by Vic­tor Davis Hanson

Hat­ing Jews, on racial as well as reli­gious grounds, is as old as the Roman destruc­tion of the Sec­ond Tem­ple in Jerusalem. Later in Europe, pogroms and the Holo­caust were the nat­ural devo­lu­tion of that ele­men­tal venom.

Anti-Semitism, after World War II, often avoided the burn­ing crosses and Nazi rant­ing. It often appeared as a more sub­tle ani­mos­ity, fueled by envy of suc­cess­ful Jews in the West. “The good peo­ple, the nice peo­ple” often were the cul­prits, accord­ing to a char­ac­ter in the 1947 film “Gentleman’s Agree­ment,” which dealt with the Amer­i­can aristocracy’s social shun­ning of Jews.

A recent third type of anti-Jewish odium is some­thing dif­fer­ent. It is a strange mix­ture of vio­lent hatred by rad­i­cal Islamists and the more or less indif­fer­ence to it by Westerners.

Those who ran­domly shoot Jews for being Jews — whether at a Jew­ish cen­ter in Seat­tle or at syn­a­gogues in Istan­bul — are for the large part Mus­lim zealots. Most in the West explain away the vio­lence. They chalk it up to anger over the end­less tit-for-tat in the Mid­dle East. Yet pri­vately they know that we do not see vio­lent Jews shoot­ing Mus­lims in the United States or Europe.

Iran­ian Pres­i­dent Mah­moud Ahmadine­jad promises to wipe Israel “off the map.” He seems eager for the req­ui­site nuclear weapons to fin­ish off what an Iran­ian mul­lah has called a “one-bomb state” — mean­ing Israel’s destruc­tion would only require one nuclear weapon. Iran’s theoc­racy intends to turn the idea of a Jew­ish state on its head. Instead of Israel being a safe haven for Jews in their his­tor­i­cal birth­place, the Ira­ni­ans appar­ently find that con­cen­tra­tion only too con­ve­nient for their own final nuclear solution.

In response, here at home the Coun­cil on For­eign Rela­tions rewards the Iran­ian pres­i­dent with an invi­ta­tion to speak to its mem­ber­ship. At the podium of that hal­lowed cham­ber, Ahmadine­jad, who ques­tions whether the Holo­caust ever took place, basi­cally dis­missed a first­hand wit­ness of Dachau by ask­ing whether he really could be that old.

The state-run, and thus government-authorized, news­pa­pers of the Mid­dle East, slan­der Jews in bar­baric fash­ion. “Mein Kampf” (trans­lated, of course, as “Jihadi”) sells briskly in the region. Hamas and Hezbol­lah mili­tias on parade emu­late the style of brown­shirts. In response, much of the West­ern pub­lic snoozes. They are far more wor­ried over whether a Dan­ish car­toon­ist has car­i­ca­tured Islam, or if the pope has been rude to Mus­lims when quot­ing an obscure 600-year-old Byzan­tine dialogue.

In the last two decades, rad­i­cal Islamic ter­ror­ists have bombed and mur­dered thou­sands inside Europe and the United States. Their state sup­port­ers in the Mid­dle East have raked in bil­lions in petro-windfall prof­its from energy-hungry West­ern economies. For many in Europe and the United States, sup­port­ing Israel — the Mid­dle East’s only sta­ble democ­racy — or even its allies in the West has become viewed as both dan­ger­ous and costly.

In addi­tion, Israel is no longer weak but proud and ready to defend itself. So when its ter­ror­ist ene­mies like Hezbol­lah and Hamas bril­liantly mar­ried their own fas­cist creed with pop­u­lar left­wing mul­ti­cul­tur­al­ism in the West, there was an eerie union: yet another sup­posed third-world vic­tim of a West­ern oppres­sor think­ing it could earn a pass for its mur­der­ous agenda.

We’re accus­tomed to asso­ci­at­ing hatred of Jews with the ridiculed Nean­derthal Right of those in sheets and jack­boots. But this new venom, at least in its West­ern form, is mostly a left­wing, and often an aca­d­e­mic, enter­prise. It’s also far more insid­i­ous, given the left’s moral pre­ten­sions and its influ­ence in the pres­ti­gious media and uni­ver­si­ties. We see the unfor­tu­nate results in fre­quent anti-Israeli demon­stra­tions on cam­puses that con­flate Israel with Nazis, while the media have pub­lished fraud­u­lent pic­tures and slanted events in south­ern Lebanon.

The renewed hatred of Jews in the Mid­dle East — and the indif­fer­ence to it in the West — is a sort of “post anti-Semitism.” Islamic zealots sup­ply the old ven­omous hatred, while afflu­ent and timid West­ern­ers pro­vide the new nec­es­sary indif­fer­ence — if punc­tu­ated by the occa­sional off-the-cuff Amen in the man­ner of a Louis Far­rakhan or Mel Gib­son outburst.

The dan­gers of this post anti-Semitism is not just that Jews are shot in Europe and the United States — or that a drunken celebrity or dem­a­gogue mouths off. Instead, ever so insid­i­ously, rad­i­cal Islam’s hatred of Jews is becom­ing normalized.

The result is that the world’s politi­cians and media are talk­ing seri­ously with those who not merely want back the West Bank, but rather want an end to Israel alto­gether and every­one inside it.