MR. HILLEL FRADKIN: Welcome to all of you, and also to our speaker today, Gabriel Schoenfeld, the author of the new book, The Return of Anti-Semitism. I will say a few words of introduction and then moderate the discussion afterward.

Before introducing Gabe himself, I want to say a few words of introduction. Perhaps I might begin by saying that it is customary or conventional in events about books, about new books, to express gratitude to the author for his book.

In these circumstances, to express gratitude would have an ambiguous meaning. I’m certainly grateful that Gabe has written a very fine book on an important subject. I’m sorry, however, that the subject, the return of anti-Semitism, has become important.

For a certain portion of the era that began with the end of World War II, the question of anti-Semitism seemed to be in decline. I speak for myself, as a person born immediately after the war, as a person who belonged to a unique generation, a unique Jewish generation. I, and most people of my generation in this country, grew up with concern about anti-Semitism, grew up with the memory of the recent extermination of six million Jews, but with little or no experience of it in this country.

Because of the generally favorable circumstances in this country towards its Jewish community, or rather these circumstances have led some non-Jews, including friends of the Center, to confess to a certain weariness with the question of anti-Semitism. It is a subject, to put it candidly, that they would prefer that we Jews stop raising.

In the most benign case, they suggest that we devote ourselves to the richness of our religious tradition, rather than the richness of our heritage of persecution and suffering. And I would like to say that I certainly wish that it was the case that we could afford to apply such advice. Speaking for myself, but also I think for many American Jews of my generation, we are also weary of the subject of anti-Semitism, not to mention its substance. And with that we could regard, various new and old expressions of anti-Semitism as simply marginal and fringe elements.

But I fear, and I think others do, that we cannot, not only or primarily for ourselves. We have a duty as fathers and mothers, and now as grandfathers and grandmothers, to our children and grandchildren. We also have a duty to our country. This blessed land, which has shared its blessings with its Jewish citizens, indeed regarded them as citizens from the very first, as our first president, George Washington, so eloquently put it in letters he wrote to the Jewish communities of this country immediately after his inauguration.

We know that what is marginal, we know from our experience, our historical experience, that what is marginal can become mainstream and effect not only the American Jewish community, but American society at large. Political circumstances can provide the proper conditions and political partisanship and opportunism will do the rest. Unfortunately, since 9-11 and our war on terrorism and even before, political conditions, it seems to me, have become more favorable to this development.

We have watched with some alarm as marginal and still minor occasions of political opportunism emerged. To name names, a Cynthia McKinney here, a Jim Moran there. But I would venture to say that in the last few weeks we may have come to see a quantum leap forward.

We are -- and one of the reasons for mentioning this is the current political circumstances. We are in the early stages of presidential contest, which by everyone’s account will be very long, hard and probably extremely nasty.

Within the last couple of weeks, a senior member of the Senate and the Democratic Party, Senator Rockefeller, undertook to attack the Bush Administration. Fair enough. But the form of attack was a demand by him, from the Department of Defense, all intelligence shared with it by Israel and only by Israel.

Now as the Senator knows as a veteran member of the Senate, of the Committee in which he serves, we share intelligence with many, many countries. Hence, it seems hard to regard his request as simply an inquiry, but rather as a means to make a case. This, it seems to me, is an extremely unhealthy development, not only for American Jews, but for American public discourse. For these and other reasons, Mr. Schoenfeld’s book is an extremely timely, and unfortunately, necessary book.

Let me say a few words about Mr. Schoenfeld. I know you have received information about him through the invitation and the handout, but also for our C-SPAN audience, it would be helpful. Gabriel Schoenfeld joined Commentary magazine in 1994 and is currently its senior editor. Prior to joining Commentary, Schoenfeld was a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, here in Washington, D.C., and founded the research bulletin Post-Soviet Prospects.

Schoenfeld earned his Ph.D. from Harvard University’s government department in 1989. Today he writes widely for Commentary and for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, The New Republic, the Atlantic Monthly, the National Interest, the New Leader, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, Der Spiegel, and the Asahi Shimbun.

Perhaps most importantly, his weekly chess column appears in the New York Sun and the Jerusalem Post. And as I know from various people addicted to that sport, already extremely popular. He has appeared as a guest commentator on a variety of network television news shows, including CBS Nightwatch, ABC’s Nightline, CNN, and also on CBC, in Canada. Please welcome Gabe Schoenfeld.

MR. GABRIEL SCHOENFELD: Thank you very much, Hillel, for that very generous introduction. It’s a great pleasure to be here at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington. I haven’t been to Washington in a long time and I see many old friends here in the audience.

I want to begin by saying a few words about how it is I came to write a book called The Return of Anti-Semitism. As Hillel mentioned, I’m an editor at Commentary. I’ve been there for a decade now. Commentary is housed in the offices of the American Jewish Committee in New York.

And working in that building over the last decade, I’ve watched as an evermore stringent set of security measures have been put in place, in and around the building where I work.

They put something called a mantrap in the lobby, two heavy steel and glass bullet proof and bomb proof doors, designed to keep anyone from bursting into the building. They have an explosive sniffing device in the lobby, designed to screen incoming mail. They have a team of armed guards who sit and monitor the mantrap and the explosive sniffing device and television cameras -- video cameras that are on the exterior of the building to see who might be casing it.

They put something called jersey barriers around the exterior, which are heavy concrete emplacements designed to keep cars or trucks from barreling into the building and presumably blowing themselves up. They put a plastic laminate on the glass of the entire building, so that in the event of an explosion in the street, there won’t be shards that spray and injure the people working inside.

Now, watching this set of measures being installed provoked a series of questions in my mind. What was the nature of the threat that this building was under? Did we, working in a Jewish organization here in New York, face a lethal danger or was this a result of what Leon Wieseltier, in the New Republic, called -- or manifestation of what he had called "ethnic panic". I set out to try and answer that question, by reviewing the evidence and the nature of the contemporary threat to Jews around the world.

And I think it’s obvious, surely to most of you and to anyone who looks at this question, that there is a lethal anti-Semitism at large in the world. Its epicenter is the Islamic world. And the center of that epicenter is probably one of two countries at the heart of the Islamic world, Iran and Saudi Arabia.

Saudi Arabia, in particular, has been using its immense wealth and its resources to propagate an extreme brand of anti-Semitic hatred within its own society, using modern means of communication, television, the Internet to the extent that Saudis have computers, and older means -- the mosques, textbooks and so forth.

Just to give you a flavor of what kind of material is pervasive in Saudi Arabia, in its newspapers, on the airwaves there, I’m going to read you a quotation from the newspaper, Alriyadh. Which is timely as well, because we just passed the Jewish Festival of Purim.

And this is a discussion in Alriyadh of how the Jews make their pastry for Purim, hamantaschen, the traditional ingredient for which is usually poppy seeds or apricots. But according to Alriyadh, there is another ingredient that the Jews use these days, it is human blood. And here is how, according to Alriyadh, the Jews extract this blood from their victims.

"For this", says the newspaper, "a needle studded barrel is used. This is a kind of barrel about the size of the human body, with extremely sharp needles set in it on all sides. These needles pierce the victim’s body from the moment he is placed in the barrel. These needles do the job and the victim’s blood drifts from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment. Torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight as they carefully monitor every detail of the blood letting -- blood shedding, with pleasure and love that are difficult to comprehend."

Now this kind of material, distributed internally in Saudi Arabia, is also exported by that government. And similar material, of course, is exported by the government of Iran and other governments in the Middle East. Almost all of the Arab governments are producing similar material. So that you have it now that theocratic regimes, like Iran and Saudi Arabia are filling their societies with this hatred and secular societies as well. Such countries like Egypt, Syria, moderate Morocco, also one finds similar material, or the Palestinian Authority, which signed the Oslo Accords and renounced incitement of this kind, is also trading in this.

And the result, of course, is that one sees people who, believing that Jews use human blood for Hamantaschen and believing all sorts of other things, drawn from myths imported from Christian Europe, myths imported from Nazi propaganda, myths derived from Islamic sources, you find people in the Arab world willing to sacrifice their own lives to kill as many of these evil Jews as possible. And we see this in the daily toll of suicide bombings in Israel.

But I think it’s very important to note that in the Islamic world, this kind of hatred is not confined to the countries that are locked in conflict with Israel. And that it extends far beyond, so that we have, in countries that have never had any contact with Jews and are thousands of miles away from Jerusalem, we have more of the same. As in Malaysia, where we saw just in December, the country’s Prime Minister, Mohammed Mahathir, indulging in yet another tirade against the Jews, a people whom he’s blamed over the years for all sorts of problems in Malaysian society.

This is not a new thing. He wrote a book some fifteen to twenty years ago, in which he singled out what he called the "hook nose Jews" for manipulating the Malaysian currency. It’s evidently a theme that resonates within Malaysian society or at least some sector of it.

And in nearby Pakistan, again, a country which only has had a miniscule Jewish population and today has maybe only under ten Jews living there, one finds again, pervasive hatred of Jews and pervasive fear of Jews, according to American journalists who’ve traveled there.

No matter who one talks to, there is a conviction, widespread, in the society, that American Jews in particular are responsible for having organized the attacks of September 11th and their goal was to propel America into a war with Afghanistan, among other things. And we saw, of course, the most dramatic demonstration of this anti-Semitic hatred in Pakistan with the execution of Daniel Pearl, who was forced, just before he was beheaded, to utter the words, "My mother is Jewish. My father is Jewish. I am Jewish."

Now, Europe would not seem to be particularly fertile ground for this kind of genocidal, openly genocidal anti-Semitism. After all, Europeans, many of them still alive, remember precisely where a war against the Jews led. It led, in their memory and in the memory of people who are of a certain generation still alive, to a war that destroyed almost every major city of the continent, to the death of some six million Jews and to the death of some tens of millions of Europeans, in the conflict.

And it’s not surprising that in the aftermath of World War II and in the post-war period generally, political parties that have attempted to capitalize on this kind of -- on Nazi style anti-Semitism or a right-wing anti-Semitism, have faired very poorly in the post-war era.

The two possible exceptions here are Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, head of France’s National Front, who in 2002, did manage to force a run off with Jacques Chirac, an unprecedented achievement for him in his political career. But, of course, he went on to suffer a landslide defeat, the greatest landslide in the history of the modern French Republic.

In any case, even though he’s dabbled in anti-Semitism over the course of his career and more than dabbled in it, he was not running on an anti-Semitic platform at all. He was at pains to distance himself from his former pronouncements and he was running on a generally xenophobic platform.

And the same story might be told about Joerg Haider in Austria, who is a person who emerges directly, head of Austria’s Freedom Party, who emerges directly from Nazi milieu. Both of his parents were unrepentant Nazis and he himself, his personal fortune rests on property that was expropriated from Jews.

And he did manage, in 1999, for his Freedom Party to get 27 percent of the vote in Austria. It’s since fallen back quite sharply. And again, he ran on a generally xenophobic platform and was also at pains to distance himself from his anti-Semitic utterances. In fact, he visited the Holocaust Museum here in Washington and traveled to Israel in an attempt to shed his anti-Semitic associations.

So this right-wing brand of anti-Semitism is in eclipse. It hardly means that anti-Semitism has disappeared on the continent. In fact, it’s there and it’s growing and it’s coming from other directions. And the first and most important of these, as I’m sure you all are aware, is Islam in Europe, where there’s been a profound demographic change on the continent over the last 50 years.

In 1945, there were approximately a million Muslims living in Europe. Today that number is somewhere between 16 and 20 million. And these immigrants bring with them the ideas, the hatreds that are ubiquitous in their former countries and replicate those ideas in their newspapers and also receive television broadcasts from the Arab world into Europe. The hatred is perpetuated in that way.

What’s more, this is of course, a population that is not assimilated into Europe and its society. It’s a population that by and large scores very poorly on all indicators of social and economic health: high unemployment, high illiteracy, high rates of incarceration and so forth and so on.

And the result, of course, is a population that is deeply alienated and that certain elements of which radicalize and are striking out at the objects of their hatred, which as often is the case, at Europe’s Jews. We see this most dramatically in France, where there’s been a whole spade of articles.

I scarcely need to tell you about them, but just to point to some dramatic facts that strike me as an indicator of how serious the problem has become. More synagogues have been destroyed in France in the past five years by acts of desecration and so forth, than were destroyed in the entire period of the Nazi occupation of France.

And French Jews have begun to react, not surprisingly. We’re seeing historically high rates of immigration from France to Israel, a real change for this community. We see a Jewish community that has prided itself on integrating into French institutions, withdrawing its children from the French public school system into private schools. The atmosphere within the French public school system has become very threatening. And so we have a record increase in the establishment of Jewish day schools in that country.

And of course, we have the Chief Rabbi of France issuing a warning to French Jews not to wear garb that identifies them as Jews -- no skull caps, Stars of David and so forth, lest one become victims of the violence that now threatens this community. And similar stories could be told, perhaps not as dramatic, about other countries in Europe and Spain, the Benelux countries, somewhat in England and on and on.

Islam is not the only corridor, the only stream of anti-Semitism that is now taking on a life inside of Europe. We also have an older anti-Semitic tradition that has come alive on the continent. And that left-wing anti-Semitism has its own distinct history.

And I’m going to first read you a quotation from a nineteenth century French Socialist, Pierre Prudhon, which sheds interesting light on the continuities between that moment, mid-nineteenth century, and our own and where the Left is with respect to the Jews, or elements of the contemporary Left, in any case.

Here’s what Prudhon said that Europeans, or Frenchmen should do with regard to the Jews. He said, "We should make a provision against that race which poisons everything by butting in everywhere without ever merging with any people, demand its expulsion from France, except for individuals married to French women, abolish the synagogues, allow them to enter no employment, and finally, proceed with the abolition of this religion. Not for nothing have the Christians called them deicides. The Jew is the enemy of mankind. That race must be sent back to Asia or exterminated."

Now in some ways, this quotation anticipates fully the Nazi final solution. But I would point to something else in it as shedding light on the current kinds of anti-Semitism, strands of anti-Semitism that we see in the European Left. The first is that the contemporary European Left does not, unlike Prudhon, speak openly about the Jews this or the Jews that. That word, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, is a taboo.

And instead, various code words are used by the Left to bake similar charges against Jews. We hear instead, in Europe, as we do here, increasingly about the nefarious role played by neoconservatives or more bluntly, by Zionists. And the indictment, however, is the same.

According to Prudhon, the failure of the Jews was that they would not merge with any people. And this is precisely the indictment leveled against the Jewish state, which is now playing the role of the Jew of the nations. It refused to merge with its neighbors and disappear.

And so today, in Europe, we have it that a whole host of leftists are engaging in a campaign against the Jewish state, singling it out for special opprobrium. Environmentalists, Socialists, anti-globalists, all marching in the street holding up banners, denouncing Israel, equating its leadership with the Nazis.

We see this not just on the streets, but in elite circles. The French Ambassador to the Court of Saint James, Daniel Bernard, called Israel -- can I say this on C-SPAN? -- a shitty little country. He blamed, in a kind of transmutation of a medieval notion, he blamed all the current troubles in the world on that country. The Jews are responsible for all the current troubles in the world.

And we see it in the readiness of Europeans on the Left to make extreme and unfounded charges against the Jewish state. As when Israel, in 2002, after one of its hotels was blown up on Passover during Seder, killing two dozen or more people. Israel responded with a raid on a terrorist camp in the city of Jenin, a refugee camp there, engaged in gun battle.

The world denounced Israel for committing genocide. Most major West European newspapers, a number of British newspapers, used that term to describe what Israel had done. Well, in fact, there was a gun battle and it turned out that some fifty Palestinians were killed and that some 47 of them were armed guerrillas. But nonetheless, it’s called genocide.

We see it in the readiness in the Left to equate the victims of the Holocaust with the perpetrators of the Holocaust, a kind of grotesque historical inversion. This is not a new theme in the news. Already in the 1970s, Olaf Palme, Sweden’s Prime Minister, ran a great standing on the Left, the head of Europe’s Socialist International, gave a speech in which he likened what Israel was doing on the Gaza Strip in the West Bank, to what the Nazis had done to the Jews in the Warsaw ghetto.

Well today, a kind of comparison that Palme indulged in, in the 1970s has become commonplace. You find it everywhere in European political discourse. The poet Tom Paulin, wrote a celebrated poem describing how the Zionist SS guns down -- what he called the Zionist SS, guns down Palestinian children. And we see the Portuguese novelist, Jose Saramago, again, describing what Israel is doing in the occupied territories as nothing less than, the word he used is Auschwitz.

Now, of course, there are no smokestacks or crematoria in the occupied territories or anywhere else in Israel. But none the less, this is repeated by not a crackpot writing for other crackpots, but a leading man of letters in Europe. Jose Saramago is a Nobel Laureate in literature.

And I think this is an indication of just how pervasive this kind of thinking is in Europe and is also an indicator of how the most progressive elements of the European scene have become agents of the most reactionary aspects of the European past.

Now, what about the United States? Are we likely to see this kind of anti-Semitism make headway here? Well, to a considerable extent, the United States mirrors Europe, but in very attenuated form. I think it’s very important not to exaggerate the problems we are facing. Although we are, indeed facing some problems.

To begin with, as in Europe, the right-wing anti-Semitism is in serious decline. The militias, the KKK and so forth, various neo-Nazi groups, have all fallen on very hard times. The key event here, of course, was the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, which utterly discredited these fringe movements, which were fringe movements to begin with, and become more so. And the ensuing police group medium cracked down on all of them. And so, they’ve become removed from the margins to the far margins.

And in intellectual circles, writers who’ve attempted to make headway promoting anti-Semitic ideas have not faired particularly well. Jude Wanniski, once a founder of supply side economics, a distinguished member of the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, began promoting the ideas of the Reverend Louis Farrakhan, defending him against charges of anti-Semitism and so forth. And he is today, no longer with the Wall Street Journal, but just a man with a website in New Jersey.

Joseph Sobran, who also published a series of anti-Semitic columns, who was a former columnist at the National Review, William F. Buckley’s magazine, was pushed out of the magazine for indulging in anti-Semitism. And he today, is a crackpot, writing for other crackpots. His work, he lectures for organizations like the Institute of Historical Review, which is a California Holocaust denial outfit. And he is on the far fringe and does not enjoy any sort of mainstream audience.

Politicians on the Right who’ve attempted to capitalize on anti-Semitism have not done well. David Duke did, it’s true, manage to force a runoff in the Louisiana Gubernatorial election some years back, but he lost. And today, where is he? He’s in federal prison on fraud charges.

Patrick J. Buchanan, who has flirted with anti-Semitic ideas over the years, ran for the presidency four years ago as a Populist. Well this Populist proved to be not particularly popular and got under one percent of the vote. So perhaps with the possible exception of Mel Gibson, a movie I haven’t seen yet, The Passion, the right-wing anti-Semitism is in eclipse in this country.

On the other hand, the left-wing brand that I was describing in Europe, is making its appearance here. It’s confined largely to college campuses and has been most in evidence in the anti-Zionist campaign that has been waged on campus after campus, across the country, which frequently, regularly, typically crosses the line from legitimate criticism of Israel, into outright Judeophobia. As when posters are held aloft, showing pictures of what’s labeled "Palestinian baby meat, slaughtered according to Jewish rights." Or when the Jewish star is equated with the ultimate symbol of evil, the Nazi swastika.

And perhaps the most significant demonstration of how far this movement has come is in this petition drive that has circulated on leading American universities. It began at Harvard and MIT and it spread elsewhere throughout the Ivy League and beyond, signed by many faculty members, calling on their universities to disinvest their portfolios from companies that do business in the state of Israel.

Now it’s to my mind, striking that Israel, the Jewish state, is singled out somehow as the only country in need of such sanctions, when countries that engage in human rights violations on a truly massive scale are ignored; Communist China or Saudi Arabia. There’s utter silence from these professors. Yet, the Jewish state is singled out. It strikes me as an example of nothing less than unadorned bigotry.

And along with this left-wing anti-Semitism, we have our own growing problem with Islamic anti-Semitism on our shores. Here the numbers are somewhat in dispute. We don’t have a good estimate of how many Muslims there are in the United States. The number is variously set between two and six million people and stipulated somewhere in between. I just don’t know.

But I do know that immigrants from the Middle East constitute the fastest growing subgroup in this country. Their numbers increased eight-fold in the period of 1970 to 2000, and are expected to double over the course of the next decade.

As in Europe, many of these immigrants bring with them the hatreds and political ideas that are taught in their homelands. And as in Europe, many of these immigrants replicate these ideas on our shores. So we now have it that we have a system of Islamic day schools. Just as we have Jewish day schools, we have Islamic day schools. Maybe between 200 to 400 such schools, teaching what’s a variously estimated, between 20,000 and 40,000 students.

And in these schools, textbooks are used that are imported from countries like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and where the same kinds of teachings about Jews that I was describing earlier, are taught, that Jews are the sons of monkeys and apes or that Muslim’s have a sacred duty to slaughter Jews, and so forth and so on. And we see the same kinds of material in the Arab language newspapers in these countries -- the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the notorious czarist forgery describing a cabal of Jews working behind the scenes to manipulate events, have been republished in newspapers like the Arab Voice, published in Paterson, New Jersey and in other Arab language newspapers in this country.

We also have in some ways, an equally troubling or more troubling development inside our prisons, where a different problem exists in a somewhat different population. Some perhaps quarter of a million black Muslim prisoners in this country and men and women behind bars who are members of one or another black Muslim movements, and the states have had to service their religious needs. They do this by hiring a core of Chaplains. And as the Wall Street Journal has reported, many of those Chaplains have been the beneficiaries of a massive outreach program by the government of Saudi Arabia.

They are flown to Saudi Arabia for instruction in the fine points of Wahhabi doctrine and they come back and teach these doctrines in American prisons to a population that is one of the most potentially violent in our country. And it’s not a surprise, I think, that as a result of all the trends I’m describing, we do have a kind of change in the nature of the violent actions that are directed against Jews in this country.

If in the past, the kind of vandalism of synagogues and desecration of cemeteries was the work of neo-Nazis or skinheads, today it is increasingly the work of young Muslims in this country, or at least so says the Anti-Defamation League, of the B’nai B’rith.

And along with this rising anti-Semitism, we have something that I want to draw attention to, which is what I call anti-Semitism denial, which is the refusal to recognize that what we are facing is, in fact, anti-Semitism. I can cite several instances.

I’ll begin with an attack that occurred against a synagogue in the Ukrainian city of Kiev, in which a crowd descended upon the synagogue chanting "Kill the kikes" and a Rabbi was assaulted and required hospitalization and windows were broken. In the aftermath, the Mayor of Kiev held a press conference to declare that this was not anti-Semitism, this was soccer hooliganism. And of course, Jacques Chirac, said last year, famously, that there is no anti-Semitism in France. There are no anti-Semites.

The Reverend Louis Farrakhan -- the anti-Semites themselves are always at pains to deny they’re anti-Semitic -- says, "I am not an anti-Semite. My quarrel is only with those Jews who oppress our people," repeating his own anti-Semitism in the process.

The New York Times seems sometimes rather loath to recognize anti-Semitism. There was an interesting article in the Weekend Review, in which reporting on a demonstration in Europe, in which people were chanting, "Death to the Jews." And the Times article asked, "Is this legitimate criticism of Israel or is it anti-Semitism?" It did not really answer the question, it just posed it.

And I had my own, in researching my book -- researching the article actually that proceeded it and appeared in Commentary, I had my own encounter with this kind of denial when I was trying to track down a quotation that appeared in a student newspaper at Rutgers University. The quotation said something like -- said exactly like, "Die, Jew, die. Die, die, die. Build yourself an oven, die."

So I called the faculty member who was responsible for overseeing this student publication, just to verify its existence. And she confirmed that, yes, it was there. And I explained to her what it is I wanted it for and she became very alarmed. She said, "Mr. Schoenfeld, you don’t understand. That’s not anti-Semitism. That’s blowing off steam."

And because of the denial and because of the anti-Semitism, I think we are facing three dangers, which I’ll close with, from this rising tide of anti-Semitism and a refusal to recognize it for what it is.

And the first of these is the way in which, under the pressure of this openly genocidal anti-Semitism that is now spilling across the boundaries of the Middle East and the Islamic world into Europe and to some extent here, under the pressures of that wave, we are seeing that more benign forms of anti-Semitism are being normalized, becoming acceptable in a polite society.

And just to cite two examples. We are just seeing the tail end of the presidential campaign and we have it that a candidate for the presidency of the United States and the Democratic Party, has openly fanned the embers of anti-Semitism and participated in a Pogrom, in fact, in 1981 in Crown Heights, in which a Jew was killed.

He participated in a boycott of a Jewish owned store in Harlem, in which eight people, none of them were Jews, were killed, but where a great deal of incendiary anti-Semitic rhetoric could be found. This man, who’s never apologized for his own role in these events and for openly speaking in anti-Semitic terms in the Crown Heights riot, is accepted as a member in good standing of the Democratic Party.

Indeed, he is invited to participate in the debates and never criticized for his words. In fact, he is the candidate who gets to lecture the other candidates about race relations. And they are silent about his past. And not only they are silent, which perhaps electoral considerations explain that, but the press is generally silent as well. And it has become accepted that this essentially deviant candidate is in the mainstream.

And another example is the way which Jewish officials of the U.S. government are singled out for responsibility for policies with which people disagree, the Persian Gulf War most notably. We hear it over and over again, that a trio of Jewish names, Wolfowitz, Perle and Feith, are singled out as the hawks of the second Persian Gulf War, as if Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice and George Bush himself, were not the architects of that war. None of them are Jewish. But yet, somehow this trio of lower level officials is held responsible.

Now this corruption of our language and our political discussion would be bad enough, but it is, of course, not the only danger we face. Far more serious is the very real prospect of terrorism directed against Jewish targets. Obviously, we’ve seen in the aftermath of September 11th, that Al Qaeda remains interested in attacking Israeli and Jewish targets. Not all of its targets have been Israeli or Jewish, but a good number of them have been -- the synagogue in Djerba, in Tunisia, an attempt on the synagogue at Strasbourg, an attack on an Israeli-owned resort, an aircraft in Kenya, bombs blown up in synagogues in Turkey.

And those barriers around my office are there for a reason. Indeed, here in this country we have seen a new kind of violence directed against Jews over the last ten years that we haven’t seen before.

We saw a Lebanese gunman open fire with an automatic gun on the Brooklyn Bridge, at a vanload of Hasidic Jews, killing one and injuring several. We saw another gunman on top of the Empire State Building, whose target, as he wrote in his suicide note, was Zionists, open fire, killing several people, two at least, and injuring quite a few. And we saw most recently, in Los Angeles, a gunman open fire, an Egyptian, I believe, open fire at the El Al ticket counter and killing several people.

But terrorism itself is not, in the final analysis, either the most grave danger that we face. Rather, that comes from another department, which is the realm of international relations. For the states that are most badly infected with the anti-Semitic hatred, are also the states that are most determined to acquire weapons of mass destruction.

In Pakistan we already have it that they have what the government calls the Islamic bomb. In fact, they have some 35 to 40 of these extremely destructive weapons. Weapons that can obliterate whole cities. And not only do they have these weapons, but they have shown a readiness to share the technology with other countries that are infected with the anti-Semitic hatred. And among their clients appear to be Libya and Iran.

Iran openly drapes its missiles with signs saying, "Israel must be wiped from the map." And now we learn that it has, thanks to the help of Pakistan and thanks to the help of some other countries, acquired uranium enriched to 90 percent and is far closer to developing atomic weapons that our intelligence agencies had thought.

So a country that has engaged in terrorism against Jewish targets in far away places like Argentina, is now going to have, or is coming close to having these fearsome weapons. So we are, in the final analysis, facing something of a replay of -- perhaps a more terrible replay of the 1930s.

Leon Wieseltier attempted to dismiss all this by saying that Hitler is dead. That was the title of his article. But the genocidal impulse that Hitler represented, remains very much alive. And the possibilities of a recurrence, using weapons of mass destruction, of repetition of the tragedies of the 1930s remains very much with us.

I’ll close there and take questions.

MS. DIANE KNIPPERS: My name is Diane Knippers.

How widespread is the understanding among Jewish leaders in this country, that the problem is more on the Left than on the Right? I mean, I see that clearly when I look at Christian Church statements, that there’s a lot more anti-Semitism and certainly anti-Israel statements on the Left than on the Right. But how widespread is this understanding in the Jewish community?

MR. SCHOENFELD: I think it doesn’t understand it very well at all. In fact, it continues to direct its energies in the other direction, toward the right-wing anti-Semitism and tends to grapple rather haphazardly if at all with the left-wing brand and with the Islamic brand. Although it’s mobilizing on the Islamic front more these days.

But, there is a real lag in understanding, which remains a significant problem. We see it in the response of the Anti-Defamation League to The Passion, which its made it’s central focus over the last several months, perhaps over a year, while saying relatively little about what I think represents a far graver danger to the Jewish community and indeed to the society as a whole.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: In the case of the United States, you mentioned your concern about what happens in the prisons with the Muslim Chaplains. You also mentioned some concern about what may be happening in Muslim schools. I wonder how much we know about what may be happening in terms of indoctrination within the armed forces, as far as the Muslim Chaplains?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, I think that also remains a concern. I know that one of the institutions that was responsible for recruiting Chaplains for the military, was subsequently closed down, the Virginia-based outfit, for its associations with -- or raided -- I’m not sure if it was closed down. But raided for its associations with radical Islamic groups.

And we have seen a series of incidents -- some of the people have been acquitted, so you don’t want to rush to judgment, but where Islamic members of the armed forces have been engaged in espionage.

But I think the focus here in the military has not really been anti-Semitism, per se, but just indoctrination in tenets of radical Islam.

MR. FRADKIN: Would you please, all speakers, identify yourself for the record?

MR. LLOYD EBY: My name is Lloyd Eby. I’m from The World and I magazine. Could you say something about what you think the reasons for the rise in anti-Semitism are today?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, it’s very complicated and I don’t really go into this very much in my book, the reasons for it, because it’s so -- well, it’s just a very hard question. But clearly in the Islamic world, we’ve seen a steady growth of radical Islam, which calls that these anti-Semitic ideas are very central to their teachings. And at the same time, we have this complete crisis of these countries -- economic stagnation of a very striking character, an inability to come to terms with the modern world.

And anti-Semitism is a natural bacteria that grows very well in that environment. And we also see a way that this disease is just spreading naturally across borders, carried by human carriers and carried by the airwaves. So that explains part of it. It’s spilling out of the boundaries of the Middle East into other parts of the world.

Now the rise of left-wing anti-Semitism is somewhat harder to account for. Why now? But perhaps one factor here, and I’m not certain it’s the only one, is that there is just a kind of hope for a kind of coalition against the United States.

The Left, of course, is traditionally quite anti-American and radical Islam is as well. And this is a way of making common cause against the United States and against Israel and against Jews. It’s a way of building a coalition. That’s just a hypothesis. It’s hard to demonstrate.

MR. FRADKIN: Let me say one thing, that maybe it’s illustrative. I mean, it’s not representative. But it was a very striking thing recently that in France, a very notorious left-wing terrorist, Carlos the Jackal, who was of course, captured and since imprisoned in France for murdering a French policeman, subsequently, in prison, converted to Islam. And in the statement which he made on behalf of this conversion, it was relatively clear, it seems to me, that it had less to do with that he had suddenly found God to be the new shining star of his life, but rather that he felt that within radical Islam at least, there was the grounds for new forms of opposition to the United States, to capitalism, to all the things that he had originally been hostile to in his former career as a radical leftist terrorist.

And this shows up a little bit also in things like the anti-globalization movement, in places like France and elsewhere, where you get the expectation that somehow or other this kind of alliance could be more productive than anything else in a post-Cold War world, where Communism has ceased to have a very significant impact.

Yes, sir?

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: I’m from Pakistan and I went back to country in 1996. This was my first time after 11 years. And I was shocked at how people think about Jews. They are obsessed and they think that every wrong thing that goes in Pakistani politics or even their foreign policy is because of Jews. It was really shocking to me.

And then a couple of years ago, I was going out with a Jewish lady and she took me to different synagogue and then I saw there are a lot of similarities between those Muslim who have this kind of mentality. I mean, at least on the surface, the way they rock back and forth.

My point is that, isn’t the doubt addressing the question of injustice and inequality, is that fair to ignore the issue? For example, I live in Northeast Washington, D.C. I live on G Street and if you go on H Street there are every day little crimes, but we don’t shoot those people. Because number one, they commit crime against their own people. Number two, there is a history of injustice in this country, so it’s understandable.

The way we treat people in West Bank and Gaza, for example, you have Israeli income per capita is more than $20,000. Then go to Gaza and the income per capita is less than $500. But people have different cultures, so they deal with those kinds of things the way they are taught.

The other thing, I came and you were talking about who in Muslim country that teach about violence. The question I want to ask you, that 15 years ago these Taliban -- 15 or 20 years ago, these Taliban, they were very young students and they were taught in Pakistani camps. We were giving them training so we can make them fight against Russians.

And from their book, we took apple and orange and we put like tank and Kalashnikov. And let me say that these people are inferior and they could be used as commodity. But what does it tell about our civilization that how we use these Afghanis, and then they turn against us? Now, we give the reference of Islam, but aren’t we the ones who used or abused Islam or Islamic philosophy of these people who were little children, because we wanted to get even with Russians?

So I have two questions. Number one, can you really address these issues without addressing injustice? And number two, how hypocrite we are, you know, we criticize them, but once it’s come to protect our interest, we are equally violent people?

Thanks.

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, there are two questions here. One is whether inequality between Israelis and Palestinians somehow fuels anti-Semitism? Undoubtedly it does to some extent. But I would think that it’s this pervasive incitement that is far more important. After all, the Arab world generally is just trapped in a kind of very deep poverty. And the Palestinian population is a relatively affluent group among the Arabs. I think this is really not the root cause.

And as for whether we have a responsibility or hypocrisy for having trained Islamic resistance fighters against the Soviet Union? Well, surely. But I don’t think the United States government was ever training -- involved in their religious ideas. It was promoting a group that was fighting against and invasion of a sovereign country. And things went very badly, obviously, afterward.

MR. FRADKIN: We’ve had most of the questions from up front. Maybe we’ll finish -- Sarah, why don’t you take the last question over here and then we’ll go work the back, okay? Mr. Fisher?

MR. EUGENE FISHER: Thank you. I appreciated this very much. It’s very helpful.

I wanted to skip back to the question over there on the Islamic textbooks in the United States. We have extensive dialogues with a number of Muslim groups at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. We were very pleased when one of the major Muslim textbook companies came to us. They were doing their own textbooks and wanted to get the criteria and the things we Catholics have used to change our textbooks. They were seriously going to go through.

Looking through those textbooks to give them some advice, I noticed that the textbooks they had, which they wanted to change, were at least as stereotypical on Christians as they were on Jews. So we’re pretty much on the same boat on that one.

But I think this is a very good sign. A couple of years ago, the Anti-Defamation League got very worried. They have studied Hispanic immigrants. That was Hispanics in the United States and they found that the first generation immigrants were about twice as high on the anti-Semitism scale as the second generation. But the second generation of immigrants were right on the national average, which is very low.

There is something about the American educational system, there’s something about the society and its values that does Americanize people who come here. So I wouldn’t write off the entire Muslim community by any means. There are some very good people that are doing some good things.

MR. SCHOENFELD: I certainly wouldn’t write it off either. I’m just pointing to some real problems that exist within that community. And I’m glad to hear about your efforts to clean up those textbooks. I’m not so optimistic that it’s going to filter down to all the schools in the neighborhood where I live. But let’s hope.

MR. IRA RIFKIN: Hello, my name is Ira Rifkin. I’m with the Jerusalem Report magazine.

I want to go back to the film The Passion and throw that into the equation here. Specifically, one of the things that I’ve seen happen is that it has caused at least a split among the leadership within the evangelical community, which is defending the movie, and many in the American Jewish community, which is very critical of the movie. Not all Jews are, obviously, but I’m talking about right now, those who are.

Do you see this becoming a catalyst for any sort of a backlash within the evangelical community towards Jews and perhaps sparking some sort of, if I may use the term, latent anti-Semitism that might be among some people there? And could it also spill into the alliance between American Jews and the evangelical community, on Israel?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, I don’t think we’re likely to see a backlash against Jews in this country because of this film. I think a very good story comes from this billboard in Denver, where the Pastor of a fringe Church put up a sign after the film came out, saying "Settled, the Jews killed our Lord, Jesus." And every major and minor Church in the city of Denver descended upon this poor Pastor and he was induced to apologize and, in fact, duly put up a billboard saying, "I apologize" and changed the course.

I think Christian-Jewish relations are on very firm and solid footing in this country and it’s unlikely that the film is going to really alter that. My concerns about the film, really are about the way in which very brutal images -- I still haven’t seen the film though, from what I’ve read about it, are going to feed into European and Islamic anti-Semitism.

But, of course, they really have enough material, so it’s not as if this is going to be more than a drop in the bucket. But it has, in a way, it has split certainly the Jewish community, split conservative intellectuals in a very interesting way, and I look forward to seeing how that discussion evolves.

MS. BONNIE WACHTEL: My name is Bonnie Wachtel (sp).

I’d like to go back to the question about whether or not the Jewish community understands that a much more serious threat in the United States is coming from the Left, rather than the Right. There was an interesting discussion on C-SPAN over the weekend about anti-Semitism. They got into a riff about voting Democrat or Republican. And as you know, one of the comments made about the Democratic Party, are the three main fundraisers are labor unions, trial lawyers and Jews.

Is it not fair to say -- and Jewish voting in general has been overwhelmingly Democratic, that if you look at the mainstream elements of the two parties, also taking into account the fact that the Democratic Party seems to have a more European view of how to fight the war on terror, that the Democratic Party -- I’m not trying to overemphasize this.

But the Democratic Party is really more of a threat to the Jewish community to dealing with this seriously now, in its organized elements in the Republican Party. And this really seems to be, the Jewish community almost seems to be in denial about this.

And just very quickly to wrap up, in this particular discussion that was on C-SPAN, when one of the -- Phyllis Chesler, I think, was saying look, we really ought to move more into the Republican Party. Her antagonist was going on about -- this long stream about how Bush’s family had connections to wealth that came through the Holocaust.

We have to look at this very seriously. I mean, I would almost have taken it as he was expressing a sort of prejudiced attitude towards the Christian faith that Bush espouses or the Bush attitude towards dealing with the world.

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, I think there’s something to that. I think the Democratic Party and the Left, generally, has done a very poor job, at the very least, of policing anti-Semitism in its ranks. I mean it’s inconceivable that a racist candidate would be accepted into the Republican debates. That is if David Duke had done well enough or ran for presidency and were not in prison, I think no Republican politician would want to appear on the stage with him and would criticize him loudly if they were forced to, and ask questions. And the press would also descend upon such a figure.

But we have, as I pointed out in my talk, a candidate in the Democratic Party who has engaged in racist ideas and anti-Semitic ideas and is accepted in the Party. Of course, we see in lower levels of the Party in the Black Caucus, in particular, examples like Cynthia McKinney and Earl Hilliard.

And it’s not just that they were trading in anti-Semitic ideas, but they were also receiving funds from the mainstream members of their party. Nancy Pelosi and others were treating them as members in good standing of the Party. And I think it is disturbing, the way in which this anti-Semitism is pushed under the rug or just mainstreamed.

MR. FRADKIN: Right here, Cliff May.

MR. CLIFFORD MAY: I’m Cliff May, with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

I’d like to share with you fellows, you’ve done a very good job of diagnosing this disease. A very separate task is trying to prescribe medicine for it. Have you seen or heard of any remedies that you think are encouraging, effective, realistic?

MR. FRADKIN: Well, I’ve been an editor at Commentary for a decade, and one of the things I was taught there very early, is we’re best at pointing to problems and very bad at solving them. I don’t know if we’re very bad, but we prefer to point to them.

But in this case, there is at least one good step, one good take, which is to -- it stems from the fact that the war on anti-Semitism is very closely related to the war on terrorism and the war on countries that belong to the Axis of Evil or that should be considered members of the Axis of Evil. And to the extent that we wage that war on terrorism effectively and vigorously, we will also be fighting the same forces, some of the same regimes that are promoting this anti-Semitic hatred around the world. And I think that’s an essential first step.

It’s also, I think, extremely important to just begin calling things by their proper names, to pointing to anti-Semitism when it exists and defining it. And also to focus our resources where the fight is most acute, not on issues of peripheral concern, but this central struggle. Jewish organizations and Americans generally, should be engaged in that.

MR. FRADKIN: Jody Hassett?

MS. JODY HASSETT: (Inaudible) ABC News.

You spoke a moment ago about anti-globalist demonstrators and with students on campuses, a blurring between legitimate criticism of Israeli policies to anti-Semitic remarks to possibly genocidal statements.

I’m wondering, is it your contention that there are these agitators on campus and that the demonstrations, much like we had with the SDAS (sp) in the ’60s and small groups with a committed purpose, or their funding streams were, what is the intent or is this just sloppiness? What is the source of this? Because certainly not every student who appears at this is going to be aware of what’s going on.

MR. SCHOENFELD: No, I think it’s very important not to exaggerate. I don’t think this is something all encompassing among the student body or in the student bodies of American campuses. But there has been a concerted campaign on American Universities against -- which regularly includes things which are clearly anti-Semitic.

The funding streams, I think, are probably a variety of sources. Some of it is self-generated. Some of it may come from Arab organizations that are promoting this kind of material. Some of it from left-wing organizations. I haven’t really examined in any detail at all the funding.

But we do see these demonstrations. We do see the placards that are openly anti-Semitic. And we do see a tolerance for them by faculties in universities. And we do see that some mainstream figures, like Lawrence Summers, of Harvard, are speaking out against what he called anti-Semitic activities on his campus and elsewhere as well.

The Governor, Gray Davis, of California, before he was -- when he was Governor, was so alarmed about what was going on in California universities, that he issues a directive to the State system calling for very effective enforcement of the rules in making sure these anti-Semitic -- people who engaged in anti-Semitic activity on campus and anti-Semitic violence in particular, would be duly punished.

MR. ALAN MAIRSON: I’m Alan Mairson. I’m a staff writer for National Geographic Magazine.

I want to go back to the question someone asked earlier, just about the "why" behind this. You said it was a subject that you didn’t address at any length in your book. And I’m rather perplexed by your being perplexed by the root causes of this.

I was telling a colleague earlier today, in thinking about this talk today, I remembered an article that Tom Friedman had written some years ago, in the New York Times Sunday magazine, called "Focus on Israel." And in the piece he asked the question, why are there 350 news organizations permanently stationed in Jerusalem and there are only what, four in Addis Ababa? And to make a long story short, his argument was essentially that the reason people were paying so much attention to the place is because it’s effectively ground zero for, you know, a master story, a super-story, he likes to call it, for Western civilization and that somehow what happens there somehow affects all of us.

And the question I have is that there was actually a quote in the piece where he quoted a Christian theologian who said, "You know, as we read our story, as we read our Bible, it wasn’t supposed to happen this way. They were supposed to, you know, wander eternally.

And now we look and see that they’re back and somehow we have to reassess the story from the beginning." And given that framing of the problem, why is it any puzzle that Islamic anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism is what it is? The existence of a sovereign Jewish state on historically Islamic land is a stick in the eye to a believing Muslim who sees history, Muhammad as the final prophet, as the seal of the prophets, as God’s final revelation to mankind. And over time, some Muslims I would imagine, see that this message slowly gets out to the world at large. The existence of Israel is a refutation at some level, of that basic story that millions of Muslims tell themselves. Why is that a puzzle?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, as I said, I wasn’t as puzzled by that as I was by the rise of the left-wing anti-Semitism, its particular rise right now. And I tried to point to some, if it were possible, coincidence of interests. But no, I accept what you say, that there is in Islam, a very profoundly rooted antipathy toward Israel and toward Jews, which is in the tradition. And that is now, given the crisis of the Islamic world, taking on a very radical dimension in some quadrants of the Islamic world and spilling over borders.

MR. MAIRSON: Go to Europe then.

There was a piece about a year ago in the Washington Post, which talked about the design of the European currency and the fact that Europe is essentially sort of running from history. It’s tried to create a currency that’s complete devoid of any anchor in history. It’s struggling to determine whether or not Christianity should be mentioned in the European constitution. Israel, if it adheres to any kind of super-story whatsoever, is grounded in history. So is it any mystery that Leftists in Europe find, you know, some bind with Jews, who somehow are adhering to a different story?

MR. SCHOENFELD: No. I think that also, it ultimately must be part of the explanation. And you know, it’s a very long history, anti-Semitism, and it’s very tricky to point to any one cause. It’s a very complicated phenomena. And I think, you know, these are explanations that are valid and there are others as well. One might point to guilt for the Holocaust and the way in which many in the European Left are uncomfortable, unhappy, with the role their parents played in Europe, and are anxious to portray today’s Jews as (inaudible).

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: (Inaudible). A place in the world over the past two millennia, where there was less -- no, not in the world. A place in the West over the past two millennia where there was less anti-Semitism than there is in the United States today?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Probably not. And I think, you know, we are, in some ways this is an extraordinary moment. We have candidates running for the presidency and a different candidate who’s established his anti-Semitic credentials. We have candidates who are at pains to show that they have Jewish roots. That's kind of a badge of honor if not electability. So it’s a somewhat paradoxical moment, because you have it -- I mean, this is a fringe phenomenon here.

So it’s not something that’s come to the mainstream as it has, to a much greater degree in Europe. But I was trying to point to the way in which the European trends have their shadows here. I don’t think we are in danger of being engulfed by this, but it’s something to watch.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: There’s another phenomena opposite, I guess, of anti-Semitism, philo-Semitism, which seems to be very palpable in America today, particularly among evangelical Christians and is perhaps not well understood in the American Jewish community. But among evangelicals, including some of the people here in this room, they’ll be glad to tell you about it.

Have you paid any attention to that and do you think that it is smaller in size or in scope or in influence than anti-Semitism today or larger?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, I wish I had written a book called The Return of Philo-Semitism. But I ended up having to write a very different kind of book. And no, I haven’t paid attention to it really or sort of thought about it really very much. I have thought about it in connection with Germany, where you see a very pronounced stream of philo-Semitism today and a kind of tremendous interest in Jewish history and Jewish culture among German intellectuals and German liberals.

And there, it’s a kind of an attempt to come to terms with their past and it’s a very special case. But here, a very different phenomenon.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: Is it a very different phenomenon here?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, I think, you know, Germany has such a special history. The interest in Jews is of such a personal story for so many of the Germans, who are interested in bringing back Jewish culture to their country. Many of their parents were people who either murdered Jews or stood by while others did. And they’re attempting to come to grips with that. And we certainly don’t have anything like that here.

MR. FRADKIN: If I may offer a comment here, in response to Alan’s question or observation. I do think trends or trend lines, rather than simply brewed facts, are important in any kind of analysis of this or other social and political phenomena.

You know, I can remember a time, because I’m of such an age, when the kinds of statements you find in Europe today, in France in particular, were unknown. That was from the ‘50s and ‘60s of my youth. And I remember in 1967, shortly after the Six-day War, a statement by Charles de Gaulle, which I regret I can’t recite by heart. But which opened a kind of new -- which seemed to open a door to renewed, at least anti-Jewish, anti-Semitic utterance.

Again, I don’t remember it by heart, but he said something like Jews are proud and arrogant people. When he was attacked for it afterwards, he said that, of course, from his perspective that was a compliment. But it was clear in the context, that he was playing a certain kind of political game. And that he sought some advantage in those remarks.

At the time, one might have said, well, this is just one utterance. It doesn’t really amount to very much. But other more prescient people said at the time, well you know, this opens -- this is a change from the kind of discourse that’s been considered legitimate by senior leaders in European countries over the past 20 years. And that, I think, has been prescient, that it was an opening that allowed people to think, well it’s -- there are ways in which to express certain kinds of things that were not permissible before.

I don’t say that de Gaulle is responsible for this. But that is to say he did create a certain kind of, as I said, opening. And conditions thereafter took on a life of their own, which have led to the circumstances that Gabe has described so well and in his account of the European phenomenon.

Yes? It’s on, I think.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: An additional question that moves a bit further on. Do you think it’s possible for Jews and Muslims and Jews and Arabs to coexist peacefully?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Is it possible for Jews and Arabs and Muslims to coexist peacefully? I certainly hope so.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN: By what means?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, I think we’re going to need to see some very profound changes in the Muslim world, countries that are failing to address their own internal problems, are singling out Jews as the reason for their failures, instead of addressing their own deeply rooted internal problems.

The Arab Human Development Report that came out, the first one came out two years ago, was a terrifying survey of the way in which the Arab countries in particular had fallen behind the rest of the world, going to one after another indicator of social and economic health. And even here.

This was a document produced by Arab intellectuals at the UN, under the auspices of the UN. Even here, at the end of this survey, which was a very frank and candid and serious document. I mean, they just really did their homework, illustrating sources and the nature of the problems besetting these societies.

These Arab social scientists came around and blamed Israel, a country of five or six million people, for the problems besetting hundreds of millions of people. It was the existence of the state of Israel the report said, that was one of the most serious problems facing the Arab world.

Until that kind of totally unrealistic and demonizing attitude is extirpated, I don’t think Arab societies are going to make progress in facing the challenges of modernity and the transformation toward modernity.

MR. FRADKIN: Yes, in the back?

MS. SUSAN SILVERMAN: Susan Silverman, from B’nai B’rith International.

With the EU expanding on May 1st, how much do you anticipate anti-Semitism to spread to Central and Eastern Europe, where there is known to have lesser amounts of anti-Semitism, they are more friendly to Israel, they have very good bilateral relations and support their Jewish communities very well?

MR. SCHOENFELD: Well, I think Eastern Europe and Russia, are in some ways a good news development there. Yes, anti-Semitism remains a very pervasive phenomenon in most of the countries of the East, Russia included. But we have seen a very profound change in the attitudes of governments toward Jews.

There was this deeply sinister campaign in Russia, which illustrates this. A campaign in which some organization or a group of individuals or individuals acting on their own were putting up billboards around the country saying "Death to the Kikes" on the billboards. And the billboards themselves were rigged with explosive devices. And one of the first instances of these, a young woman, I think her name was Tatiana Sapunova, a motorist, non-Jewish, driving by, saw the sign and took it down and was maimed when the bomb went off.

Now, Vladimir Putin invited her to the Kremlin and bestowed upon her Russia’s highest civilian award. Now this is a tremendous change from 12, 13 years ago, under the old regime, the Communist regime, where if such events -- such a campaign had happened, it would either have been hushed up by the society or have been sponsored by the government itself. And here we have the Kremlin speaking out very forcefully against this kind of anti-Semitic hatred. And you can -- I think in Poland, a similar story obtains as well.

MR. FRADKIN: Please join me in thanking Mr. Schoenfeld once again.