Lebanon’s NBN TV channel — which is affiliated with the influential Pro-Syrian Lebanese Parliamentary Speaker Nabih Beri — has just aired a program stating that “Jews use drug trafficking to control the world and subjugate other nations.”

The program’s narrator continues: “Drugs were also the Jews’ method of wearing down the German people, which led to the Nazi extremism, in which the Jews themselves played a role. In addition, they carried out widespread drug dealing in Czarist Russia, from the 17th century. This was in accordance with the Jewish Talmud.”

The program, based on the notorious anti-Semitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion (which, as a new report yesterday found, is also being distributed using Saudi money in mosques in London and elsewhere in western Europe) was shown on Lebanon’s NBN TV on October 22, 2007.

Among other excerpts that MEMRI has translated:

* “Isn’t it true that these Jewish plots to corrupt the peoples were described by American ‘plot-disrupters,’ such as Benjamin Franklin and Henry Ford, and even by some Jews, like Alfred Lilienthal, and even Karl Marx, who, more than 150 years ago, exposed in his book On the Jewish Question that there was an instinct within the Jewish individual that drives him to take control of the world, by means of illegal money – which is known today as ‘money laundering?’”

* “The Koran said about them: ‘They strive to spread corruption throughout the land.’ Spreading corruption throughout the land is the declared goal of the Zionist hands of evil, which are infiltrating the world. The Zionists have summarized their destructive principles in what has become known as The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which contains their secret plan to subjugate the entire world by spreading chaos and promiscuity among the nations, by imposing corrupt and depraved ideologies on human minds, and by destroying the foundations of religion, nationalism, and morality.”

* “Moreover, the third Zionist protocol states that other nations must be left sick, poor, and lacking any determination or strength. Naturally, drugs are the most effective means to accomplish this goal. The American thinker Benjamin Franklin, in his famous 1789 manifesto, the American industrialist Henry Ford, who wrote The International Jew, and others like them warned of the danger posed by the Jews, who destroy morals.”

* “I believe this is true, we [the Lebanese] must consider our responsibility – what we should do to overcome this plague, which is killing our society.”

(You can view a fuller clip of the program from Lebanese TV here.)

Equally worrying is the way in which some western media are playing a role in this increased anti-Semitism. Yesterday BBC World Service Radio interviewed an American woman who stated that there was “no problem with anti-Jewish or anti-gay discrimination in countries like Saudi Arabia”. It was, she said, all merely “propaganda that American Jews had made up”. True to form, the BBC presenter didn’t challenge her on her remarks but merely thanked her for her insights.