Islamic Propaganda & Antisemitism: Why the Pointing Finger Works! | Ruth Wisse

The Psychological War Its Victims do not Understand

For over a century, oppressors have honed a skill, the Western Mind is NOT trained to fight.

Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism are often treated as separate problems, one rooted in religious hostility and the other in prejudice. But that misses the bigger picture.

Antisemitism is not merely an old hatred that flares up from time to time. It is a political instrument. It organizes grievance, directs blame, builds coalitions, and distracts people from the leaders and systems that are actually failing them.

That’s why Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism matter far beyond the Jewish community.

When politics is organized around a demonized minority, the target is never the only victim. The society doing the blaming is also being robbed of its ability to diagnose its own problems honestly.

Antisemitism Is a Politics of Blame

There is a simple question that changes how we understand this subject: What do political movements gain by organizing against Jews?

That question moves us beyond the vague idea of prejudice.

• Prejudice exists.
• Discrimination exists.

But Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism become especially dangerous when they are used to explain everything that has gone wrong in a society.

The Jews are not the problem being solved. They are the convenient explanation for problems others do not want to solve.

Modern political Antisemitism took recognizable form in late nineteenth-century Germany.

• Wilhelm Marr, who founded the Antisemitenliga, framed his campaign as something modern and political rather than Christian anti-Judaism.
• His claim was that Jews had taken over Germany. It was absurd, but it was politically useful.

People struggling with unemployment, social change, urban life, economic uncertainty, or cultural anxiety could be given a simple answer. The Jews took your job. The Jews control the shops. The Jews are ruining the nation’s culture. The accusation did not have to be true. It only had to be emotionally satisfying.

That is the politics of the pointing finger.

“Look over there,” the political entrepreneur says. “That is why your life is hard.”

And while everyone stares at the chosen target, they stop asking hard questions about the person gaining power through the accusation. Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism operate this way when they make Israel or Jews responsible for every political, cultural, or economic failure.

Why Negative Politics Builds Coalitions

• Positive political programs are hard. They require priorities, money, discipline, tradeoffs, and actual results.
• Negative politics is much easier. It only requires a villain.

That is why Antisemitism is such a powerful coalition-building tool.

• Socialism promises material equality.
• Communism promises a transformed society.
• Liberal democracy promises rights and participation.
• Antisemitism promises something much thinner but often more intoxicating: someone to hate together.

Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism can gather groups with little else in common. Nationalists, Islamists, secular radicals, religious extremists, frustrated young people, and political elites may disagree on almost everything. Yet hostility toward Jews or Israel can temporarily make them feel united.

That coalition does not need a serious plan for improving life. It only needs a shared target.

Antisemitism is perhaps the most effective negative campaign in modern politics because it turns grievance into belonging.

This helps explain why the accusations become stranger over time. Jews have been blamed for

• Capitalism and communism
• Cosmopolitanism and tribalism
• Wealth and povert
• War and cowardice
• Moral decay
• Excessive moral influence.

The contradictions are not a bug. They are the point. A political scapegoat must be flexible enough to carry every frustration a movement needs to unload.

So when Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism present Israel as the source of every disorder in the Middle East, they are not conducting serious analysis. They are building a story that makes political organization easier.

The Arab League & the Politics of Deflection

The Arab League’s founding in 1945 offers a sharp example.

• The Arab world was emerging from an era in which European empires had been exhausted by war.
• Many Arab states had vast territory, major resources, and soon enormous oil wealth.
• They had the chance to build stable, prosperous, and confident societies.

But the region was also divided. It contained rival states, rival ruling families, religious divides, ideological struggles, and growing popular dissatisfaction. Pan-Arabism needed something powerful enough to hold these differences together.

Israel became that target.

Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism helped turn opposition to the Jewish state into a unifying political language. The Arab League built an economic boycott of Israel into its program from the beginning. Israel could be blamed for instability, humiliation, poverty, failed leadership, and the frustrations of a divided region.

When leaders point constantly at Israel, they are often hoping nobody points back at them.

This is not cost-free politics in the long run. It is deeply destructive. A country that misidentifies its problems cannot solve them. A government that blames Jews for domestic failure will not reform its economy, institutions, schools, or public life. It will simply keep escalating the rhetoric.

And the worse the country’s internal problems become, the more tempting the scapegoat becomes. Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism therefore create a vicious cycle. Deflection produces failure. Failure produces more deflection. Eventually, the society is trapped by its own lie.

Never Follow the Pointing Finger

There is a painful temptation in Jewish political life. Someone makes an accusation against Israel, and the instinct is to answer the charge point by point.

What about this policy? What about that prime minister? What about a border, a military operation, a settlement, or a withdrawal?

Of course Israel, like every country, has arguments, disagreements, mistakes, and imperfect leaders. Jews do not need to pretend otherwise. But the central political error is to assume that every obsessive accusation is really about the stated issue.

The charge is often not the real problem. The political use of the charge is the problem.

If an agitator points at Israel as the explanation for every moral failure in the world, negotiating over the details of one Israeli decision will not satisfy him. It cannot. The accusation is serving a larger purpose.

Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism thrive when Jews accept the role assigned to them. The answer is not to deny reality or shut down ordinary debate. The answer is to recognize political manipulation when it is happening.

Do not blindly follow the pointing finger. Ask instead:

• What grievance is being activated?
• Who gains influence by directing anger toward Jews or Israel?
• What domestic failures are being hidden?
• What unlikely coalition is being built through this hostility?

Those questions get much closer to the truth.

Israel’s Resurrection & Rebirth Is the Central Story

There’s another story that must be told with far more confidence. Not as propaganda. Not as a slogan. Simply as reality.

European civilization, including its most cultured and educated societies, descended into catastrophe in the twentieth century.

• Nazi Germany murdered six million Jews.
• Stalinism brought its own immense brutality and destruction.
• The very idea of progress seemed shattered.

Then, within three years of the Holocaust, Jews reclaimed sovereignty in their ancient homeland.

That is not a small historical footnote. It’s among the most extraordinary national recoveries in human history.

Out of the ashes of Europe came the reestablishment of the Jewish State.

Israel was built by people who emerged from displaced persons camps, slave labor camps, ghettos, and devastated communities. Many had nowhere else to go. They did not merely survive. They rebuilt a political society, revived a language, defended themselves, absorbed immigrants, created institutions, and made a country.

Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism work relentlessly to reverse this moral picture.

• They portray Jewish national restoration as an offense rather than a recovery.
• They frame the Jewish return to sovereignty as the source of history’s problems rather than one of history’s great acts of resilience.

That distortion has consequences.

• If Jews internalize it, they begin to tell their own story apologetically.
• They become hesitant about the very achievement that should give them confidence.

Why Coexistence Is Both Strength & Vulnerability

Judaism is built for coexistence. Jews have lived among other peoples for most of their history. Jewish law, Jewish learning, Jewish communal life, and Jewish ethics developed under conditions where Jews had to remain distinct without becoming conquerors.

That is a profound strength. It teaches self-discipline, responsibility, learning, and the duty to make oneself useful in the world.

But it can also create a political vulnerability.

• Jews often want acceptance even from those most hostile to them.
• They want to prove they are helpful, constructive, peaceful, and morally serious.
• Those are admirable instincts.
• But Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism exploit them by encouraging Jews to believe that enough accommodation will end the hostility.

A people seeking coexistence can be tempted to mistake surrender for peace.

The Oslo years showed the power of that temptation. The hope was understandable. If Palestinian leaders were empowered, perhaps they could create stability and peace. But empowering an enemy with the expectation that he will provide your security is not a durable strategy.

The lesson is not that peace is undesirable. The lesson is that peace cannot be built on denial. A society must understand the goals of those who openly seek its destruction.

Anti-Zionism Is Not a Harmless Substitute

Anti-Zionism often presents itself as a cleaner, more respectable political vocabulary. It claims not to oppose Jews, only Jewish sovereignty. But when the Jewish state is singled out for obsessive condemnation, humiliation, exclusion, and destruction, the distinction begins to collapse.

Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism increasingly use anti-Zionism as their preferred language because it is more useful in the modern West. It allows old hatreds to enter institutions that would reject openly Antisemitic language.

The phenomenon is more dangerous not because every critic of Israel is an Antisemite. Criticism of any government is normal. It is dangerous because anti-Zionism can collect earlier anti-Jewish myths and attach them to a living state with millions of citizens.

• It can treat Jewish self-determination as uniquely illegitimate.
• It can turn Israeli leaders into symbols of global evil.
• It can create a public ritual of humiliation in which Jews are told that their national identity is an offense.

The demand is not merely that Jews be criticized. It is often that Jews be made afraid, diminished, and publicly ashamed.

The October 7 massacre made this brutally clear.

• Hamas did not hide its barbarity.
• It celebrated it and publicized it.
• The goal was not only to attack Israelis. It was to announce contempt for the moral limits of Western civilization itself.

And yet, in many places, people rushed to excuse, minimize, or redirect attention away from the atrocity. That is the moral wreckage produced when Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism have already trained people to see Israel as guilty before facts are even considered.

American Confidence Is Jewish Confidence

American Jews face this moment inside a broader American crisis of self-confidence. The United States is one of the great achievements of political history. Its Constitution, Bill of Rights, democratic institutions, and commitment to equal citizenship created possibilities that much of the world had never known.

But these achievements do not explain themselves. Children are not born knowing why free institutions matter. A country must teach its story, defend its principles, and give its people reasons to cherish what they have inherited.

When American schools, universities, cultural institutions, and elites stop doing that, a vacuum opens. Into that vacuum come ideologies that promise moral purity through destruction, grievance, and blame.

Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism gain ground in precisely that vacuum. They offer a cheap morality.

• The world is divided into oppressors and oppressed.
• America is evil.
• The West is evil.
• Israel is evil.

The Jew becomes the tiny, dramatic figure onto whom the whole story can be projected.

If Jews cannot live freely and confidently in America, America is no longer fully confident in freedom itself.

The freedom of Jews is not a narrow communal issue. It is a test of whether the American promise still means what it says.

Teach the Story, Create the Culture

The long-term response is education. Not defensive education alone. Not only training people to answer hostile claims. The deeper work is teaching Jewish history, Jewish literature, Jewish political thought, Zionism, American civic ideals, and the actual story of Israel.

Identity comes before advocacy. A young Jew who understands the Jewish story is not easily frightened into disowning it. Zionism stops being a word inherited from parents or a campus argument. It becomes part of a living history of survival, renewal, and responsibility.

Culture matters just as much. Jewish novels, films, journalism, music, art, and public conversation all help form the moral imagination of a people. American Jews need a stronger, thicker, more self-aware cultural life. Israelis, too, have an extraordinary story to tell, and the world is hungry for honest accounts of Israeli energy, creativity, complexity, and courage.

This is not about pretending Jews are perfect. It is about refusing the grotesque lie that Jews are the explanation for everyone else’s failures.

The future belongs to what we teach, what we create, and what we are willing to defend.

Islamic propaganda and Antisemitism may offer a fast path to anger and political mobilization. But they produce only distortion, fear, and decay. The better answer is confidence rooted in knowledge.

• Know the story.
• Tell the story.
• Build the institutions.
• Make the art.
• Teach the children.

And never let anyone else write the Jewish story for Jews.

The War Machine…

A| EXAMPLES OF OPPRESSIVE PROPAGANDA

All through history, authoritarian regimes have used oppressive propaganda to control populations, eliminate dissent, and justify discrimination or violence. Such propaganda strategies employ psychology and systemic goals.

Dehumanization & Alterity (Othering) strip targeted groups of their humanity to reduce public empathy and justify persecution or violence.

• Animalistic Comparisons: Comparing a marginalized group with pests, predators, or disease to induce disgust and fear (e.g., Nazis compared Jews to rats. Muslim clerics state: “The Jews are descendants of apes, pigs, and other animals.”).
• “Enemy Within” Narrative: Framing a minority or political group as a hidden, treasonous threat working to destroy society from the inside.
• Moral Corruption Accusations.

Information Distortion & Historical Revisionism

• The Big Lie: Stating a massive, foundational falsehood so confidently and repeatedly that the public begins to believe it, assuming no authority would lie so boldly.
• Historical Erasure: Rewriting history textbooks to erase the cultural identity of marginalized groups.
• Gaslighting the Public: Systematically denying observable realities and causing citizens to doubt their own perceptions.

Russian Propaganda

Influence of Russian propaganda in different regions of the world is very effective. This is due to a comprehensive approach. It includes the use of local context, various information tactics, and new technologies.

Examples of such effectiveness is Russia’s activity in the Middle East and North Africa.

Russia promotes itself as an alternative to Western countries. It presents as a profitable partner ready to reformat the world order. This works in favor of states that feel injustice at the hands of the so-called “collective West.” Such propaganda allows Russia to manipulate public opinion and influence political processes. Thus strengthening its position in the international arena.

B| INVERSION PROPAGANDA

Inversion propaganda is a communication strategy where an aggressor flips reality to portray the victim as the oppressor and themselves as the oppressor as the victim. It’s a form of psychological manipulation and warfare, used to flip moral responsibility and confuse public perception.

Key Mechanisms

• Blame Shifting: The real wrongdoer accuses their opponent of doing the exact bad things that the wrongdoer is actually doing.
• Flipping Agency: The strategy strips the real aggressor of accountability and paints them as acting purely in self-defense. They criminalize the actual victims for resisting.
• Holocaust Inversion: A specific, prominent variant where historical victims of Nazi atrocities (Jews or the State of Israel) are falsely accused of acting like Nazis toward others, thus turning the victim into the perpetrator.

Purpose & Impact

• Justifying Violence: By framing oneself as the true target of an existential threat, aggressive actions or retaliation can be presented to the public as virtuous and necessary self-defense.
• Neutralizing Facts: It creates an alternate narrative ecosystem where verifiable historical or current facts lose their power, replaced instead by a persistent web of emotional claims.
• Shifting Blame: It short-circuits critical debate by putting the defending party on the defensive, forcing them to disprove absurd or inverted premises rather than address the original offense.

C| HOW DID THE MUSLIM BROTHERHOOD DEVELOP ITS PROPAGANDA?

The Muslim Brotherhood combined grassroots community outreach, print media, and religious education with a populist political message. They used mass-mobilization techniques by blending traditional Islamic proselytizing (dawa) with the modern organizational, authoritarian, and rhetorical strategies prominent in 1930s Europe.

Early Grassroots & Print Media (1920s–1940s)

• Founding Vision: Founded by Hassan al-Banna in Egypt in 1928, the group used simple, direct language to frame Islam as a complete social, political, and economic alternative to Western imperialism.
• Local Outreach: Al-Banna built the movement’s foundation through direct engagement in mosques, coffee houses, clubs, and schools rather than relying solely on elite political channels.
• Publications: The Brotherhood expanded its reach by launching its own newspapers, magazines, and weekly pamphlets to spread its ideology and critique secular governance.

Global Expansion & Modern Digital Networks (1970s–Present)

• Financial and Institutional Backing: Fleeing persecution in Egypt, members relocated abroad, often aided by funding partnerships in the Gulf, to set up educational charities, cultural centers, and international networks.
• Digital Ecosystems: In the modern era, the movement utilizes satellite channels, websites, and social media platforms (like X and YouTube) to amplify narratives, support regional offshoots like Hamas, and influence online public discourse across the Arab world.

European & Authoritarian Influences

• Fascist and Nazi Organizational Models: The Muslim Brotherhood emerged during the rise of European fascism in the 1930s. Al-Banna and the group adopted strict hierarchical command structures, totalizing ideological loyalty, and youth paramilitary wings akin to European fascist movements.
• Axis Propaganda: During the late 1930s and World War II, the Brotherhood engaged with Axis powers and integrated aggressive anti-British, nationalist, and exclusionary rhetoric.
• Later Wartime Alliances: Prominent figures like the Jerusalem-based Amin al-Husseini collaborated directly with Nazi Germany’s broadcasting and propaganda machinery during WWII, before taking refuge with the Brotherhood in Cairo, further aligning pan-Islamist and European Antisemitic tropes.

D| HAS ‘MEIN KAMPF’ INFLUENCED MUSLIM PROPAGANDA?

Mein Kampf played a limited direct role in shaping World War II Nazi propaganda aimed at Muslims, as the Third Reich instead relied on selectively interpreting the Quran and blending European Antisemitism with regional anti-colonial grievances.

World War II & Nazi Strategy

• Limited direct use: Historical research shows that Hitler’s Mein Kampf and official Nazi party texts were rarely cited in Arabic-language radio broadcasts or leaflets during World War II.
• Racial contradictions: Hitler’s original writings expressed contempt for non-Aryan populations, which created friction with Arab nationalists. Nazi officials downplayed racial theories of Aryan supremacy when addressing the Middle East.
• Weaponizing religion: Rather than pushing Mein Kampf, Nazi propaganda shifted toward quoting select verses from the Quran and Islamic traditions. Broadcasters paired these religious references with claims that Jews were a mutual enemy of both Islam and Germany.
• Early distribution: Local allies, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, did distribute Arabic translations of Mein Kampf at political conferences in Cairo as early as 1938, but the book itself was not the main driver of daily messaging.

Postwar & Modern Impact

• Symbolic artifacts: In the decades following World War II, Mein Kampf and The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became widely printed “unread bestsellers” in parts of the Middle East.
• Cultural absorption: Rather than being consumed as rigorous political theory, the book turned into a cultural artifact. It helped normalize modern European conspiracy theories about Jewish global control within regional political discourse.
• Contemporary propaganda: Elements of this ideological fusion—combining religious hostility with modern Antisemitic tropes—reappeared in the media strategies of modern militant groups like Hamas and Hezbollah, mirroring the propaganda techniques first deployed during the mid-20th century.

During the post-October 7 War, Israeli forces discovered translated Arabic copies of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf in civilian homes and operational bases used by Hamas in the Gaza Strip.

E| HAS THE ‘PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF ZION’ INFLUENCED MUSLIM PROPAGANDA?

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion has significantly influenced modern political discourse, media, and propaganda in parts of the Arab and Muslim worlds by providing a ready-made narrative of a malicious global Jewish conspiracy.

Integration into Anti-Zionism & the Israeli Conflict

• Blaming Regional Outcomes: The text has been widely used by various political movements and state media to explain complex geopolitical failures, economic stagnation, military defeats against Israel, and internal divisions within the Muslim world.
• Equating Zionism with Global Subversion: Rather than treating Zionism strictly as a nationalist movement, propaganda inspired by the Protocols frames the existence and policies of Israel as part of a multi-generational plot to control world banking, media, and governments.

Adoption by Islamist & Nationalist Groups

• The Muslim Brotherhood: Influential ideologues, such as Sayyid Qutb of the Muslim Brotherhood, incorporated themes from European Antisemitism and the Protocols into their literature, fusing traditional Islamic polemics regarding early sectarian conflicts with modern European conspiracy theories.
• State and Militant Sponsorship: Over the decades, Arabic translations of the Protocols have been published with prefaces from notable figures, endorsed or circulated by state-linked entities (such as historical distribution by Iranian embassies or references in official Saudi and regional media), and cited in foundational charters of militant groups like Hamas.

Historical Spread

• Adoption via Europe and the Soviet Union: While early Nazi propaganda in Arabic relied more heavily on selective religious framing than direct distribution of the Protocols, subsequent dissemination accelerated heavily during the Cold War. The Soviet Union actively exported anti-Zionist propaganda containing themes from the Protocols to the Arab world following the 1967 Six-Day War, embedding the forgery deeply into regional political rhetoric.

During the post-October 7 War, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Israeli leadership prominently publicized the discovery of several widely known Antisemitic books and texts in residential buildings used as operational bases by Hamas. These included annotated Arabic Translations of ‘Mein Kampf’ and ‘The End of the Jews,’ authored by Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar.

The association with ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ frequently arises in discussions about the conflict, because the original 1988 Hamas Covenant explicitly references the Protocols, citing the infamous Antisemitic forgery as historical “proof” of a global Zionist conspiracy.