Antisemitism is rife in Egypt - that much we know. But, as Amr Bargisi points out in a WSJ op-ed today, what’s not so well known is that much of the Jew-hatred emanates from “the pro-democratic and anti-Islamist crowd on which the country’s hopes for a more tolerant future supposedly rest.”

Here are some examples:

On Oct. 11, Abbas at-Tarabili, the editor in chief of the Al-Wafd daily — the house organ of Egypt’s leading “liberal” political party of the same name — wrote a column purporting to show that Jews were merely manipulating the stock market as they had the price of gold in the late 1970s.

“The Jews played a filthy game,” he wrote. “It is true that the Western countries — the United States on top — have a lot to lose, but all pours into the pockets of Jewish businessmen who control the stock markets of the world.”

Two weeks later, Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypt’s largest independent newspaper and widely regarded as the country’s only serious tribune for liberalism, ran a column baldly titled “The Jewish Conspiracy.” The columnist, Khairi Ramadan, who also co-hosts one of the country’s most successful talk shows, asked his readers not to ignore what is being said on the Internet “about a Jewish conspiracy in the end of Bush’s term, in preparation for controlling the next president.”

“The available information,” wrote Mr. Ramadan, shows that “the Jews withdrew 400 billion dollars from Lehman Brothers a couple of weeks before it collapsed,” adding that the collapse of the brokerage house was of a piece with the events of September 11, “when thousands of Jews did not go to the WTC.”

Bargisi’s conclusion is spot-on:

What can be done? Here’s a modest suggestion. The Egyptian state and the country’s newspapers go out of their way to make a leper of any author who expresses even remote sympathy with Israel. Perhaps Western institutions could adopt a similar practice, refusing to invite to their various functions any editors who allow their pages to become Jew-hatred platforms. The cold shoulder alone might get these lunch-eaters to change their tune.