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The Lie That Wouldn't Die: The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion

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The 'Protocols of the Elders of Zion' is one of the most famous and perhaps the most damaging forgery ever done. In this scholarly and informative work the President of the International Organization of Jewish Lawyers and Judges Hadassa Ben-Itto traces the origin and development of the work. What began in the cellars of the nineteenth century Tsarist secret police became a favorite document of the Nazis, and today is spread throughout the world by the evil largesse of Saudi Arabia, and other Islamic groups including Hamas.

In other words this work has been used at various times and places as a means for hating Jews and demanding their destruction.

The Protocols main thesis that there is an international Jewish government planning to take over the world is absurd to anyone who knows the actual history of the Jews in the past two thousand years or even more. The Jews for those two thousand years were by and large a people scattered and persecuted, exiled and stateless. Nonetheless the coming into being of the modern state of Israel, the ingathering of Jews from over a hundred nations has not put an end to the slanderous uses of the Protocols.

In this book Ben- Itto presents the history of the creation of the Protocols - She describes the court trial in Bern in 1934 which exposed the Protocols as falsification: She shows how the deliberately obscure style allows the advocates of this book to link any event to it, no matter what it is: Tzar's family murder or financial crisis.

She shows how this forgery contributed to 1974 UN Resolution that declared Zionism to be one of the types of racism. Now the Protocols are used by Islamic fundamentalists and, in particular, the organization Hamas" that distributes that defamatory piece in the Muslim countries.

Ben- Itto too demonstrates how the Protocols are not simply harmful to Jews but to the character of any state that adopts them.

This is a first rate piece of research which unfortunately will probably not be read by those who need it most, the disseminators and promoters of the forgery.

For the general reader however it is a fascinating guide to a particularly unsavory dark corner of history.

Shortly after the 1897, First Zionist Congress, a full transcript was published, according to this masterful book, which capped six years of investigation into the etymology and evil of the 1895 forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It's a reminder that the U.S. should veto all U.N. resolutions submitting to terrorist demands.

Hezbollah, the Iranian terror group that attacked Israel July 12, believes the Protocols--twice proved an 1895 forgery of Tsarist officials in Paris--are the real First Zionist Congress transcript. This libel so well matches Hezbollah's lethal designs that it collaborated with Iran on a Protocols series, broadcast on Al Manar TV in Lebanon during Ramadan in October 2003, and in Iran in 2004. Ben-Itto here examines the lie's history and continued propagation.

Egypt's culture and information ministry approved another such 41-part TV series that aired in late 2002. U.S. State Department condemnation elicited Minister Safwat El-Sherif's declaration that it "contains no anti-Semitic material." Broadcasts continued. Al-Akhbar's editor called international opprobrium "a barbaric attack on Egyptian and Arab art."

Ben-Itto first encountered the Protocols' political use at the U.N. General Assembly in 1965, while in Israel's delegation to Third Committee deliberations on human rights. Her rebuttal didn't debunk the notorious forgery. A non-Jewish diplomat later chided her, "This book is dangerous."

Indeed. The forgery's anonymous speaker presents "in concise form, a comprehensive program for the annihilation of all Christian states, proposing practical methods for achieving world domination by the Jews." It then terms describes the Jewish people as a satanic sect, "united in purpose, acting under the leadership of a group of elders, who lacked any moral consideration." Each section (24) elaborates on purported plans for a "Jewish super-government."

Although the very antithesis of Jewish thought, this false text has nevertheless for a century swayed hundreds of millions of dupes.

In 1988, while lecturing in Berne Switzerland, Ben-Itto she met the diminutive widow of Georges Brunschvig, who in October 1934 tried the Protocols, under a 1916 Swiss statute prohibiting publication of "obscene literature." The Christian judge, Walter Meyer, in 1933 determined to try the case on its merits, a year later appointed independent experts, and in 1935--after many testimonies and affidavits attesting to the Tsarist crime--ruled the text a forgery, intended to malign Jews and incite their mass murder.

How Tsarists leveraged Maurice Joly's anti-Napoleonic 1864 novel, Dialogues in Hell, is a tale of court intrigue, Russian Orthodox mysticism, peasant anti-Semitism and counter-revolutionary tactics so compelling, albeit complex, as to confound the mind. But Ben-Itto's meticulous search through French, Russian, British, South African and Swiss archives, private libraries, journalists' notes and court records on three continents--and her interviews with dozens of witnesses--prove that truth is often stranger than fiction.

Joly anonymously published his 324-page Dialogues in Geneva in 1864, hoping the staged conversation between Niccolo Machiavelli and the fictional Charles de Secondat Montesqieu would generate opposition to Napoleon III. Instead, Joly was arrested, imprisoned and "charged with inciting hatred." His banned novel remained out of print from 1865 through 1933--excepting four copies in Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale.

Yet the book intended as a force for good was soon exploited for monumental evil. In the 1880s, Edouard Drumont's anti-Semitic La Libre Parole newspaper began charging that Jews intended to economically and politically dominate the world. The "Jewish conspiracy" myth spread throughout France and in 1895 instigated false charges against Captain Alfred Dreyfus.

Russia's troubled Romanov dynasty likewise fueled the 1895 forgery plot. Tsar Nikolai II further empowered Paris Okhrana chief Piotr Ivanovich Rachkovskii, who often carefully crafted forgeries to implicate suspected revolutionaries and other Russian emigrants whom he later remunerated to spy on others.

In 1933, several non-Jewish witnesses corroborated Rachkovskii's forgeries and helped George Brunschvig unmask Rachkovskii's "most outstanding" effort in court.

Russia's 1917 provisional government sent Sergei Svatikov, a former law professor, to dissolve Okhrana's Paris office. Svatikov presented papers from Henri Bint, formerly Rachkovskii's trusted agent, including fabricated letters, pamphlets and anti-revolutionary provocations. Svatikov also testified that Bint himself had paid Rachkovskii's two forgers, including Matvei Golovinskii, to copy Joly's 1864 book in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

Vladimir Burtsev, former editor of Russia's Byloe, confirmed Golovinskii's evil, vituperative anti-Semitic character, and libelous accusations of a "Jewish world conspiracy." Moreover, former police chief Stepan Petrovich Beletskii had told Burtsev that Tsarist officials all knew the Protocols were a "crude forgery," but nevertheless disseminated them widely--to falsely discredit the Jews for "revolutionary activities."

Graf Armand Alexander du Chayla, who spent spent nine months in 1909 at Russia's Orthodox Optina Pustyn monastery with Sergei Nilus, the Protocols' virulently anti-Semitic 1905 publisher. Nilus had showed du Chayla the text and said it came from Rachkovskii in Paris.

Many trials have unequivocally proved the Protocols to be false. Yet since the 1940s, they have circulated widely in the Arab and Muslim worlds, where they are available almost everywhere--even five-star hotels--are frequently promoted by government media and government clerics.

The Hamas Charter cites the Protocols, alongside Islamic beliefs. Other promoters include such renowned clerics as Sheik Muhammad Al-Mussayer of Cairo's Al-Azhar University and Palestinian Authority-appointed Jerusalem Mufti Ikrima Sabri. Countless Islamist websites publish them. RadioIslam provides 16 translations.

Ben-Itto discusses this phenomenon --- but doesn't understand the sources of Muslim acceptance --- classical Islamic ideology in the Qu'ran, Hadith, jurisprudence and end-time eschatology.

Georges Vajda's 1937 essay, notes Hadith eschatology (Mohammed's reputed deeds and sayings) describing Jews as "adherents of the Dajjal --- the Muslim equivalent of the Anti-Christ --- and as per another tradition, the Dajjal is in fact Jewish," according to Dr. Andrew Bostom. Elsewhere, the Dajjal is expected to appear with 70,000 Jews, who will then be slaughtered.

This book is critical to understanding the grave danger now posed by the Protocols. But defeating this inhuman lie requires defeating radical Islam, its biggest current purveyors.

--Alyssa A. Lappen

The author, a judge, has researched and laid out all the evidence for the reader. Her opus transcends anything written on this subject before. The history of the Protocols and its many manifestations and clones reads like an unfolding mistery. The Lie That Would Not Die continues to resurface: in the crude threats and vituperations of Moslem jihadists and mullahs; in the speeches of so called ambassadors at the United Nations; in the fulminations of "elected" leaders such as the President of

Iran; in schoolbooks throughout Arab and Moslem nations;in the broadcast and printed media; and most lamentably, in the halls of academe even in prestigious Ivy League schools. This is must reading and belongs on the shelves of all libraries and schools.

This is a great study into the fabrication of a "Jewish Conspiracy" to World domination. People, mostly uneducated from the "Ultra-Right" or Over Educated from the Ultra-Left percieve this mid 19th Century Tzarist Forgery as fact or even attempt to entertain this rubbish. If one might take into the consideration of researching into the origional work will find its relationship to Napolean and his quests. One could develop this same lie about wealthy Non-Jewish families; Rockefellers, Fords, Carnagees, Morgans and many others with the same outcome. Today people do not place any of their reading habbits into researching or dismantling any and all of these rediculous claims even when most are public figures or public corporations which release by law their Corporate information: Jews own the Media, actual fact dictates that Arab/Moslems own far more share in all mainstream media. Jews own the Banking researching the earlier mentioned names, that claim is also a myth and the same trend relates to all of these mythical claims. This work is a good understanding of how this lie was fabricated, for what purposes and shares the factual lies within each. Usually people who entertain this "Protocals" garbage are ignorant and have never read a creditable book on the History of these people and are unlearned on the entire topic of Anti-Semitism which are blindly lead. This is a great book to defute this widely circulated promulgation. Might I suggest Paul Johnson's "A History of the Jews", Marvin Perry's "Anti-Semitism" and Joan Peters "From time Immemorial". All are fabulous, well documented and I'd consider the latter a piece of source material that should be accepted as a text for Academia.

This book is highly readable and provides an absorbing accounting of some of the court cases involving the so called Protocols. I especially liked the way one layer after another of evidence. That can make it hard to keep your place in the story if you only do a few pages at a time. If you like details and legal considerations then this is quite interesting.

This book is a good complement to Warrant for Genocide by Cohn. The original literary source of the Protocols is also very interesting after reading Ben-Itto's book and it's available in a modern edition titled: : The Dialogue in Hell between Machiavelli and Montesquieu: Humanitarian Despotism and the Conditions of Modern Tyranny" (Paperback) by Maurice Joly.

How ironic that Joly's material actually inspired imitation by those who instead critized and tried to crush the Jewish people unjustly. I wonder if Stalin and Hitler had a copy of this or the protocols by their bed sides. Continuing spread of the protocols shows how contagious evil can be.

Now it's time for someone (maybe our author) to pickup from this with a more pointed focus on current middle eastern mis-use of the protocols. Those turn of the century Czarist agents generated a best seller that continues to provoke outrage. What a blight on the world. People need to realize how much ugly and nasty stuff like this exists and motivates so many in our troubled world and then tell others.

Great work Ms Ben-Itto !

I would just like to say that since the author is a Judge and not a historian the one thing that I didn't like about the book was the fact that no footnotes or endnotes were present. In case I wanted to look up something the author had written, I would be at a disadvantage as I wouldn't know where to begin to find that information.

Other than that, this is to date the most comprehensive book that I've read on the history of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." This is my fourth book on the subject and I must commend the author on her diligence. Although at times I thought the "emotions" ascribed to the characters in this book were a bit overboard, the story will draw you in like a modern mystery thriller.

The characters are well developed and we learn about each one as well as their motivations and what they planned to get out of either creating this forgery or propagating it. I personally never knew that so many people had taken part in this forgery, in terms of both its creation and distribution in Russia, not to speak of Europe, which followed closely after. It was also in Europe that this forgery made the biggest impact and not in Russia where it was initially supposed to have been used, it was mentioned and readily forgotten after investigations into its authenticity proved that it was a fake.

To describe all the layers of this story is beyond this review, suffice it to say that I would highly recommend this book. The book is well written with a few typos here and there easily overlooked. The author does a good job handling so much material and so many characters so that the reader is hardly ever confused about who is being discussed, during what time period, and in what location. What more is there to say? A proven forgery, over and over again, with nothing in its defense aside from the fact that it exists. Learn its tragic story here. I will only add that sadly there is no concrete evidence as to why this book was written, theories exist and there is circumstantial proof for a few of them, but nothing that will support a 'beyond a reasonable doubt' type reason. Even so, the fact that this is a forgery and easily proven to be just that is the truth of the matter, the exact reason for this forgery's creation will have to remain a mystery.

Do you love exciting fiction? Do you love adventure books that teach you a lot, hold you to the edge of your seat in suspense, and have the good guys win at the end? Well, this is such a book... and, best of all, it isn't even fiction.

Since the 1920s the Protocols were known to be fraudulent, as the London "Times" proved. Later, Norman Cohn's "Warrant for Genocide" established it was a fraud by the Czarist secret service, based on a satire against Napoleon III by Maurice Joly (a satire which had nothing to do with the Jews), which was later accept as genuine by a mad Russian mystic, Sergey Nilus.

This book completes the story. It names the the master-spy who forged the protocols from Joly's book: Ratzkovsky. It shows how Joly's book, being suppressed by Napoleon III, was so rare that it is possible to trace the exact copy Ratzkovsky used; how the original forgery of the 1880s was meant not so much to spread antisemitism per se (though he had no problems with that), but as part of a plot to weaken the "liberal" wing in the Russian court; how this plot failed because even the antisemitic and superstitious Russian royals condemned it as ridiculous; how only after his return to Russia, in 1904, could Ratzkovsky (or his agents) get Nilus, a paranoid lunatic, to believe it.

The book also deals with the libel trial against Swiss Nazis in the 1930s as an example of how antisemites use the "protocols", inside and outside the courtroom. It proves most antisemites know very well they are spreading a lie, as can be seen by their usual courtroom tactics, in the 1930s trial and in similar trials elsewhere (up to and including David Irving's holocaust denial trial.) They rarely defend what they published about Jews on its merits, as a true believer would. Instead, they rely on insinuation, on insulting their opponents in cross-examination, on presenting themselves as "victims" of a "Jewish conspiracy", and on getting help from antisemitic governments (then, the Nazi government; today, certain Muslim governments.)

The story of the trial shows how difficult it was for the judge to balance the right of the defendants to a consul and to question witnesses with the desire to not turn the courtroom into a nazi rally. The judge is correctly praised for simply followed the law, allowing the defendants (up to a point) to insult and badger witnesses which they called "questioning" -- but, unlike in a nazi rally, in his court, the Jews could speak back. His decision proved, once more, that the best defense against lies isn't censorship but telling the truth. The plaintiffs had no problem detailing in court the story of the protocols' forgery (outlined above) with numerous expert witnesses; the defendants, despite being given ample time and resources by the court, failed to produce a single expert witness that would support the protocols' authenticity, nor could their cross-examination have any effect on the reliable experts' testimony. Once their "cross examination" ran out of insults and innuendo, they had nothing. Naturally, the judge ruled for the plaintiffs.