In an enlightening and prescient essay written nearly ten years ago, Martin Kramer identifies the roots of Muslim antisemitism, following the Hizb’Allah bombing of the Jewish center in Buenos Aires: The Jihad Against the Jews.

The Islamic fundamentalist position has now been thoroughly penetrated by classic European anti-Semitism. This has been facilitated by the fact that so many fundamentalist thinkers of the present generation have spent time in the West, collecting advanced degrees at the universities of London and Paris. There they internalized the anti-Semitism of the extreme Left and Right, and they now retail a comprehensive indictment of the Jews which goes far beyond anti-Zionism. Their tales of unbridled Jewish power enjoy even more credibility among their listeners at home, since they can claim to have seen and experienced it firsthand. They wax persuasive when they declare that an international Jewish conspiracy stands behind Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, or the fall of the Muslim-owned Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).

Consider the spiritual mentor of Hezbollah in Lebanon, Sayyid Muhammad Husayn Fadlallah, whose teeming flock overflows into Beirut’s streets to hear his mosque sermon each Friday. According to Fadlallah, “The struggle against the Jewish state, in which the Muslims are engaged, is a continuation of the old struggle of the Muslims against the Jews’ conspiracy against Islam.” Muslims now face

a world Jewish movement working to deprive Islam of its positions of actual power—spiritually, on the question of Jerusalem; geographically, on the question of Palestine; politically, by bringing pressures to block Islam’s movement at more than one place; and economically, in an effort to control Islam’s economic potential and resources, in production and consumption.

Fadlallah thus rejects the argument, which is still made by some nationalists and fundamentalists, that Israel is but an instrument of American imperialism. “The Jews want to be a world superpower….No one should imagine that the Jews act on behalf of any super or minor power. It is their personality to make for themselves a future world presence.” The very purpose of Israel is to bring “all the Jews in the world to this region, to make it the nucleus for spreading their economic and cultural domination.”

For Fadlallah, then, Israel is “not merely a group that established a state at the expense of a people. It is a group which wants to establish Jewish culture at the expense of Islamic culture.” Here is a view of Muslims and Jews locked in a timeless and total confrontation, until one completely subjugates the other.