by Vic­tor Davis Han­son
Tri­bune Media Services

Who recently said: “These Jews started 19 Cru­sades. The 19th was World War I. Why? Only to build Israel.”

Some holdover Nazi?

Hardly. It was for­mer Prime Min­is­ter Necmet­tin Erbakan of Turkey, a NATO ally. He went on to claim that the Jews — whom he refers to as “bac­te­ria” — con­trolled China, India and Japan, and ran the United States.

Who alleged: “The Arabs who were involved in 9/11 coop­er­ated with the Zion­ists, actu­ally. It was a coop­er­a­tion. They gave them the per­fect excuse to denounce all Arabs.”

A con­spir­acy nut?

Actu­ally, it was for­mer Demo­c­ra­tic U.S. Sen. James Abourezk of South Dakota. He denounced Israel on a Hezbollah-owned tele­vi­sion sta­tion, adding: “I mar­veled at the Hezbol­lah resis­tance to Israel. . . . It was a mar­vel of orga­ni­za­tion, of courage and bravery.”

And finally, who claimed at a United Nations-sponsored con­fer­ence that demo­c­ra­tic Israel was “much worse” than the for­mer apartheid South Africa, and that it “under­mines the inter­na­tional community’s reac­tion to global warming”?

A rad­i­cal envi­ron­men­tal­ist wacko?

Again, no. It was Clare Short, a mem­ber of the British par­lia­ment. She was a sec­re­tary for inter­na­tional devel­op­ment under Prime Min­is­ter Tony Blair.

A new vir­u­lent strain of the old anti-Semitism is spread­ing world­wide. This hate — of a mag­ni­tude not seen in over 70 years — is not just espoused by Iran’s loony pres­i­dent, Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad, or rad­i­cal jihadists.

The lat­est anti-Semitism is also now mouthed by world lead­ers and sophis­ti­cated politi­cians and aca­d­e­mics. Their loathing often mas­quer­ades as “anti-Zionism” or “legit­i­mate” crit­i­cism of Israel. But the venom exclu­sively reserved for the Jew­ish state betrays their exis­ten­tial hatred.

Israel is always lam­basted for enter­ing homes in the West Bank to look for Hamas ter­ror­ists and using too much force. But last week the world snoozed when the Lebanese army bom­barded and then crushed the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp, which har­bored Islamic terrorists.

The world has long objected to Jew­ish set­tlers buy­ing up land in the West Bank. Yet Hezbol­lah, flush with Iran­ian money, is now pur­chas­ing large tracts in south­ern Lebanon for mil­i­tary pur­poses and purg­ing them of non-Shiites.

Here at home, “neo­con­ser­v­a­tive” has become syn­ony­mous with a sup­posed Jew­ish cabal of Wash­ing­ton insid­ers who hijacked U.S. pol­icy to take us to war for Israel’s inter­est. That our state depart­ment is at the mercy of a Jew­ish lobby is the theme of a recent high-profile book by pro­fes­sors at Har­vard Uni­ver­sity and the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago.

Yet when the United States bombed Euro­pean and Chris­t­ian Ser­bia to help Balkan Mus­lims, few crit­ics alleged that Amer­i­can Mus­lims had unduly swayed Pres­i­dent Clin­ton. And such charges of improper eth­nic influ­ence are rarely lev­eled to explain the bil­lions in Amer­i­can aid given to non-democratic Egypt, Jor­dan or the Pales­tini­ans — or the Saudi oil money that pours into Amer­i­can universities.

The world like­wise dis­plays such a dou­ble stan­dard. It seems to care lit­tle about the prin­ci­ple of so-called occu­pied land — whether in Cyprus or Tibet — unless Israel is the accused. Mass mur­der­ing in Cam­bo­dia, the Congo, Rwanda and Dar­fur has earned far fewer United Nations’ res­o­lu­tions of con­dem­na­tion than sup­posed atroc­i­ties com­mit­ted by Israel. A num­ber of British aca­d­e­mics are spon­sor­ing a boy­cott of Israeli schol­ars but leave alone those from auto­cratic Iran, China and Cuba.

There are var­i­ous expla­na­tions for the new anti-Semitism. For many abroad, attack­ing Jews and Israel is an indi­rect way of damn­ing its main ally, the United States — by imply­ing that Amer­i­cans are not entirely evil, just hood­winked by those sneaky and far more evil Jews.

At home, there are obvi­ous prag­matic con­sid­er­a­tions. Some Amer­i­cans may find it makes more sense to damn a few mil­lion Israelis with­out oil than it does to offend Israel’s adver­saries in the Mid­dle East, who num­ber in the hun­dreds of mil­lions and con­trol nearly half the world’s petro­leum reserves.

Cow­ardice explains a lot. Libel­ing Israel won’t earn some­one a fatwa or a death sen­tence in the man­ner com­pa­ra­ble crit­i­cism of Islam might. There are no Jew­ish sui­cide bombers in Lon­don, Madrid or Bali.

This new face of anti-Semitism is so insid­i­ous because it is so well dis­guised, advanced by self-proclaimed diplo­mats and aca­d­e­mics — and now embraced by the sup­pos­edly sophis­ti­cated left on uni­ver­sity campuses.

When national, col­lec­tive or per­sonal aspi­ra­tions are not met, it is far eas­ier to blame some­one or some­thing rather than to look within for the source of the fail­ure and frus­tra­tion. More recently, some­one must be blamed for get­ting ter­ror­ists (with oil and its prof­its behind them) mad at us.

That some­one is — no sur­prise — once again Jews.