It has been more than 70 years since a Swiss judge in Berne angrily denounced as "ridiculous nonsense" the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" – the notorious, antisemitic tome that claims to describe a Jewish plot to take over the world.

That historic decision was rendered on May 14, 1935. No longer, the official hoped, would "responsible" people "rack their brains" about the validity of the Protocols.

The judgment would be validated in three subsequent trials: in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1991; and in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and Moscow, both in 1993.

No doubt the Swiss jurist and his colleagues would be stunned by recent decisions at the highest levels of government in Palestine and in Iran: In January 2006, an administration came to power in Palestine whose constitution specifically endorses the Protocols.

Article 32 of the Hamas Charter, adopted in 1988, specifies that the Zionists have laid out in detail "their scheme" in the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion." Article 22 says the Zionist "scheming" had been going on "for a long time," specifically to accumulate "a huge and influential material wealth," which then "permitted them to take over control of the world media such as news agencies, the press, publication houses, broadcasting and the like."

The document says the Elders of Zion will manipulate other major public organs to dominate mankind. The charter makes the same point, observing in Article 22 that, to achieve its objective to "rule the world," the "Elders" manipulate the "Freemasons, Rotary Clubs [and] Lions Clubs."

Manipulation is not restricted to organizations. The Hamas Charter claims both the French Revolution of 1789 and, more than a century later, the Communist Revolution of 1917 were planned by the Elders of Zion. The Elders of Zion "stood behind World War I," the charter states.

Also, according to the charter, Zionists "established the League of Nations in order to rule the world," World War II was planned by the Zionists, and, when the combat ended, "they inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council...in order to rule the world by their intermediary."

Iran's references to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are not as clear as those in the Hamas Charter. But in a six-page November 29, 2006, letter addressed to "Noble Americans" and published on the Iranian United Nations delegation's website, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (at left addressing the U.N.) hijacked the language of the Protocols to criticize U.S. President Bush's Middle East policy.

That policy, Ahmadinejad wrote, was forced upon America by "the Zionists" who have "imposed" themselves "on a substantial portion of the banking, financial, cultural, and media sectors" of U.S. society.

Ahmadinejad's diatribe against presumed Jewish domination of banks and media mirrors the central feature of the Protocols and its propagandists.

An Old Story

The first publication of the Protocols came more than 100 years ago. While not the first deadly propaganda targeting Jews, the Protocols quickly attained the status of history's most horrendous. It served as the decisive critical factor in Adolf Hitler's propaganda war against the Jews.

In fact, the Protocols is an enormous hoax and forgery; it was almost entirely lifted and altered from a forgotten political satire published in Brussels, Belgium, in 1864 – which had nothing to do with Jews. The author, Maurice Joly, was well-known for his freewheeling political commentaries, but had no antisemitic intentions in his piece.

The first publication to print the Protocols was the St. Petersburg newspaper Znamya – Russian for Banner – where it was serialized from August 26 to September 7, 1903. Editor Pavel Krushevan was known for his ultra-right antisemitic views.

The Protocols was said to be secret decisions reached at a gathering of Jewish leaders allegedly held at the First Zionist Congress, which met in 1897 in Basel, Switzerland.

The decisions were even attributed to B'nai B'rith. At the time, "B'nai B'rith" was practically synonymous with Jews.

The Protocols also played on fears of Freemasons among the Russian aristocracy and the Orthodox Church establishment. The international fraternal order of Masons, which was identified with liberalism and modernity, was presented in the Protocols as having already been infiltrated and manipulated by the Elders of Zion.

In this manipulative conspiracy, the Elders were to focus on both internal, domestic matters and external, interstate relations. Within each state, they were to foster discontent and unrest, especially among workers.

From the beginning of the Nazi movement in the 1920s, Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler took the Protocols as a seminal source while planning their first military coup in Munich against the German Republic. Later, when in power after 1933, they made the Protocols required reading for the Hitler Youth.

Europe was not the only place that the Protocols made an appearance in the '20s and '30s. The United States became a center of distribution through publication in the Dearborn Independent, a weekly newspaper owned by auto magnate Henry Ford that was known for its sensationalist and often antisemitic content. Beginning in November 1920, the Independent published excerpts from the Protocols highlighting a supposed Jewish conspiracy to take over the world by manipulation of banks.

The newspaper was intended for a mass audience, with 200,000 to 500,000 copies produced. Ford was so enthused about the product that he arranged for a special 250-page paperback anthology of the antisemitic articles, entitled The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, which sold for 25 cents a copy. The booklet would become widely known in various circles of U.S. bigotry. Its title captured the essence of the hatemonger's image of the dispersed Jewish outsider.

A New Audience

With the destruction of Nazism and the awareness of the horrors that antisemitism had wrought, it would seem the Protocols would be thrown into the trash bin of history.

The document, though, found a welcome readership in Leonid Brezhnev's Soviet Union. The Soviet campaign against Zionism reached a crescendo in 1977, with the Soviet Academy of Science's release of the hate-filled "International Zionism: History and Politics." Other Soviet publications also revealed how Moscow carefully used the Protocols as part of Kremlin propaganda.

An exploitation of the Protocols came at the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. A table at the forum for nongovernmental organizations prominently displayed the document.

The tract and similar racist publications so shocked Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), a key figure in the American delegation and the only Holocaust survivor in Congress, that he described it as "the most sickening display of hate for Jews I have seen since the Nazi period."

The following year, the Protocols received official endorsement by a powerful Egyptian television station. In fall 2002, in primetime and during the crucial Islamic holiday of Ramadan, the station aired a 41-part series on the Protocols entitled "Horseman Without a Horse."

When the United States officially protested that the program drew upon "Tsarist and untrue" sources, the Egyptian Minister of Information responded that the series "contains nothing that can be considered antisemitic."

Later, a senior adviser to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, Osama El-Baz, writing in Al Ahram, one of the oldest daily newspapers in the Arab world, cautioned Egyptians against succumbing to European antisemitic conspiracy theories. The damage, however, had already been done.

Following a Theme

With a connection made between the Protocols and the Middle East, it was not too surprising that Ahmadinejad would easily appropriate and incorporate the document's premise.

A perusal of the Iranian press is revealing. In 2005, a year before Ahmadinejad's letter to "Noble Americans," a number of Iranian newspapers printed excerpts of the Protocols to celebrate what they thought was the 100th anniversary of publication.

As early as 1986, a new Iranian edition of the Protocols was published in Teheran and widely distributed in the country by the official "Islamic Propagation Organization, International Relations Department."

Some eight years later, one of the wealthiest institutions in Iran, the Shrine of Imam Reza, financed the publication of another edition of the Protocols. To strengthen the impact of the work, significant parts of the publication were reprinted in a radical daily journal under the heading, "The Smell of Blood, Zionist Schemes."

Ahmadinejad's adoption of the Protocols' thesis is a natural progression. But the Iranian leader has taken the hate spewed in the document to other levels.

Parallel to the Protocols theme, he has called the Holocaust a "myth," contending at an Islamic summit in Mecca that "we cannot accept...the claim" that "Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces."

From December 11-12, 2006, he became the first government leader ever to host a Holocaust-denial conference, inviting more than 65 well-known Holocaust deniers to challenge an accepted universal truth.

The conference was entitled "Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust." It was held at the Iran Foreign Ministry's Institute for Political and International Studies (which immediately prompted an angry repudiation of the Institute by Western scholarly and academic groups).

According to Iran's Foreign Minister, Manouchehr Mottaki, the aim of the conference was to "create an opportunity for thinkers who cannot express their views freely in Europe," presumably because of the criminalization of Holocaust denial in several Western European democracies.

Ahmadinejad's virulent views have prompted chastisement from the 15-member U.N. Security Council and from then Secretary-General Kofi Annan. In late 2005, they criticized his public statements denying the Holocaust and threatening the existence of a member U.N. state.

The U.N. General Assembly, which has officially recognized and commemorated that Holocaust since 2005, voted by consensus on January 6, 2007, to denounce the Teheran initiative. The resolution, sponsored by the United States and 100 other powers, urged "all [U.N.] member states unreservedly to reject any denial of the Holocaust as a national event…" It added that denying these "terrible events increased the risk they will be repeated."

Iran's small and vulnerable Jewish community of some 15,000-25,000 felt threatened. Its president, Haroun Yashayaei, sent a letter to Ahmadinejad protesting the Holocaust denial comments. Moris Motamed, the official representative of the Jewish community in Parliament, said that it was "very regrettable to see a horrible tragedy so far-reaching as the Holocaust being denied."

Notable was the critique offered by Iran's pro-reform newspaper, Aftab-e Yazd. On December 28, its website carried an article entitled "Adventurism at a Cost to National Interests," which contended that the founder of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Khomeini, had never questioned World War II crimes.

Noting that 20 million people died in the war, the article wondered, "[W]hat is the meaning of doubting the war crimes which took place 60 years ago and thousands of miles away?"

The Current Threat

In embracing the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion," both Hamas and the Iran regime pose serious threats to the Jewish state.

Even with the strongest encouragement from the major diplomatic parties involved with the Middle East – the United States, the European Union, Russia, and the United Nations – Hamas has refused to recognize Israel, to reject terrorism, or to accept previous agreements reached by the Palestine Liberation Organization.

Indeed, the Hamas Charter notes in its preamble that it plans to bring about the "elimination" of Israel. According to the charter, no compromise is possible. Hamas is identified here as a crucial link in the "Chain of Jihad," the purpose of which is the expulsion of the Jews from the Holy Land. Article 7 of the charter cites its version of the presumed vision of Allah: Peace will not be attained "until Muslims will fight the Jews [and kill them]."

In Iran, the threat might be more immediate as it strives for nuclear weapons. And there appears to be a connection between the two enemies of Israel: A major Israeli source, on March 5, 2007, warned that Hamas "had started to dispatch people to Iran – tens and a promise of hundreds" for training.

Yuval Diskin, chief of the Shin Bet, Israel's security service, made the revelation in a rare on-the-record briefing. The planned training, Diskin said, meant a "strategic danger" of uncertain proportions.

William Korey is the former director of policy and research for B'nai B'rith International, and a prolific writer of articles and books.