The US State Department has awarded a $200,000 grant to the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) to conduct a project that will document anti-Semitism, Holocaust denial and Holocaust glorification in the Middle East.

The welcome announcement last week serves as an occasion to address, once again, the import of anti-Jewish propaganda within Arab societies – virtually the only places in the world where anti-Semitism is publicly endorsed, and where to this day it flourishes unabated.

Too many segments of Arab societies continue to be nourished by time-worn anti-Semitic tropes, now disseminated ever more swiftly through the Internet. In style and in substance, much of this venom, until recently absent in the Islamic world, has been imported – one of the few Western imports Islamic fundamentalists seem eager to accept. Arab anti-Semitism builds on the myths of the immoral Jew that once haunted the European imagination.”

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