EclectEcon

Economics and the mid-life crisis have much in common: Both dwell on foregone opportunities

C'est la vie; c'est la guerre; c'est la pomme de terre . . . . . . . . . . . . . email: jpalmer at uwo dot ca


. . . . . . . . . . .Richard Posner should be awarded the next Nobel Prize in Economics . . . . . . . . . . . .

Friday, October 14, 2005

The Protocols of the Elders of Zion:
a despicable forgery

About 6 or 7 years ago, I was at the local lunch counter, and a guy there started telling me about a publication called "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" which sets out how Jews created a conspiracy to dominate the world.

Fortunately, I was skeptical. I went home, did a few searches on the internet, and found many different sites that said things like this:

Serge Nilus, a little-known Czarist official in Moscow, edited several editions of the Protocols, each with a different account of how he "discovered" the document. In his 1911 edition Nilus claimed that his source had stolen the document from (a non-existent) Zionist headquarters in France. Other "editors" of the Protocols maintained that the document was read at the First Zionist Congress held in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland.

... in August of 1964 a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee issued a report repudiating the Protocols, to which Senators Thomas J. Dodd and Kenneth B. Keating appended the following: "Every age and country has had its share of fabricated ‘historic’ documents which have been foisted on an unsuspecting public for some malign purpose. . . One of the most notorious and most durable of these is the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion.’."
And from Wikipedia:

The Encyclopædia Britannica describes the Protocols as a "fraudulent document that served as a pretext and rationale for anti-Semitism in the early 20th century".

The overwhelming majority of historians in the United States of America and Europe have long agreed that the document is fraudulent; this has also been stated in a number of court cases worldwide, e.g., as early as the 1930s in Bern, Switzerland. In 1993 a district court in Moscow, Russia, formally ruled that the Protocols were faked in dismissing a libel suit by the ultra-nationalist Pamyat organization, which had been criticized for using them in their anti-Semitic publications.[2]

The Protocols is accepted as factual in some parts of the world in which people hold negative opinions of Jews or Israel, as well as in countries such as Japan, where some believe it can be read as a textbook description of means to obtain power. In the current conflicts in the Middle East, the Protocols is sometimes used as evidence of Jewish conspiracy. [3]

That afternoon, I stormed into the person's place of business with nearly a hundred pages of printouts. The person was quite embarrassed and didn't raise the topic again; his wife gave him a look of "I told you so!"

Sadly, too many people are reproducing the Protocols.
Even sadder is that too many people believe them.

Don't. The document is a fraud.
 
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