Two days ago the Iranian president Mahmoud Ahma-dinejad declared that the holocaust never happened. Jews he said have invented a "myth" that they were massacred. This was dangerous speech of a high order, because it was made not by a fringe group of extremists, nor behind closed doors but broadcast live on Iranian television.

Nor, sadly, is it an isolated incident. There are parts of the world where, in recent decades and with ever-growing intensity, all the classic anti-Semitic myths, from the blood libel to the protocols of the elders of Zion have been resurrected in bestselling books and primetime television.

I find it uncomfortable to talk about anti-Semitism, because for me being Jewish is about life, not death, celebration, not grief, building a future, not being traumatised by the past.

Yet I have come to believe, these past few years, that the emergence of a new strain of the ancient virus is one of the most frightening phenomena of my lifetime - because it's happened after sixty years of Holocaust education, antiracist legislation and interfaith dialogue.

After sixty years of saying never again, it is happening again. There can be no doubt as to the most tenacious ideology of modern times. German fascism came and went. Soviet Communism came and went. Anti-Semitism came and stayed.

For Jews, memory of the Holocaust is a private grief. But at a deeper level, it has significance for all of us. Jews and others were murdered because they were different; but to someone of another culture or faith we are all different; so an assault on difference is ultimately an assault on humanity.

In one of the most powerful verses in the Bible, Moses, shortly before his death, told the Israelites not to hate their traditional enemies, the Edomites and the Egyptians (Deut. 23: 8). Had they continued to hate, Moses might have taken the Israelites out of Egypt, but he wouldn't have taken Egypt out of the Israelites. If you want to be free, you have to let go of hate.

So perhaps it was no coincidence that on the day the Iranian president denied the holocaust, Human Rights Watch published a report on the murder of thousands of political prisoners in Iran. Projecting hate onto an outsider is always the most effective way of deflecting criticism within. Which is why we have to fight together the public manipulation of hate, wherever it occurs, whoever it is directed against -- if we are to mean it when we say, never again.

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