Europe

Did you know that the vast majority of anti-Semitic libels, including accusations of disloyalty and the infamous blood libel, go all the way back to the Roman Empire. Of course Jews were slaughtered and attacked way before Romans became experts at it, but ancient nations like Babylonia and Assyria and Egypt were simply treating Jews the same way they treated everyone: conquest, slavery, high taxes...

Remember that the very, very first historical reference to "Israel" was an Egyptian boast by Merneptah that the people of Israel had been completely destroyed, leaving no offspring. But this boast was included in a long list of destroyed people.

Romans, as far as history tells us, were the first to villify Jews as they killed them. It was no longer a matter of bullying everyone. Jews were singled out in particular.

Apion (1st century BC) gave us the earliest version of the blood libel. The Roman historian Tacitus gave us the suspicion that Jews could never be loyal to their host nation and hence were always under suspicion. Cicero, Seneca and Plutarch all added to the earliest history of intellectual anti-Semitism.

Natrually the Spanish Inquisition, operating throughout Spanish and Portuguese territories, took anti-Semitism to new lows. Until the 1930's, with all due respect to modern Catholics, Catholics were the most rabid Jew-haters in history. Of course Hitler and the Nazis finally took that title.

In the Sudan, members of a fundamentalist Islamic movement took control. As that new fundamentalist government tried to consolidate its control, in the south anti-fundamentalist forces, led by a non-Muslim, held out against the wave of Jihadists.

Europe, swept by anti-Muslim sentiments and a sense of their own righteousness and self-importance, sends a multi-national force to relieve the beleaguered holdouts in Southern Sudan. The Jihadists fuel the flames of mutual hatred by demanding that a leading European leader come to the Sudan to submit and convert to Islam.

As the multi-national force was dispatched, it was beset from the beginning by poor management and greed. The very route they took to reach the Sudan was determined not by military strategy, but by the desire for certain vested interests to profit from the military action. Even as private individuals profited, the military expedition proved a disaster. The multi-national force was poorly supplied and took their anger out on the natives, slaughtering innocent lives, turning the natives against them almost immediately. Atrocities were committed by BOTH sides, making both side's claims to moral superiority a farce.

This is not today. This was in the mid-1880's when Mahdist rebels took over in the Sudan, then jointly mismanaged by Egypt and Britain. The southern holdouts were led by the Emin Pasha, who was actually a German Jew, originally named Eduard Schitzer. The European nations sent a relief force, but the greed of people like Belgian and Congolese King Leopold II (who later presided over one of the worst holocausts in history), British merchants hoping to get their greedy hands on ivory, and various newspapers who wanted some good stories, led to the relief effort going through the Belgian Congo (then called the "Congo Free State" but was actually a private domain of King Leopold). Look on a map. This route makes no sense militarily and by the time the relief effort reached the Sudan, half its members had died of disease and starvation and needed to be helped by the Emin Pasha. In the meantime, the Mahdist threat had retreated...until the abuses by the European relief expedition stirred up native anger again, giving the Emin Pasha a new situation to deal with.