Lebanese newspaper editor goes on anti-semitic diatribe

Charles Ayoub is the editor of the Lebanese newspaper al-Diyar and is known to be close to Hezbollah and Syria.

But his latest article, about the absurd Mohammed video, is pure Jew-hatred. He doesn't even try to pretend to be anti-Zionist - he hangs his Jew-hate right out there, proudly.

In this article, he says Jews want to divide Muslims from Christians so Jews can control both of them. He says 400 Jews disembarked off the airplane that eventually was bombed over Lockerbie. He says Moammar Gaddafi, his sons and his mistresses were Jewish, and that's why he sent arms to Lebanon to keep the civil war going.

And, of course, he says all the Jews didn't come to work at the World Trade Center on 9/11.

According to Ayoub, Jews control both the United States and Russia.

The stupid Mohammed video? It wasn't released to coincide with 9/11. No, the Jews who (naturally) made the movie to cause a rift between Christians and Muslims released it right before the Pope was to visit Lebanon, in order to cause internal strife! The film's purpose is to incite Muslims to attack Christians while the Pope is there.

So diabolical!

There has been a definite uptick in explicit anti-semitism in the Arabic media in the past few months. It is starting to become as acceptable as it was in the days before MEMRI and the Web when Arabs didn't pretend to distinguish between Jews and Zionists. Usually, Arab anti-semites would hide their caricatures of big-nosed, black-hatted Jews by labeling them "Zionists" or they would claim that "Zionists" controlled the banks and the media, and so forth.

And even though it was a joke, it revealed that they were at least embarrassed to admit that they really hated Jews. That embarrassment seems to be melting away.

Only in the past week we saw explicitly anti-Jewish vitriol and incitement in Egyptian and Jordanian newspapers.

As far as I can tell, there has been no pushback against these articles in the Arab media or in talkbacks.