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In 1987, Egyptian author Said Ayyub published a book titled The Anti-Christ, in which he claimed that all the popes of the Catholic Church, Martin Luther King and Napoleon Bonaparte were Jewish.

In 1990, another Egyptian writer, Izzat Arif, published The End of Saddam, where he accused the dictator of Baghdad of being a Jew. In 1995, the Syrian newspaper Ath-Thawara said that Yasser Arafat agreed to negotiate with Israel because he himself was a Jew. And last year, a Palestinian sheik claimed that Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, had been a Jew pretending to be a Muslim.

Just when I thought I had exhausted my capacity for surprise at Arab conspiracy theories about the Jews, I was struck by a new, creative one. Perhaps I was even more astonished because I did not hear it in the streets of Tripoli, in the bazaars of Damascus or even, at the McDonalds of Cairo, where I invited for lunch the Egyptian taxi driver who was driving me around, only to be treated to an anti-Jewish diatribe. (No, it wasn’t because he preferred Burger King.)

I heard the latest canard in Geneva, a perfectly civilized city in the heart of Europe. I was attending a lecture by a Swiss journalist on the post-9/11 world. His views didn’t sit well with three Arabs seated in the front. After interrupting him repeatedly, one of the Arabs, a Palestinian journalist, stood up and began to say that Osama bin Laden was not a Muslim. Challenged, she raised her voice and claimed quite matter-of-factly that bin Laden was – you guessed correctly – Jewish! She shouted that preposterous line a few more times as she stormed out.

This scene came on the heels of a no-less-disturbing event that had taken place at the same conference hall just a few moments before. A Western-looking journalist stated that he had been in New York on the fateful morning of Sept. 11, 2001, and that to his surprise, the subways in New Jersey were all empty — empty of Jews, that is. Furthermore, he claimed that he saw that all the Jewish stores in the area were closed.

So confident was this gentleman that he quietly ignored the many dismissive laughs that his statement brought and felt comfortable enough to join the audience for cocktails.

A year ago, I wrote that anti-Semitism should not be disregarded when addressing European attitudes toward Israel. Since then, scores of anti-Semitic attacks have been recorded in Europe: Jewish cemeteries have been desecrated, synagogues set on fire, yarmulke-wearing Jews beaten, Molotov cocktails thrown at Jewish institutions, and Jewish school buses stoned.

True, most of these attacks were perpetrated by Muslim immigrants, but it is equally true that their Muslim brothers in the United States and Latin America have not resorted to violence against their co-nationals.

Contrary to Latin and North Americans, Europeans seem to have created the proper political and cultural ambience for Muslims to feel comfortable enough to attack Jews with impunity.

We see this at the popular level, where street demonstrations have turned especially crude when it comes to rallying for the Palestinians as in Ireland or as in Italy, with demonstrators dressed like suicide-bombers. In elite circles, the Jose Saramagos and the Daniel Bernards lead.

New York Times columnist Nicholas D. Kristof recently wrote that as he was about to leave for Riyadh, a Kuwaiti official told him to set his watch back 100 years. I should be pardoned for falling for the temptation of borrowing this piece of advice, and recommend anyone traveling to Europe these days to set their clocks back, too — but just 69 years, to 1933.

Julián Schvindlerman is a political analyst in Geneva, and a member of the American Jewish Committee.