Free Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History by David Aaronovitch Page B

and Jewish Zionist fundamentalism”; Lawrence of Arabia was an attempt to “infantilize the Arabs”; and Alien was designed to demonize non-Westerners. All of this, a narrator claimed, was “in total compliance with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion .”
    But just in case the Iranian viewer of the early twenty-first century was not fully versed in the story of the Protocols , the documentary carefully outlined the story of the Basel Congress of 1897, with its own new twist. In this version, some Russian policemen set fire to the congress hall while the delegates were inside. Terrified, “the Jews fled, and the policemen went inside and gathered up all the documents and sent them to Moscow.” Among these writings they found what was later called The Protocols of the Elders of Zion . “The Protocols were divided into twenty-four parts,” the narrator claimed, “and included the Satanic Jewish ideas of taking over the world using a Jewish government, after destroying all of Orthodox Russia, Catholic Europe, the pope’s reign, and Islam.”
    In May and June 2008, the Iranian television news channel IRINN showed a series titled The Secret of Armageddon , in which various academics and “researchers” testified to the truth of the Protocols . The narrator concluded the series by tying the old conspiracy to new ones:
    Today, there are many indications that the “hidden hands” of world Zionism were involved in the 9/11 terrorist attack. According to a large group of Western intellectuals, the Zionists are the real rulers of the United States. According to irrefutable documents published by independent American media outlets, the Zionists used intelligence agents and spies, with the full cooperation of agencies with[in] the country, to carry out this terrorist operation in full view of the world, in order to prepare the ground for taking over Afghanistan and Iraq, and to realize the dream of a greater Israel.
    The thread from Goedsche to the present day has never properly been snapped. Johann von Leers died in 1965, incidentally, but not in prison or in Germany or even in a South American hideaway. Somehow he had fled to the Middle East, lain low, converted to Islam under the name of Omar Amin, and then resurfaced in Egypt as an adviser on propaganda to the Arab nationalist government of President Nasser. One of Nasser’s practices, while von Leers was with him, was to hand out, to those who wanted them and those who didn’t, copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion .

4. DEAD DEITIES
I shouted out,
“Who killed the Kennedys? ”
When after all,
It was you and me.
     
    —ROLLING STONES, “SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL”
     
     
     
     
     
    T he entry in my late mother’s diary for Saturday, November 23, 1963, begins: “Everyone abuzz with Kennedy assassination. Man called Lee Oswald arrested.” Then she adds, “Wonder if it is a frame-up, he is billed as having comm[unist] associations.” My mother, a member of the British Communist Party, was wary of any piece of reporting that sought to blame something as reprehensible as political murder on an unknown comrade. The next day she felt her suspicions had been justified: “Kennedy’s alleged assassin now assassinated. More and more looks like a frame-up.”
    A few hours before Mrs. Aaronovitch took up her pen, the president of the United States of America, John F. Kennedy, traveling in a slow-moving motorcade through the city of Dallas in Texas, had been hit by two shots, and had died soon after. Although subsequent mythology attached a kind of contemporary sainthood to the dead leader, there had been much about Kennedy that, while he lived, had irritated many and enraged a few. He had presided over the resolution of the terrifying missile crisis of 1962, but he had also allowed support for an abortive invasion of Cuba—the Bay of Pigs fiasco—shortly after taking office, and superintended the escalation of American involvement in Vietnam. Domestically,