Lewis defines antisemitism as a special case of prejudice, hatred, or persecution directed against people who are in some way different from the rest. According to Lewis, antisemitism is marked by two distinct features: Jews are judged according to a standard different from that applied to others, and they are accused of "cosmic evil." Thus, "it is perfectly possible to hate and even to persecute Jews without necessarily being anti-Semitic" unless this hatred or persecution displays one of the two features specific to antisemitism. [41]

He writes that what he calls the first wave of antisemitism arose with the advent of Christianity because of the Jews' rejection of Jesus as Messiah. The second wave, racial anti-Semitism, emerged in Spain when large numbers of Jews were forcibly converted, and doubts about the sincerity of the converts led to ideas about the importance of "la limpieza de sangre", purity of blood. [42]

Lewis associates the third wave with the Arabs, and writes that it arose only in part because of the establishment of the State of Israel. Until the 19th century, Muslims had regarded Jews with what Lewis calls "amused, tolerant superiority" — they were seen as physically weak, cowardly, and unmilitary — and although Jews living in Muslim countries were not treated as equals, they were shown a certain amount of respect. The Western form of anti-Semitism — what Lewis calls "the cosmic, satanic version of Jew hatred" — arrived in the Middle East in several stages, beginning with Christian missionaries in the 19th century, and continued to grow slowly into the 20th century, up to the establishment of the Third Reich. He writes that it increased because of the humiliation of the Israeli military victories of 1948 and 1967. (See 1948 Arab-Israeli War and Six Day War.) [42]

Into this mix entered the United Nations. Lewis argues that the United Nations' handling of the 1948 refugee situation convinced the Arab world that discrimination against Jews was acceptable. When the ancient Jewish community in East Jerusalem was evicted and its monuments desecrated or destroyed, they were offered no help. Similarly, when Jewish refugees fled or were driven out of Arab countries, no help was offered, but elaborate arrangements were made for Arabs who fled or were driven out of the area that became Israel. All the Arab governments involved in the conflict announced that they would not admit Israelis of any religion into their territories, but the United Nations did not protest; and furthermore announced that they would not give visas to Jews, no matter which country they were citizens of. Again, the United Nations did not protest. All of this has sent what Lewis calls a "clear message" to the Arab world. Lewis writes that this third wave of antisemitism has in common with the first wave that Jews are able to be part of it. With religious antisemitism, Jews were able to distance themselves from Judaism and convert, and Lewis writes that some even reached high rank within the church and the Inquisition. With racial antisemitism, this was not possible, but with the new, ideological antisemitism, Jews are once again able to join the critics. The new antisemitism also allows non-Jews, he argues, to criticize or attack Jews without feeling overshadowed by the crimes of the Nazis. [42]


The fourth wave since 1945

Professor Yehuda Bauer writes that the new anti-Semitism is the fourth wave of anti-Semitism to spread across the West since 1945.Yehuda Bauer, Professor of Holocaust Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, writes that there have been three waves of anti-Semitism since 1945 — 1958-60; 1968-1972; and 1987-1992 — and that we are now experiencing the fourth, which he estimates started in 1999 or 2000. [43] Each wave has had different causes, some of them to do with economic downturns, though the common ground has been "an underlying latency of anti-Semitism that waits to explode when aroused by some outside crisis." [44] He describes the fourth wave as an upper-middle class, intellectual phenomenon, "widespread in the media, in universities, and in well-manicured circles.

Bauer notes that the two crises that led to the post-1945 waves of antisemitism are the Holocaust and the establishment of the State of Israel. The Holocaust created an unease about Jews, he writes, especially in Europe, where people "have to live with six million ghosts, created by a deadly mutation of European culture." [44] Although a feeling of relief accompanied the creation of Israel, because Europeans no longer had to deal with the Jews, at the same time, he argues, it turned the Jews from victims into perpetrators. He argues that the Arab-Israeli conflict "provide[s] ample material for an antisemitism that sees itself as anti-Zionist." Anti-Zionism need not be deemed antisemitic, "but only if one says that all national movements are evil, and all national states should be abolished. But if one says that the Fijians have the right to independence, and so do the Malays or the Bolivians, but the Jews have no such right, then one is anti-Jewish, and as one singles out the Jews for nationalistic reasons, one is anti-Semitic, with an attendant strong suspicion of being racist." Citing Irwin Cotler, Bauer writes that "the status of the collective Jew, that is Israel, is akin to the status of the individual Jew in the Middle Ages." [45]

Although the Arab-Israeli conflict has produced real tragedy for Palestinians, Bauer suggests that Western latent antisemitism has fastened onto that tragedy in order to brand the Jews as mass murderers and Nazis as a way of solving the West's own psychological problems caused by the Holocaust. "Facts do not matter there," he writes, arguing that the number of Palestinians killed between the beginning of the Second Intifada in 2000 and 2003 (when he was writing) was around 2,000, which is one sixth of the daily number of Jews shipped to Auschwitz from Hungary in the spring of 1944. Bearing these figures in mind, "[a]ny kind of simplistic comparison becomes totally ridiculous," he argues. [46]

“ A charming TV personality [on Egyptian television] asked little Basmallah, a 3½ year old girl, 'Do you know who the Jews are?' "Yes." 'Do you like them?' "No." 'Why?' "Because they are monkeys and swine ..."
— Yehuda Bauer [47] ”

Bauer regards this wave of antisemitism as dangerous because of Islamism. He identifies Islamism as one of three major ideologies to have emerged during the 20th century, alongside Soviet Communism and National Socialism, [48] and argues that all three saw or see the Jews as a main enemy. [49] The language used about Jews by the Muslim media is, he says, "clearly and unmistakably genocidal," the ideology of Nazism "in a different dress."[50] He cites a television program broadcast on May 2, 2002 on the Egyptian television station IQRAA, during which a three-year-old girl was asked whether she knew who the Jews were and whether she liked them. She replied that she did not like them, because "they are monkeys and swine ... and also because they tried to poison the wife of our prophet." [47] Bauer writes that 1.2 billion Muslims are being exposed to these teachings, making this fourth wave of antisemitism a "genocidal threat to the Jewish people." [51]