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Last fall, two Muslims attending an exclusive secondary school in Paris began harassing and beating another student, an 11-year-old Jewish boy, shouting, "We'll finish Hitler's job!" Traumatized, the victim had to go on tranquilizers. The headmaster moved him to another class and filed a lawsuit against the assailants. But without an admission of guilt or witnesses willing to testify, prospects of a conviction are slim. "We're in a dead-end," the headmaster said.

The Lawyers Committee for Human Rights issued a report in 2002 titled "Fire and br /oken Glass." It chronicles a rising European tide of firebombings of Jewish synagogues, schools, and homes; desecrations of Jewish cemeteries and Holocaust memorials; attacks by skinheads; and marches by people who chanted "Sieg heil!" and "Jews into the sea!"

Often such vitriol accompanies over-the-top criticism of Israel. The Italian daily La Stampa recently printed a front-page cartoon with an Israeli tank pointing its gun at the baby Jesus, who exclaims, "Surely they don't want to kill me again."

While such examples of anti-Semitism are new, the disease is not. Historian Robert Wistrich has called anti-Semitism "the longest hatred." Elie Wiesel writes in the foreword to Gabr /iel Schoenfeld's new book, The Return of Anti-Semitism, "Those of us who naively believed that Auschwitz put an end to anti-Semitism were wrong."

Militant Muslims and Arab rulers, seeking to deflect attention from their own corrupt rule, are major conduits of this new mayhem. During a recent sermon in Mecca, a sheikh said, "Oh God, give victory to the mujahedeen [holy warriors] everywhere. Give them victory in Palestine. Oh God, inflict your wrath on the criminal Zionists." In November, suicide truck bombs killed 25 people and wounded 300 more at two synagogues in Istanbul. More than 600 Israeli civilians have died since 2000 in a variety of attacks in discos, restaurants, and markets.

The infection has spread widely. Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammad of Malaysia, one of the more moderate Muslim states, told a gathering of world Muslim leaders in October that they must modernize to defeat the world's Jews. "The Europeans killed six million Jews out of twelve million," Mahathir said. "But today the Jews rule this world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them." Mahathir received a standing ovation.

Unfortunately the church also has a deplorable history of anti-Semitism. Despite the Jewish roots of Christianity, the painful fact is that many Christians through the centuries have twisted biblical texts as allowing—even encouraging—the sin of anti-Semitism.

To justify their actions, Christians called Jews "Christ-killers" and said the Jews deserved their sufferings because they had rejected Jesus. Martin Luther turned on Jews with a vengeance once he realized they were no more receptive to Reformation doctrines than they had been to Rome's. In more recent times, while some Christians heroically tried to protect Jewish neighbors during the Holocaust, too many willingly participated in the Nazi campaign of extermination—or simply looked the other way.

Given this history, it's understandable that some Jewish leaders are suspicious of Mel Gibson's powerful movie, The Passion of The Christ.

Despite these tensions, leading Jews have begun to recognize that Christians are sure allies in the global battle against anti-Semitism, which Schoenfeld describes simply as a "lethal hatred of Jews." In January, Israeli politicians started a political caucus to improve ties with Christian groups. Delegations of Christian leaders from the United States, Europe, Canada, Australia, and Israel met with top Israeli politicians in Febr /uary to discuss ways to combat anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism in their respective countries.

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April 2004, Vol. 48, No. 4