"This is the scariest time for Jews since the Holocaust," warns talk-show host and national columnist Dennis Prager in the latest issue of Whistleblower magazine, titled "The New Anti-Semitism."

Maybe you don't understand what he means.

Think about this: When Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad talked about Jews running the world last week and made a reference to Hitler not getting the job done, I expected an international outcry.

To say that outcry has been muted would be an overstatement. In fact, few national leaders made forceful condemnations of Mohamad's anti-Semitic tirade. Thankfully, President Bush was among them.
"The Europeans killed 6 million Jews out of 12 million," said Mohamad. "But today the Jews rule this world by proxy." He added that 1.3 billion Muslims could not be defeated by a few million Jews and that others are fighting on behalf of the Jews.

The fact that Islamic leaders make such outrageous statements is nothing new or unexpected. All one needs to do is monitor the Arab press, the Islamic clerics and what Muslim national leaders tell their own people in their own languages to know this is business as usual.

But what is surprising and disappointing is the reluctance by so many of the world's leaders to roundly condemn this kind of vicious hatred. France's President Jacques Chirac was late rebuking him and mild in his rhetoric. Canada's Prime Minister Jean Chretien actually refused repeated invitations from his nation's press to condemn the remarks of Mohamad.

What this shows conclusively is that anti-Semitism is not only alive and well in 2003, there is resistance and reluctance to condemn it. Why? I believe there are two main reasons – fear and economic interests. Too many so-called "civilized leaders" fear the kind of attack that hit America on Sept. 11, 2001. They mistakenly believe that if they are nice to the radical, barbaric Islamist element, they will get a free pass. They are not only cowards, they are wrong.
The radical Islamic world respects only power and might. Weakness is not respected.

Others in the West also recognize the immense power of the Arab and Muslim oil interests and do not dare to challenge the hatred that emanates from that part of the world because of the potential threat to their own economies.

This is no doubt why so many were quiet in the 1930s as well. Why rock the boat? Why make enemies? Why take a moral position that will draw the ire of a world power?

And that's how it starts.

The real threat from anti-Semitism is never so much what the practitioners of this virulent form of hatred can do themselves. The real threat is what others allow them to do through their own silent complicity.

Hitler is not really dead. His spirit lives among people like Mohamad and Moammar Gadhafi and Yasser Arafat and Osama bin Laden and Bashar al-Assad and among groups like Hezbollah, Hamas, Islamic Jihad and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade.

As long as we continue to make false distinctions between these people and groups, we will be vulnerable to their lies and their attacks. They all stand for one thing – the same kind of "final solution" Hitler envisioned.

That vision once before plunged the world into its costliest and deadliest war. The only way to prevent history from repeating itself is to recognize what we are up against, to speak out this time and to defeat the movement before it becomes too powerful.