The old woman was telling a tale of massacre. She had just heard of another Israeli family murdered by terrorists, and there were tears in her eyes as she remembered back those many years. "I had luck," she said in Armenian. "I hid from the Turks behind a trellis. I saw my mother and father shot down, my baby sister spitted on a scimitar."

The old woman, who'd been a young girl in the year Turkey slaughtered several million Armenians under the cover of World War One, understood the link between Armenian and Israeli corpses. Because Armenia, the first Christian state in history, whose prosperity was a reproach to Turkish squalor, and whose high culture was an insult to their ignorance, was, like Israel, an infidel island in a sea of Islam. And for that there could be no forgiveness.

The Arab complaint today against Jews, while wretchedly tired, is identical to their excuse for murdering them in their beds: failure to provide Palestinian statehood, refusal to relinquish occupied territories. For the murder of Jews to appear plausible, though, the victims must be stigmatized. Epithets like Zionist oppressors and Fascist murderers are used incessantly to browbeat hearers and achieve that purpose. This is a tactic taken straight from the Ottoman Turks of 1915.

Then, the Armenians were accused of all manner of crimes, from rebellion to robbery to kidnapping Muslim infants. Exactly how a civilized people who had peacefully existed for centuries in their ancestral lands, and whose Christian conversion predated Constantine, had suddenly become rebels, thieves, and pedophiles, was never explained. Just as in Germany of the 1930s, libel preceded genocide. The allegation of babies skewered on bayonets is a much favored emotional trigger of slanderous propaganda, which outrage upon truth and trust is more felt than believed.

Armenians did not help themselves by their passivity in the face of destruction. Says Vahakn Dadrian in his comparison of the Armenian and Jewish predicaments, "Jews and Armenians developed an ethos of submissiveness intended to mollify the agents of persecution. When the victimizers are not held accountable, that becomes a source of new incentives for victimization." In other words, radical Islam, then and now, thinks it can get away with murder.

Today, one of radical Islam's goals is to despoil the Jews of the land of Israel. In 1915, the plan of the Young Turks led by the mass murderer Enver Pasha – a model for Heinrich Himmler – was to rid Armenia of Armenians by butchering them all and resettling Muslims there. The Arabs of 2005 would be content for the Jews to pack up and leave Israel for the Diaspora. And so they kill them to drive them out. The Ottoman Turks, on the other hand, would have exterminated the entire Armenian Diaspora if their reach had been long enough, so deep was their feeling of inferiority and so rabid their hatred. As it stood, three-quarters of the Armenian population was destroyed.

The key difference between the two countries is that despite historic occupation by Romans, Seljuk and Ottoman Turks, and Bolsheviks, Armenia is today unwanted by anyone. No longer does it serve as a bridge and invasion route, since the wars of East versus West have ceased in that part of the world — at least for the foreseeable future. That war, ongoing in one way or another since Xerxes invaded Greece, is now transferred to the Middle East, Israel being correctly perceived by Islam as The West. And the land of Israel, a harsh, bony spit of desert, is lusted after by Islam as a woman who is not to be shared with another suitor.

In the long run, Israel might not be able to prevail, to continue to exist as a forward-looking, non-Muslim Western state. Unless the United States continues its massive moral and material support, beginning under Truman and continuing under the Bush Administration, sustained through every crisis, the Jewish island could eventually sink under the heavy weight of Arab populations and constant assaults — even as Israel gallantly fights a long slow defeat. Jews could neither conquer their enemies nor assimilate them, and so would be forced to return to the Diaspora from whence they came.

Before that occurred, however, there would be many acts of heroism and valor by the Israelis, and, sadly, many deaths among them. They would certainly not go gentle into that good night, but would rage, rage, against the dying of the light. Therefore it is imperative to the maintenance of freedom and peace in the world that the rabid, highly dangerous, but growing anti-Semitism in Europe and America be denounced and combated by every means and at every opportunity.

The old Armenian woman, my grandmother, having witnessed the slaughter of her people in the past and the continuing murder of Israelis in the present, had a foreboding of the future. She slowly and somberly shook her wizened head. "For Muslims today," she said, "it seems like the only good Jew is a dead Armenian."