International Jewish conspiracy
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The existence of an international Jewish conspiracy is an anti-Semitic canard which regularly features in various racist conspiracy theories.
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[edit] Origins
There have been conspiratorial slurs about Jews, such as the blood libel, for hundreds of years. In medieval Europe, it was common to blame disasters such as plagues on Jewish sabotage.
However, modern anti-Semitic theories, which depict an ellaborate secret hierarchy of controlling Jewish influences, largely take their cue from The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a fabrication purporting to be the manual of a Jewish secret society planning world domination, which was widely circulated in the early twentieth century.
Automobile manufacture Henry Ford further popularised the conspiracy during the 1920s, publishing the Protocols in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, along with other anti-Semitic articles. These were later collected and published by others as a four-volume treatise entitled The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem.
These writings proved extremely popular in Weimar-era Germany, and were a significant influence on the formation of the Nazi party and its grassroots support. Adolf Hitler, who admired Henry Ford, further propagated the consiracy myth in Mein Kampf, and propaganda throughout the Nazi regime blamed Jews for the rise of both communism and rampant capitalism, and for Germany's economic decline following the First World War.
Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco similarly believed in a conspiracy of Jews, Freemasons and communists intending to establish a world government.
[edit] Later Variations
After the fall of Nazi Germany, anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, along with anti-Semitism itself, have become increasingly marginalised. However, the myth of an international Jewish conspiracy remains common among right-wing conspiracy theorists, Neo-Nazis and other racist lunatics, and has been further perpetuated in recent years by these lunatics' rantings on the internet.
This canard is also common in parts of the Islamic world, especially among Palestinian resistance movements. For example, the founding charter of Hamas asserts the existence of a Zionist conspiracy, working internationally through secret organisations such as the Freemasons as well as the government of Israel, and cites the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as the embodiment of their plans.[1]
Anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists often focus on Zionism and the founding of Israel, but also on the Holocaust, often denying its existence or scale, and claiming that it is a myth fabricated or exaggerated to serve Jewish interests. Believers in an international conspiracy often claim that Jews are secretly running the United States government, in collaboration with Israel. They point to examples of wealthy Jews in the financial sector and other industries (the Rothschild family regularly appears in these theories), and to the apparently disproportionate numbers of Jews involved in the movie industry in Hollywood.
Individual theories vary widely. Many claim that "international Jewry" are in control of the Freemasons, Illuminati, and other real or perceived secret societies. Often the international Jewish conspiracy is portrayed as an active part of, or the major power behind, that greatest of all conspiracies, the New World Order.
In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, various anti-Semitic 9/11 conspiracy theories sprang up, claiming that a Jewish or Israeli conspiracy was behind the attacks, or that the whole incident was faked in order to serve Jewish and Zionist interests. A common myth, spread by racist websites and chain emails, is that hundreds or even thousands of Jewish employees in the World Trade Center were forewarned of the attacks missed work on September 11th 2001.
[edit] See also
[edit] Footnotes
- ↑ The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas), reproduced at MidEastWeb. See especially articles 17 and 32.
