Zionist
Congress, which met in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland. Later, the
source was attributed to B'nai B'rith.
What was stunning about the Protocols, as later scholarly
investigation and research revealed, was that it was lifted
almost entirely from a forgotten political satire published
in Paris in 1864 and written by a well-known democrat,
Maurice Joly.
Joly's pamphlet was designed to expose the repressive
character of Emperor Napoleon III's regime, which ruled
France at the time. Titled ``A Dialogue in Hell:
Conversations Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu About Power
and Rights,'' the pamphlet made no reference to the Jews.
The creator of the Protocols simply plagiarized the Joly
work. Protocols 1 through 19 strikingly correspond with
Joly's first 17 dialogues. In nine cases, the borrowing
amounts to more than half of the Joly text; in some cases,
they constitute three-quarters of the test, and in one case,
Protocol 7, almost the entire text is plagiarized. Moreover,
the very order of the plagiarized passages remained the same
as in the Joly work. The main change in the shamelessly
forged Protocols, of course, was the insertion of antisemitic
content and language into the Joly dialogues.
Nor was the creator of the Protocols original in the
inserted antisemitic language. The forgery rests on the
traditional trope of international Jewry, or alternatively
Zionism, aspiring to world domination based on the biblical
concept of the ``Chosen People''. This aspiration, the
Protocols purported, is to be achieved through guile, cunning
and conspiratorial devices, particularly through Jewish
control of the international banking system and press.
The Protocols also played on the fear of Freemasons among
court circles, aristocracy and the church establishment. The
international fraternal order of Masons, which was identified
with liberalism and modernity, was presented in the Protocols
as having already been infiltrated and manipulated by the
Elders of Zion.
In its manipulative conspiracy, the Elders were to focus on
both internal, domestic matters and interstate relations.
Within each state, they were to foster discontent and unrest,
especially among workers. By promoting liberal ideas, they
were to produce confusion while, at the same time, seizing
behind-the-scenes control of political parties. Drunkenness
and prostitution were said to be vigorously encouraged and
morality undermined.
Interstate conflicts were to be stirred up through emphasis
upon national differences. Every effort was to be made by the
Elders of Zion to increase armament production and enhance
the likelihood of warfare. The end game of the Zionists,
according to the Protocols, was not victory for one side but
rather even greater chaos.
The Elders of Zion's ultimate goal, perceived to be but a
century away, was the messianic age when the entire world
would be united under Judaism and dominated by a descendant
of the House of David. The emergent structure of a Kingdom of
Zion resembles the nightmare vision of George Orwell's
``1984.''
The only nightmare vision to result from the Protocols, of
course, was the near destruction of European Jewry during the
Holocaust. Both Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler were deeply
impressed the Protocols and made it required reading for the
Hitler Youth.
With the destruction of Nazism and the horrors that
antisemitism had wrought, one might have expected that the
Protocols would be thrown in the trash bin of history. The
forgery, though, found a welcome readership in Leonid
Brezhnev's Soviet Union. The extraordinary Soviet campaign
against Zionism reached a crescendo in 1977, with the Soviet
Academy of Science's release of the vehemently hateful
publication ``International Zionism: History and Politics.''
Ironically, the Communists formally turned to Arab sources
for their anti-Zionist propaganda. One major center of hate
literature was based in Cairo, where Johannes von Leers, a
former employee of Joseph Goebbels's Nazi propaganda
ministry, was spreading antisemitism under his adopted Arabic
name, Omar Amin.
The Protocols may have been nourished in Europe with its
ancient traditions of Jew-baiting, but it found new life in
Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. Egyptian President
Gamal Abdel Nasser endorsed the document in 1958. During the
1960s and 1970s at least nine different Arabic translations
were published, some by the Egyptian government press. In
June 2001, the Egyptian paper of record, Al Ahram, cited one
of the Protocols as specifying how Jews plan to ``control the
world'' by a combination of means, including the use of
Freemasons.
A major milestone for the new drive to exploit the old
forgery came at the 2001 United Nations World Conference
Against Racism held in Durban, South Africa. A table at the
Durban forum for nongovernmental organizations displayed the
Protocols. The tract and similar racist publications so
shocked
[[Page E1923]]
Congressman Tom Lantos of California, a key figure in the
American delegation and the only Holocaust survivor in
Congress, that he described it as ``the most sickening
display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period.''
A century after its first publication, ``The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion'' continues to nourish a vibrant message
of hate. One would have thought that with all that humanity
has learned during the past 100 years, the Protocols' appeal
to ignorance would have waned, if not disappeared entirely.
The sad truth is that as long as the forgery remains a best
seller, the ground remains fertile for antisemitism.
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