The forgery claim

We are told thatThe Protocols of Zionis a hoax, a "proven forgery" concocted by the Tsarist Political Police (the Okhrana) to incite anti Semitism and discredit revolutionaries. But the "proof" is far from convincing. It consists ofthree articles published in The London Times(August 16-18, 1921) by Philip Graves. According to Graves,Protocolsis a crude, chapter-by-chapter plagiarism of Maurice Joly'sDialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu(1864). It was easy to make this claim while Joly's book was unavailable. Napolean III's police confiscated it as soon as it was published. But it is available now and I invite you to compare the two texts. In my opinion, they are entirely different in tone, content and purpose. At 140 pages,Dialoguesis twice as long asProtocols. Most of it finds no echo in theProtocols.

The crux of Graves' argument is that certain references and passages inProtocolswere lifted fromDialogues. He claims there are 50 of these and produces about a dozen. Their striking resemblance toProtocolsleaves little doubt that the author did refer to theDialoguesas part of his research. He had no compunction about borrowing or reshaping a few passages that struck his fancy. Indeed Philip Graves is "struck by the absence of any effort on the part of the plagiarist to conceal his plagiarisms." That's because he had nothing to hide. He was not Graves' "unimportant precis- writer employed by the court or by the Okhrana" to construct a hoax. He was a diabolical genius crafting an original work. It is simplistic and disingenuous to characterizeProtocolsas a hoax.

POLITICAL PROVENANCE

Graves' article smacks of a Zionist propaganda operation. Graves "expose" ofProtocolsappeared in August 1921 when Zionists were pressing the League of Nations to turn Palestine into a Jewish homeland under British Mandate. Philip Grave tells the unlikely story that a "Mr. X" brought theDialoguesto him in Constantinople where he was the Times' correspondent. Mr. X presented it as "irrefutable proof" that theProtocolswere plagiarised.

Mr. X was a White Russian, which seems incredible given the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution. He claims he bought the book from, get this, "a former member of the Okhrana" who had fled to Constantinople. InThe Controversy of Zion,(Chapter 34) Douglas Reed, a Times' staffer at the time, provides additional background.

In May 1920, Lord Northcliffe, a part owner of The Times, printed an article about the Protocols entitled "The Jewish Peril, A Disturbing Pamphlet, A Call for an Enquiry. " It concluded: "An impartial investigation of these would-be documents and their history is most desirable...are we to dismiss the whole matter without inquiry and to let the influence of such a book as this work unchecked?"

Then in May 1922 Northcliffe visited Palestine and wrote that Britain had been too hasty to promise it to the Jewish people when in fact it belonged to 700,000 Muslim Arab residents. Mr. Wickham Steed, the editor of The Times of London in 1921 refused to print the article and Northcliffe tried to get him fired. Somehow Steed was able to have Northcliffe declared "insane" and committed. Later Northcliffe complained he was being poisoned and died suddenly in 1922. Douglas Reed was Northcliffe's secretary but didn't learn of these events until they appeared in the Official History of the Times in the 1950's. Clearly Northcliffe had offended some "big boys" when he opposed the British Mandate in Palestine. Why was it so important? Israel is intended to be the capital of the Masonic World Government. They are already constructing the infrastructure. See"The Roots of Evil in Jerusalem."