Infamous anti-Semitic

A century-old forgery used to justify ill-treatment of Jews in Czarist Russia and widely disseminated by the Nazis is distributed even today in many languages to stoke hatred of Israel, an exhibit at the US Holocaust Museum says.

Colorfully bound editions of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion have appeared recently in Mexico and in Japan, where there are few Jews, says exhibit historian Daniel Greene. High school texts in Syria, Lebanon and schools run by the Palestinian authority use the book as history, he says.

Its 24 chapters profess to record discussions by Jewish leaders of plans to take over the world. Historians have traced parallels in the text to a 19th century French book, directed against supporters of Emperor Napoleon III, which does not mention Jews.

"The Internet has about 500,000 sites where the book is discussed -- about half and half for and against," Greene estimated.

The exhibit cites a quote from Joseph Goebbels, a decade before he became Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister:

"I believe that The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion are a forgery. [However] I believe in the intrinsic but not in the factual truth of the Protocols."

In the US, the exhibit points to the Reverend Charles Coughlin, a Roman Catholic priest whose popular radio sermons in the late 1930s opposed war with Nazi Germany. His periodical, Social Justice serialized the Protocols in 1938.

When Egyptian government-sponsored TV showed a series based on the Protocols in 2002, the State Department condemned it.

Last year, a new edition of the book was published in Syria and shown at the Cairo International Book Fair. The edition suggests, the museum says, that the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were organized by a Jewish conspiracy.

Last October, an Iranian bookseller exhibited an edition published by his country's Islamic Propaganda Organization at the annual book fair in Frankfurt, Germany. The Holocaust Museum exhibit said the display violated German law, which forbids libel against any religious group.