Disturbing statistics reveal that violence against Jews has nearly doubled since the year 2000 compared to what it was in the 1990s. Hosted by celebrated journalist Judy Woodruff, Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century: The Resurgence explores the phenomenon of contemporary antisemitism and attempts to explain the recent rise in hate crimes against Jews.

“Because they are apes and pigs,” says a little Muslim girl – who can’t be more than four-years-old – when she is asked why she doesn’t like the Jews. The casualness with which she answers, staring absentmindedly at her shows, suggests it’s something she was taught by rote in pre-school.

A must-see investigation, Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century tracks the history of anti-Semitism, sharing scholar’s surprising revelations, shocking news footage, and interviews with people who still believe in “Jewish conspiracies” like the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The film explores why, more than sixty years after the Holocaust, hatred of Jews has intensified in Europe and the Middle East, pointing to the roles religion, politics, and the Arab-Israeli conflict have played in this disturbing phenomenon.

Antisemitism, the film argues, was originally rooted in the Christian belief that the Jews killed Jesus. “No other religion accuses another religion of killing their God,” says one scholar. For the Christians who believed that Jews were guilty of deicide, it wasn’t difficult to also believe — as they did for centuries — that the Jews poisoned the wells, caused the Black Death, or killed Christian children to use their blood in the making of matzah.

Muslim-Arabs on the other hand, bore Jews no collective ill will for centuries, argues the film. Up until the 19th century, Arabs were frustrated by the presence of Jews in their nations and often forced them to live in a state of inferiority, but they felt no embittered hatred towards Jews as a people the way European Christians did. It was only when European Christians introduced their intense prejudice that notions of Jewish wickedness spread throughout the Middle East.

Today, what’s most frightening is that antisemitic conspiracy theories are accepted as fact by many people in the Arab world. These theories are seen as a way to explain how a people they see as wicked and inferior could rule a country in the Middle East. “They [the Jews] invented and successfully promoted socialism, communism, human rights and democracy so that persecuting them would appear to be wrong,” announced the former prime minister of Malaysia at a conference of Islamic leaders, “They have gained control of the most powerful countries so they – this tiny community – have become a world power,” he asserted, assuming fear and hatred toward Jews to be a legitimate political stance.

But it’s not just politicians who are promoting these ideas. The Arab media devotes its prime television slots to dramas that present antisemitic stories meant to rouse viewers. Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century shows a graphic clip from one such program, where three sinister Jews, in modern times, cut the throat of a Gentile boy to collect his blood for matzot.

What’s more startling than the scene is the Arab television producer’s defense of her “historical drama” about the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (an antisemitic propaganda false document of a secret meeting between Jewish leaders planning to take over the world). “It’s a big lie that the American media created!” she says and laughs. “It’s not antisemitic; it’s not anti-Jewish. It’s a historical show!”

But, according to one of the scholars interviewed, the Jews aren’t entirely blameless. The Israeli treatment of the Palestinians legitimately provokes Arabs who feel for their countrymen, he argues. “All we see here [on the television] is that they treat Muslims badly — that’s why we don’t like them in the Middle East,” an Arab university students explains.

Regardless, it’s frightening that antisemitism has become the elevator music, as the film refers to it, of Arab news—the banal, ever-present background noise. And the only people that are more susceptible to the propaganda than Middle Eastern Arabs who are bombarded with it are European Muslims who feel confused about their own identity and are looking for someone to blame for their struggle to integrate and succeed.

In the end, Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century makes it clear that the issue must be addressed because, as Woodruff points out, antisemitism not only hurts Jews, it hurts those who hold the prejudice, too.