Well, you can't expect much more from (lefty) PBS. What was startling about the message, however, was one of the messenger's: none other than the eminent historian Bernard Lewis. He declared that anti-Semitism didn't even exist in the Middle East until European Christian colonizers brought it. You don't need to be a scholar of Lewis' stature to know that European colonization of the Middle East didn't begin until some 1,100 years after Islamic anti-Semitism got going in the Koran, the canonical commentaries on the Koran, and in a long and painful (for Christians also) historical record.
Because Lewis is probably the most influential voice on Islam in our time -- particularly for the U.S. foreign policy establishment -- his pronouncements are more than significant. Right or, in this case, wrong, they become the conventional wisdom, or reinforce it.
This comes to mind because Lewis has done it again -- holding Europe responsible for unpalatable traditions of Islam. Writing at The American Thinker blog, Andrew Bostom, author of "The Legacy of Jihad" (Prometheus, 2005) and, forthcoming, "The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism," quotes a recent speech in which Lewis said: "The authoritarianism present in the Middle East region is not part of the Arab and Muslim traditions, but it has been imported from Europe."
Bostom goes on to cite copious chapter and verse -- including earlier writings by Lewis himself -- demonstrating that "the Arab and Muslim tradition" needed no lessons from Europe on authoritarianism.
Why is Lewis making statements contradicted by the historical record? If European Christendom truly is the source of Islamic evil -- e.g., anti-Semitism and authoritarianism -- Islam is let off the hook, and blame falls on the West. Whether that is Lewis' point, it is certainly Lewis' effect.
And it is certainly the conventional wisdom. Not very wise, though, when it helps feed the kind of guilt assuaged only by giving billions of dollars to murderers and thieves.