one should at least view with profound suspicion those Leftists who argue that the Muslim fundamentalist-populist movements are basically “ours,” emancipatory anti-imperialist movements, and that the fact that they formulate their program in directly anti-Enlightenment and anti-universalist terms, sometimes getting close to direct anti-Semitism, is just a confusion that results from their being caught into the immediacy of struggle (“when they say they are against Jews, what they really mean is just that they are against the Zionist colonialism”). One should unconditionally resist the temptation to “understand” the Arab anti-Semitism (where we really encounter it) as a “natural” reaction to the sad plight of the Palestinians: there should be no “understanding” for the fact that, in many, if not most, of the Arab countries, Hitler is still considered a hero, the fact that, in the primary school textbooks, all the traditional anti-Semitic myths, from the notorious forged Protocols of the Zion Elders to the claims that Jews use the blood of Christian (or Arab) children for sacrificial purposes, are attributed to them. To claim that this anti-Semitism articulates in a displaced mode the resistance against capitalism in no way justifies it.

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