NEW YORK -- It was, by all accounts, a heinous conclusion to a barbaric crime. The Pakistani kidnappers of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl forced him to state that he was a Jew and his mother and father were Jews. Then, having laid out their legal case, the killers slit his throat and beheaded him.

Some might view the murderers, with their fixation on their victim's religion, as Islamist fanatics outside the mainstream of their societies. Western Palestinian sympathizers, on the other hand, might condemn the ugliness of anti-Semitism but hint that Israelis have brought it on their own people through their occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Yet Muslim anti-Semitism is neither an aberration nor a mere political response. From the mosques to the presidential palaces, from the tabloids to the scientific journals, influential voices vomit an endless stream of propaganda that reads like Hitler's Mein Kampf. And while it is fueled by a hatred of Israeli policies, anti-Semites assume that all Jews worldwide are responsible for the actions of a state they may not live in and whose policies they may actively oppose.

As David Greenberg wrote last fall in Slate magazine, "This anti-Semitism isn't just the sort of everyday stereotyping or genteel snobbery or even official intolerance that's familiar, if mostly obsolescent, in the West. No, this is the strong stuff: fantasies that Jews ritually slaughter children and oversee secret conspiracies to rule the world. Furthermore, unlike, say, (the American thinker) Noam Chomsky, most Arab anti-Semites don't bother with the protestations about how they only oppose Israel's Palestinian policies and don't really hate Jews per se. In their usage, Zionist, Israeli, and Jew are pretty much interchangeable terms."

In some places, anti-Semitism is unsurprising. During a recent trip to Jordan, I had expected to hear support for suicide bombers in Palestinian refugee camps. In Gaza, a camp north of Amman, I sat in a two-room hut of mud bricks and cinder blocks where 15 refugees live. Rain was leaking through the roof, and bitterness was close to the surface when one man described how "Jewish gangsters came and occupied our village (in 1948), and we were forced out." He went on to say all Israelis deserve to be treated as combatants -- even civilians, even children.

What did amaze me was to find a literate, well-educated lawyer in Amman -- himself a second generation Palestinian -- smilingly explain that Palestinian suffering justified suicide bombings that target Israeli civilians randomly. It is only a small step from there to the belief that all Jews of any nationality exist under a floating death sentence, fair game for anyone willing to park a truckload of explosives outside a synagogue -- or to lure a reporter to his own beheading.

The hatred is preached even in supposedly moderate countries. Egypt has been recipient of billions of dollars in U.S. aid since it signed a peace treaty with Israel, yet attacks on Jews (and also America) are commonplace in its government-controlled media. The Egyptian magazine Al-'Ilm recently stated: "Jewish tourists infected with AIDS are traveling around Asian and African countries with the aim of spreading the disease." Not only is Al-'Ilm a science magazine, but its executive board is chaired by Egypt's minister of higher education and the state for scientific research, Mufid Shihab.

Al-Watan, a government-controlled Saudi Arabian newspaper, printed a story under the headline, "The Jewish organizations are implementing their strategic hellish plan to take over the world." Others routinely denounce Jews as "pigs" and "apes."

Whatever one thinks of Zionism, mainstream Israeli thought has been tempered by centuries of Jewish experience as victims and by the traditions of Jewish humanism and the Enlightenment. While there are extremists in Israel, there is no comparison to the flood of hatred of the Jew that fills the press and airwaves in the Muslim world.

A few liberal Arab thinkers have admitted that there is a problem. Hazem Saghiyah, a columnist for the London Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat, says that anti-Semitism is being "brought back" by "Muslim clerics who ceaselessly justify the murder of Jews; also bringing it back is the Arab media, which engages in directing public opinion." Saghiyah unconvincingly argues that Arab anti-Semitism is not racially based, but he complains that it is distracting the attention of Westerners from the Palestinian problem.

Many would argue that the West, with its millennia of pogroms and persecutions, is in no position to criticize. But the Holocaust discredited anti-Semitism in the West, while the Arab street loudly espouses views of the sort that is now found only in the lunatic fringes in the United States or Europe.* Where does the hatred of the Jew come from? It is a question for the ages. But in contemporary times, the conflict in the Middle East is the obvious catalyst. Much of the Arab world considers itself to be in a state of war with Israel. In such times, people traditionally dehumanize their enemy. During World War II, the American media portrayed Japanese soldiers as "monkey men" and "the yellow peril," and Japan and Germany pumped out propaganda about their subhuman foes.

Pearl's death is reminiscent of the murder of Leon Klinghoffer, an elderly, wheelchair-bound man whom Palestinian terrorists dumped off a hijacked cruise ship in 1985 because he happened to be a Jew. Both deaths are ghastly demonstrations of where the demonization of a people can lead. And as long as the Arabic media and mosques continue to brew up anti-Semitism, some members of their audiences will act on the assumption that any Jew anywhere is a justifiable target for extermination.