Protocols of Zion directed by Mark Levin, USA, 2005, 92 min., 35mm, English

By Donald H. Harrison

There are some people in New York, and elsewhere, who believe that Osama Bin Laden sent his squads of Al Queda suicide hijackers against the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and one unreached target in protest of America's support for Israel.  In other words, it's all the fault of us Jews.

Then there are those who believe that it wasn't Osama bin Laden at all;  it was Israel that ordered the destruction of  the World Trade Center. Supposedly the Jewish-owned media covered up this information, but didn't you hear that 4,000 Jews either didn't go to their jobs at the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, or left early?  Why?  They knew the attack was coming!  So, you see, it's all the fault of us Jews.

"Where's the logic?" you might think to yourself.  How can 9/11 result from Israel's friendship for the United States and Israel's hatred of United States?  Yes, of course, it's not logical.  But both fallacious explanations for 9/11 are consistent.  They both stem from anti-Semitism, a term documentary filmmaker Mark Levin suggests might better be called "Jew-hatred."

If you wonder where that figure of 4,000 came from, apparently it came from a quote from a representative of the Israeli Consulate-General in New York.  Asked if there were any Israelis in the building, the representative responded that the consulate had received 4,000 worried calls from Israel after the attack.  From that it's totally illogical to say that 4,000 people were warned in advance, but logic is not the strong suit of  a Jew-hater.

To try to understand Jew-hatred, Mark Levin tore a page from the book of the late Herb Brin, publisher of the now defunct Jewish Heritage newspaper chain of Southern and Central California.  Brin once went to the Idaho headquarters of the white supremacist group, the Aryan Nations, identified himself as a Jewish newspaper publisher, and boldly asked to be shown around.  To his  surprise, he was shown through the place, and wrote stories about what he saw.



Levin, along with his unseen camera crew, was welcomed by all kinds of people with malignant cases of  Jew-hatred, some of them such men and women as you might meet on a street, or lining a parade.  Others, far more organized and dangerous were  neo-nazis and Palestinians, who recruit their sympathizers respectively from the political far right and the political far left.  As Levin interviews them, he listens with a half-smile on his face to all kinds of canards and political filth about our people.  What the hell is he smiling about? you may wonder. I think I know.  He's got another meshuganah on tape!

For approximately a century, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document that was supposed to have been written by a cabal of Jews plotting Jewish control of the world—but which in fact was forged by agents of the Russian czar—has helped to give Jew-haters a convoluted framework for their paranoia.  

According to this "document," our Jewish forefathers all agreed to secretly instruct us to influence governments, take over banks and the media, corrupt morals, create diversions, foster race-mixing, undermine other religions, and so forth and so on to paralyze non-Jews, and to have our way with the world.  Almost since its publication, The  Protocols of the Elders of Zion has found a ready audience of Jew-haters.  Two of its best-known devotees were Henry Ford and Adolf Hitler—may their cursed memories serve as a warning against complacency.  Now, The Protocols are being widely published in the Arab and greater Muslim world.  They also have been made into television series and movies, and people actually believe this stuff.

There is a clip of Elie Wiesel speaking at a United Nations ceremony marking the liberation of the concentration camps and observing that some people hated him even before he was born.  Similarly there are people who believed lies about the Jews, even before those lies were concocted..

Where did this hatred come from?  A fellow Jew interviewed by Levin suggested that because Jews are not satisfied with the status quo, we are forever seeing and attempting to correct injustices, and so we are resented.  A clip of an interview with Mel Gibson, who made the movie The Passion of the Christ brings up the centuries-old deicide charge leveled against us by Christianity.  Although the Catholic Church which invented the notion recanted it last century, other groups still cling to it.

Director Levin has been invited by the 16th annual San Diego Jewish Film Festival  to attend the showing of Protocols of Zion at 1 p.m., Sunday, February 12 at the AMC La Jolla Theatres. Whether he comes, or is unable to make it, there will be a lively post-film panel discussion on which Liebe Geft, director of the Museum of Tolerance, and others will participate.  The San Diego region of the Anti-Defamation League is a "community partner" of the Jewish Film Festival's in presenting the film and panel.