The Emperor's New Clothes has been chronicling the politics of anti-semitism which is well-worth bookmarking and reading.

From publisher Jared Israel's Feb 2003 reply to reader accusing Zionism as being a Jewish Nazism:

" Regarding Israel, we at Emperor’s Clothes used to believe it was mainly responsible for the problems in the Middle East. However, we changed our minds. Consequently some people are mad at us.

The campaign to blame “The Jews” for 9-11 took off in a big way - indeed, it is still going on in the Muslim world and getting stronger, part of an escalating Arab media attack on “The Jews.” But the same idea was spread in the West as well.

All this made us wonder. Why the sudden escalation of anti-Semitism? It was too widespread to be a fluke. Leftists, Rightists, the mass media, the CIA… Could it be that the US, European and Arab establishments were resurrecting the time-tested device of using anti-Semitism to create a fascistic ‘opposition’ under the banner of “Oppose Zionist Imperialism”?

And regarding Israel, since it was clear we were getting misinformation - and outright fabrications! - both from the mainstream media and from so-called progressives, could it be that we ourselves had been misled about the situation in the Middle East?

So we began, last spring, to study the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the history of anti-Semitism. The more we studied the more we found that our assumptions had been false - in my case, for thirty years! We have now started to share with our readers what we learned." (1)

{...} I believe that certain grotesque seeming missteps were deliberately taken to foster the suspicion that Bush and Blair were being pushed into Iraq by Israel. We have seen the unprecedented phenomenon of establishment leaders, like Robin Cooke, who has discovered, late in life, that he hates government lies, and intelligence operatives like Scott Ritter leading the fight against a US war.

This creates the false sense among ordinary people of a struggle within the Establishment and lays the basis for the argument that 'valiant' people within the elite are 'resisting The Jews.'

The slogan, 'Oppose the Empire!' comes to suggest 'Free the Establishment from Jewish domination!' This mentality is what is meant by the phrase, 'creating a mass base for Fascism.'

Having fostered the now widespread belief that 'we invaded Iraq for the Jews,' Establishment operatives can argue that:

a) Now it's payback time, i.e., 'Those Jews' have to give the Palestinians a state, which translates to the destruction of Israel because a Palestinian state would be headed by antisemitic terrorists with a genocidal ideology; and

b) We have to do something to curb the Jews in the US and other Western countries because they are dominating everything and thereby causing all sorts of problems - shades of Germany in the 1920s-'30s.

This explains why, when Malaysia's PM Mahathir expressed his hallucination, born of the Czarist secret police, that 'the Jews' run the world with a goal to destroying 1.3 billion Muslims, Bush offered the absurdly off-the-mark response that Mahathir was being "divisive". People hear this and they think, "Bush can't refute that Malaysian dude so he has to chastise him for saying what everybody knows is true. It's just that the Jews don't want anyone to hear it!"

In fact the people who really cause the problems - and these people are not 'The Jews,' but the economic-political elite which the old left used to call 'the ruling class' - in fact these people most definitely *do* want ordinary people to hear that 'the Jews' are supposedly The Problem. Blaming the Jews is music to the ruling class's ears, just as it was in previous times of crisis, in Czarist Russia, and then in Germany. {...}

What is the effect? To create an environment in which Nazi-like, antisemitic arguments come to be perceived as normal and associated with resistance to a vaguely defined New World Order. People think, "Well, nobody can refute this stuff; they just say it's ugly. But where there's smoke, there's fire. At least these people have the guts to speak out."

In this fashion, Western populations are indoctrinated in the belief that their problems are produced by the 'hidden hand of The Jews.' Once adopted, this belief becomes a filter through which events are viewed so that any event may be interpreted as confirming the prejudice.

By the way, this is exactly what happened in Germany prior to the Nazi takeover.

Hitler did *not* invent the notion that the Jews were responsible for all the woes that had befallen Germany. Rather, the notion of a secret cabal of Jews stabbing Germany in the back was inculcated for many years by much broader forces, often with the support of the Establishment. And then, when conditions were appropriate and necessary, the Establishment swung full support over to the Nazis, who could march in as the seeming answer to a 'problem' - albeit a lie - which had already been sold to varying degrees to most ordinary people.

In other words, people who were voting for liberal, conservative or even left wing parties had been convinced to varying extents of the lies that 'The Jews' instigated World War I for profit, and/or sold out Germany in that war, and/or were behind the ruinous inflation of the twenties, and/or had polluted German culture, and or were starving Germany of credit through control of the banks and/or were pulling the strings of German Communism for the purpose of crippling Germany.

These ideas were not inculcated only by the Nazis. Indeed, for most of the period from World War I until the Nazi takeover, these ideas were not even inculcated mainly by the Nazis. Rather, these ideas were deliberately pushed by the German establishment through the media of various political currents. They became 'common knowledge,' because even fictional explanations can become common knowledge, thus laying the basis for the Nazis. From this perspective, Nazism was only the culmination of a process. It was the last part of a magic trick pulled off by the German elite. (2)

Read an excerpt from Jeffrey Herf's book, "The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust"