The incoming executive director of the think-tank Jewish Policy Research, Tony Lerman, believes that the Chief Rabbi’s observation that there is a ‘tsunami’ of antisemitism currently engulfing the world is an exaggeration. Expanding on his views on BBC Radio Four’s Sunday programme this morning in a discussion with myself, (approx 07.45; click here and follow the link) he further claimed that there was ‘no tidal wave’ of antisemitism from the Middle East. After I pointed out a few facts — that there was indeed an unstoppable outpouring of antisemitism from the Arab and Muslim world featuring Nazi demonology and blood libels such as the claim that Jews were killing children and baking their blood in Passover unleavened bread; that Egypt TV had broadcast a 41-part series serialising the classic antisemitic tract the Protocols of the Elders of Zion which posits a world Jewish conspiracy; that the Protocols plus Hitler’s Mein Kampf were on sale not just in the Middle East but in Islamic bookshops throughout Britain and Europe; that Muslims were labelling the Jews as the enemies of God and humanity whose annihilation was therefore presented as a service to the world; and that the Jews were routinely presented as pigs and monkeys — Lerman then claimed that Muslim antisemitism was merely a response to the Middle East crisis.

This is totally untrue and demonstrates a quite lamentable ignorance of history. The Middle East crisis is not the cause but the result of Muslim antisemitism. As I said on the programme — albeit through the constraints of the programme only, alas, very briefly — this anti-Jewish hatred well predated the establishment of the State of Israel, and led to the alliance between the Arabs of Palestine and the Nazis during the 1930s and 1940s, when the Arabs seized upon the genocidal prejudice against the Jews and made it their own in order to drive them once more from the historic Jewish homeland.

Jews had only ever been tolerated under Islamic rule as dhimmi, or second-class citizens. The rise of Islamism from the 1920s onwards, under such thinkers as Hassan al Banna, Sayed Abu’l Ala al Maududi and Sayed Qutb and the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood, brought to the fore an obsession -- rooted in religious texts -- with the archetype of a universal Jew, treacherous by nature, whose perfidy threatened not only Islam but all humanity. This fitted their Manichean mindset of a cosmic struggle between good and evil which was central to their goal of purifying society of un-Islamic teachings and practices and returning to Islam’s original pure sources and the establishment of an ideal Islamic state. Sayed Qutb, for example, the philosopher behind the Muslim Brotherhood — of which Hamas is the contemporary armed wing — held that Jews were inherently evil because throughout the ages they had rebelled against God.

It is only in this context that the Middle East tragedy can properly be understood. Yes, certainly the current dispute has exacerbated this murderous prejudice — and also, horrifyingly, extended it to non-Muslims throughout Britain and Europe. But that is because of the monstrous way in which the Jews of Israel, the eponymous targets of this genocidal hatred, have been demonised and delegitimised as the instigators of aggression and oppression, merely because they have had the temerity to seek to defend themselves from being wiped out.

The Arabs have tried three strategies for wiping out the Jews of Israel. The first was their alliance with the Nazis. The second was through war declared by Arab states in 1948, 1967 and 1973. The third was through war by terrorism, allied to a mind-bending propaganda campaign to persuade the west that the victims of their hatred were actually aggressors and that the quarrel was over the Palestinian Arabs' desire for their own homeland which was being thwarted by Israel. This, of course, is one of the most egregious Big Lies of history; and appallingly, the last bit has worked surely beyond their wildest dreams. But the reason for the Middle East impasse remains as it ever was — the Arabs’ unceasing attempt to remove from the map the State of Israel which they perceive as evidence of the demonic Jewish conspiracy to attack Islam and take over the world, and the obdurate refusal of the Jews of Israel in response to lie down and die.

It is astounding that someone who is apparently so ignorant of these fundamental historical truths can have been appointed to run a purportedly objective and authoritative Jewish think-tank. Lerman’s appointment provoked the immediate resignation of three JPR trustees in protest at his extreme views. The rest of the Jewish community in Britain must now ask itself whether, with so many British Jews feeling themselves to be under siege from the irrational hatred of Israel and the anti-Jewish prejudice which has swept the country, it should continue to fund an organisation which now threatens from within further to undermine the Jews at a time of peril.