A popular series of detective stories at the beginning of the 20th century introduced a notorious figure to the world of literature. The figure represented the embodiment and incarnation of the evil inherent in the mysterious Orient in the form of an evil genius who had mastered both the black arts of the East and the university training of the West.

This sinister figure embodied the fears of the British Empire inherent in the East, which became part of the legacy of the “Yellow Peril” that the British bequeathed to the West alongside the guilt complex known as the “White Man’s Burden.”

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Dr. Fu Manchu was a brilliant scientist who was not only evil in his own right. He was also the agent of a secret cartel in the East that was embarked on a vengeful plot to conquer the West. The Yellow Peril, then, was not merely a danger to the Western empire. Even more was it a threat to Western civilization.

Fu Manchu did the unexpected and populated his environment with more creatures of death than Indiana Jones had to face in their natural environment. Poison spiders, man-eating fungi, remnants of the Thugees, those devotees of Kali and master killers whom the British had driven underground, and a host of other horrors that we today can hardly imagine despite our contemporary roster of evildoers. Even Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction do not bring up the same horror evoked by the menagerie of Fu Manchu.

In a parallel development the Russian secret police, aided by a local monk, propagated a wily document based on an old political pamphlet against Napoleon III. “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” became a major expose of the “secret plans of the Jews” to corrupt and disrupt Christian civilization through the manipulation of capitalism and the revolution of communism.

These malevolent man-made myths seriously affected the realities of the 20th century. The Yellow Peril influenced the U.S. to close its borders to open immigration in the wake of World War I and may have been instrumental in the fear of Communist China during the middle third of the 20th century.

A variant of the fear of the East appeared in Soviet Russia during the 1920’s in such works as S. D. Eisenstein’s film about Genghis Khan and the Mongol threat. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion became the bible of the anti-Semites and especially of Nazi Germany in its war against the Jews.

What we are facing now, however, is not another mythical terror. Osama bin Laden is real. He and his gang do evil things. Islamic scholars of Muhammed’s own time taught that a jihad is not fought against women and children. Osama bin Laden crossed the religious line and committed blasphemy of the religion in whose name he claims to fight. Yet who listens to his actions when his words resonate in an Islamic mind-set that has been awakened like a hornet’s nest?

Islam and Christendom have long struggled for political control and economic exploitation and, more important, for the souls that constitute the demographics of the one Creator’s world. The last two centuries have been credited to the West in this millennial contest, and we appear to be in the process of a sustained Muslim reaction that might presage the opening of a new jihad against the Christian West.

Who supports Osama bin Laden and the plethora of terrorist organizations coming out of Islam? It is apparent that just as Saudi Arabia and the oil-rich states supported the Palestine Liberation Organization and its violence-prone groups, so too there is wide support for Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda and a plethora of potential terrorists.

Osama bin Laden is the embodiment of the worst fears of the West now over a century old. He represents the “war of all against all” that Thomas Hobbes predicated for another time and place. His declaration of war demands that we explain what he is capable of over and above the obscenities that he has perpetrated and, by the way, taught to a myriad of other terrorists and freedom fighters who have been constrained only by lack of imagination to effect their terrorism.

Unlike fiction where Dr. Fu Manchu was not destroyed but constantly defeated [so that the series could go on], in real life the supporters of terror can be defeated — but the head must be destroyed.

In the meantime we should endeavor to bring the Islamic supporters of Osama bin Laden into the new mindset of the modern world, as we have encouraged those Muslims who chose to live in the West. Their religious traditions can flourish and grow only in an open society. Bin laden and his ilk would then be somewhat contained, like the many bacilli for which we have antidotes to isolate and contain their periodic outbreak.

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Steven Bowman is Professor of Judaic Studies at the University of Cincinnati and Visiting Professor at Haifa University, Fall 2002.