Today, we can say these little people are the root of evil," said Mikis Theodorakis of the Jews. The composer of the music for "Zorba the Greek" was flanked by two Greek Cabinet ministers when he made this statement on Nov. 4 at a public event in Greece. Neither took issue with what he said.

		Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476).

Theodorakis has lots of company in his anti-Semitism. (In the uproar following his statement, he claimed that he was speaking of the Israeli government of Ariel Sharon, not all Jews.) In a recent poll conducted by the European Union, 59 percent of respondents said Israel is the greatest threat to peace in the world. More than Iran. More than Iraq. More than North Korea.

Palestinians are the world's favorite underdogs, beloved of liberals in North America, European politicians of every stripe and Islamofascists the world over.

A factual case for Palestinian persecution is hard to make. They have their own statelet and would have their own state, if they were willing to forgo murdering Israelis. Arabs living in Israel have rights and liberties that Arabs in Egypt, Syria, and Saudi Arabia can only dream of.

There has never been an Arab state called Palestine. Prior to 1967, Palestinians were either Jordanians or Egyptians. They are ethnically, culturally, religiously and linguistically indistinguishable from their Arab neighbors.

Kurds would seem a more logical candidate among Muslims for the world's sympathy. Kurds have a different ethnicity, a different language, a different cultural tradition from the Arabs and Turks who have oppressed them for lo these many centuries.

If not the Kurds, how about the Chechens? In each of its sieges of the Chechen capital of Grozny, the Russians killed many times more Chechens than the total number of Palestinians who have died in clashes with Israeli security forces. And though Palestinians have a measure of self-government, Chechnya remains under Russia's thumb.

But the number of the world's opinion leaders who give a damn about the Kurds or the Chechens wouldn't fill a telephone booth. Palestinians are loved because they are the only people on the planet who can, with any degree of plausibility, claim to be oppressed by Jews.

Hatred of the Jews has been the most durable political idea of the last 2,000 years. Jews have been hated by Christians and Muslims, by fascists and communists, by Europeans and Arabs and Africans and Asians. Jews are hated by illiterate peasants and by college professors. Jews are hated by people who think they are better than Jews, and by people who fear they are inferior to them. Jews have been hated for maintaining their identity in the societies in which they live, and for trying to assimilate into them. Jews were hated when they had no state, and because they now have one.

It's hard to understand why. Hitler wasn't Jewish. Neither was Stalin or Mao or Pol Pot or Idi Amin. Saddam Hussein isn't Jewish. Neither is Osama bin Laden or Kim Jong Il or Fidel Castro. Attila the Hun wasn't Jewish. Neither was Caligula or Genghis Khan or Ivan the Terrible. There have been a lot of mass murderers in the last 2,000 years. None have been Jewish.

Jews didn't start World Wars I or II, or the Korean War, or the Vietnam War. Jews weren't responsible for starvation in the Ukraine in the 1930s, or genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s. It wasn't Jews who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, or who put nerve gas in Tokyo's subways. Yet Mikis Theodorakis can say "these little people are the root of all evil," and few will contradict him.

Of the world's 6.3 billion people, only 12 million are Jewish. By contrast, there are nearly 1.3 billion Muslims, who rule 57 countries which contain most of the world's oil reserves. Yet Mahathir Mohammed, the "moderate" Muslim leader who just retired as prime minister of Malaysia, can claim that "Jews rule the world by proxy," and few will contradict him.

Iran is building a nuclear weapon, for the expressed purpose of annihilating Israel. Other Muslim nations applaud the effort, while most Europeans look the other way. Jews are hated in the world today to a degree not seen since the Nazis goose-stepped onto the world stage. All that stands between the Jews and another Holocaust is the United States of America.