..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..R.J. Matson
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Michael Wilmington

One hundred years ago, when The Protocols of the Elders of Zion was fabricated by Czar Nicholas II's secret police, only news of the most significant sort traveled speeds faster than the average postal employee. Today, of course, everything that even remotely resembles news -- including gossip, slander and outright lies -- moves at the speed of the Internet.

Truth takes a bit longer to arrive.

That the anti-Semitic hooey described in "The Protocols" -- in which a cabal of avaricious Jews diagrams the course to global domination -- was embraced by such larger-than-life characters as Adolph Hitler and Henry Ford is well documented. Less known is Malaysian leader Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad’s more recent paraphrasing of its allegations before an audience of world leaders.

More to the point, websites on which "The Protocols” are presented as fact are among the most popular destinations on the Internet. It was with just this sort of thing in mind that Marc Levin embarked on his provocative post-9/11 documentary, Protocols of Zion.

Known primarily for directing gritty documentaries about vicious crimes, prison life and abuses of power -- Slam and Gladiator Days: Anatomy of a Prison Murder, among the titles -- the 54-year-old Levin was drawn to “The Protocols” after a sobering conversation he shared with a New York taxi driver. During the course of the ride, the Egyptian immigrant offered as fact his belief that no Jews were killed in the 9/11 attacks, because someone in Israel passed the word along to local synagogues that this would be a good day for their members to call in sick.

Flabbergasted, Levin endeavored to discover how his chauffer had come upon this intelligence -- an oxymoron, if there ever was one -- and why it had found traction among the Muslim community in and around New York. The path led him to “The Protocols,” the details of which Levin could barely recall.

“It was a rude awakening for me,” admitted Levin, whose voice that rivals that of legendary NFL Films narrator John Facenda. “I’d read it in the early ’70s, and considered it to be the mother of all conspiracies … more like a Zap Comix than anything else. I revisited it in the ’80s, after I saw it being sold by the street vendors on 6th Avenue.”

Link to “The Protocols” on Google, and links to the cabalist theory show up far higher on the hit-list than any discourse on the facts.

“Here I was hearing the same thing repeated matter-of-factly by this cabbie,” he added. “This was spring of 2002, and the whole city was suffering from post-traumatic stress. All sorts of different people were killed in the Twin Towers, including Jews and Muslims.”

After this encounter, Levin watched TV mini-series from Egypt, Lebanon and Syria, which have been shown during Ramadan. They presented “The Protocols” as fact, as well.

He also discovered that an Arab-language newspaper in New Jersey actually had printed the “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” after 9/11, even though the publisher acknowledged its dubious origins: “It may be a fraud, but it exists … so, it’s news.”

With camera in hand, Levin took to the streets of New York City and Patterson, N.J., to speak not only with those who believe in the tract, but also those who see an anti-Semitic conspiracy behind its continuing distribution. Essentially, the filmmaker “wanted to take the debate outside the realm of academia, spin-meisters and the pundits on the Sunday morning shows. I approached it like a spirited discussion about sports or anything else.

“It became a filmmaker’s journey, starting in the streets of New York.”

Levin assumed going in to the project that leaders of the Jewish community would want to address the question in a straight-forward manner. But, he was wrong.

“I was asked not to dredge this stuff up,” he continued. “The rabbi I interviewed in the film warned that I didn’t know what I was dealing with here. Other people accused me of being a self-hating Jew, for inviting representatives of the Black Panthers, Nation of Islam and other groups to screenings.

“I wanted them to see ‘The Protocols’ for what they are. If we’re going to have a serious discussion of anti-Semitism, it shouldn’t be poisoned with this strychnine. ”

Levin admits to there being a risk involved with introducing people, who may not be aware of its existence, to “The Protocols.” Still, he argues, “light is the great disinfectant,” and young Jews should know what they’re up against, at least.

The New York-born, New Jersey-raised filmmaker said that apart from some run-of-the-mill taunting from neighborhood toughs, he hadn’t been forced to deal with virulent strains of anti-Semitism, until recently.

It can be argued, as well, that Levin goes too far afield to introduce devils’ advocates into the debate. Besides encounters with street preachers and youths outside a New Jersey mosque, Levin travels to Red State America to pay a cordial visit on a prominent distributor of neo-Nazi literature and memorabilia, and a radio station where such bile passes as lively discourse. He tried to get Jewish filmmakers in Hollywood to weigh in on what made The Passion of the Christ such a huge hit, but no one took the bait.

The only time Levin admits to being frightened in the face of such true hate came while being interviewed in St. Louis, by the publisher of the Jew Watch website, and hearing radio listeners call in with their teeth bared. These people would blame their problems, and those of the world, on Jews -- or Catholics or Muslims or Eskimos -- even if the “The Protocols” never was written.

The purveyor of Hitleriana was far more cordial, though, even to the point of quipping that he enjoyed Gladiator Days: Anatomy of a Prison Murder -- which examined the death of a black prison inmate at the hands of white supremacist -- so much he started selling bootleg copies of it via his site. Their conversation, like other encounters captured in the movie, bordered on folksy and amusing.

Much of the material in The Protocols is in this vein. Levin occasionally engages his subjects in debate, but he rarely interrupts their attempts at humor and tortured logic. Nor, does he lecture them.

Trouble is, once a conspiracy theory on the order of “The Protocols” makes its way past the niche bookstores, television and radio talk shows, and onto the fringes of the Internet frontier, it might as well be true. The reality on the flip side of the First Amendment is that the folks at Google -- and other search engines that rely on visitor frequency to determine prominence on their hit parades -- are too busy counting their money to worry about the kind of muck that’s flowing through the company’s pipeline.

That ethical bill will have to be paid, later.

October 26, 2005
- Gary Dretzka

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