The problem in Europe seems destined only to get worse over the next several years. “Europe has both an aging population and a low birthrate,” says Mort Zuckerman. “So they need immigration, and Muslims are the primary group coming in.”

In the Muslim world, where anti-Israel and anti-Jewish extremism are hardly news, the speech by outgoing Malaysian prime minister Mahathir Mohamad broke new ground. Not since Hitler has a head of state had the gall to take off the rhetorical gloves with such zeal. Addressing the 57 member nations of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—a group where the sole membership requirement is religion—he called on the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims to defeat the Jews.

“The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million, but today the Jews rule the world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for them,” he said. The Jews, he continued, “invented socialism, communism, human rights, and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong, so that they can enjoy equal rights with others.”

“Israel,” says Zuckerman, “is not allowed to live like other members of the family of nations.”

It is one thing that the leaders of all 57 states gave Mahathir a standing ovation—including those from supposedly moderate states like Egypt and Jordan—but their reactions later, after they had had time to consider what he said, were stunning.

The Egyptian foreign minister said the speech was “a very, very wise assessment.” After making it clear he agreed with everything Mahathir said, Yemen’s foreign minister decided to pile on: “Israelis and Jews control most of the economy and the media in the world.”

This fifteenth-century-like hatred and prejudice is infuriating and frustrating for Jewish leadership. It is also endless. Egyptian television just finished airing a 41-part series based on the decades-old screed called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “It was as anti-Semitic as anything you’ve ever seen,” says Zuckerman.

Making and airing a series like the Protocols is, of course, part of an orchestrated strategy by Arab dictators determined to stay in power. “Mubarak and the others try to distract their populations with hostility towards Israel and the Jews,” says Zuckerman. “You simply can’t believe the things they write in the Arab press. We confront them, but what can you do about that?”

Similarly, the outrageous, flamboyantly anti-Israel behavior of the United Nations has routinely dumbfounded Jewish leaders. In recent weeks, the U.N. has condemned Israel for building a fence to keep out suicide bombers and for destroying three empty buildings in Gaza.

“Israel is held to a different standard,” says Zuckerman. “It is not allowed to live like other members of the family of nations any more than individual Jews were allowed to live like everyone else in their individual countries.”

Aside from the occasional specious accusation from the likes of Pat Buchanan, the Jean-Marie Le Pen of America, that Jews are responsible for the war in Iraq, the battle here is being fought mostly on college campuses.

Natan Sharansky, the former Soviet dissident who is Israel’s minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs, completed a thirteen-college speaking tour here several weeks ago. He wrote an account of his extraordinary road trip for an Israeli newspaper in which he described being welcomed by robust anti-Israel demonstrations, bomb threats, and pro-Palestinian protesters with signs reading RACIST ISRAEL and WAR CRIMINALS. He was even hit in the face with a pie thrown by a Jewish student screaming, “End the occupation.” But the most discouraging moments were surely those he spent talking to some Jewish grad students at Harvard. They told Sharansky the atmosphere on campus is so overwhelmingly anti-Israel that they’re afraid to speak out in support of the Jewish state. They don’t want to be identified as pro-Israel because they fear being ostracized and having their grades affected.

Alan Dershowitz, who is a professor at Harvard Law School, argues that Sharansky overstated the problem. But listen carefully to how he characterizes it: “We are not losing so badly on the campuses today.”

But he believes it is critical that students know all the facts of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict—not just the version put out by the left. “Remember,” he says, “the goal of the campus divestiture movement is not divestiture but to miseducate an entire generation of students so that in fifteen or twenty years, the leaders of America will be like the leaders of France.”

One thing is clear. The traditional means of battling anti-Semitism are as dated as the rules of conflict that once protected humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross and the United Nations from attack. “The old bag of tricks may work for your donors and for your own self-image as tough guys fighting back,” says David Harris. “But if the bottom line is, are you changing attitudes? Are you reversing images and stereotypes in Europe and the Muslim world? If that’s the measuring stick, then it’s very hard to say any of the organizations have been particularly effective.”