Ancient fantasies that infect the internet and inspire suicide bombers: Quote: >My local Islamic bookshop is a ramshackle place whose volumes are barely visible through a mist of dust and burnt spices. Here the jovial staff - "All right, mate?" - will sell you commentaries on the Koran, hanging lamps, copper teapots and phone cards. They will also dispense, equally cheerfully, copies of a paperback which explains that Jews ritually murder Christian children and use their blood to season Passover matzo balls. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a version of the medieval "blood libel" cooked up by the tsarist secret police a century ago. It is a work of the blackest propaganda, its every assertion demonstrably false. Yet it is circulating in 21st-century Britain, through bookshops, online book services and websites, nearly all of them Islamic but by no means all of them readily identifiable as the "extremist" outlets that Tony Blair proscribed at his press conference yesterday. The audience for the Protocols stretches far beyond fanatical jihadists; no one has surveyed "moderate" Muslims to discover how many accept its central tenet, but my guess is that community spokesmen would have a hard time accounting for the results on the Today programme. Before we raise our hands in horror, however, it is worth scanning the shelves of the chain bookstore in a nearby shopping mall. For most of the past year, its best-selling title has been The Da Vinci Code, a thriller based on a myth about the Merovingian bloodline of Jesus that its author, Dan Brown, believes to be true. He is thus presenting secret "facts" in the form of fiction, which is also the technique adopted by an Egyptian television soap opera based on the Protocols.<
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posted by johannes,
Saturday, August 06, 2005
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