Extract from the Wiesenthal Centre:

In fact, just a few years ago, the Centre defended the courageous editor of a Jewish newspaper in Moscow as he fought the ultra-nationalist Russian Pamyat group, which was re-publishing the Protocols. We presented critical documentation directly to the judge in a Moscow courtroom - ironically, a court in the very country where this scurrilous forgery was first written.

Indeed, we won an important victory in the Russian courts. But sadly, in the post-Cold War world, our efforts have failed to stop groups like Pamyat from openly selling the Protocols on street corners and in subway stations throughout Moscow.

And Russia is not unique: Centre research from around the world indicates that there is a virtual explosion of publication and dissemination of the Protocols. And thus, you and I are now facing a dangerous situation of unprecedented magnitude.

A few years ago in Canada and the United States, this vile book's distribution was limited to hate-group mail order and a handful of extremist bookshops. But as I mentioned earlier, the Protocols are instantly available today in tens of millions of homes across the country - free of charge! All any student or teenager needs to get a copy of the Protocols today is a computer and a dial tone.

And incidents in the rest of the world mirror this shocking situation. Let me share a few disturbing facts with you:

* Just last year, the Protocols were published as a series in a newspaper in Estonia in "honor" of Passover, a sickening remembrance of the dreaded "blood libel" used to provoke pogroms against Jews throughout Europe.

* Dozens of Internet sites now carry full text versions in several languages with up-to-date "commentary" and additional "proofs".

* Simon Wiesenthal himself protested to Boris Yeltsin last year about a completely new Russian edition of the Protocols, and violent anti-Semites in the former Soviet Union promote the books as "required reading".

* In the Middle East, the Protocols are read aloud on the radio... quoted in newspapers... discussed on television... and referenced by political leaders, intellectuals, writers and others - all to spur anti-Semitic feelings and foment anti-Israel sentiments and violence. Hamas followers, in fact, believe every word in the Protocols.

* Here at home, extremist groups use the theme of the Protocols to justify their terrible hate crimes.

Make no mistake! The world is suffering from this deadly proliferation of the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion.

And around the world - with no counterbalance against its vile lies - this slander is rapidly becoming accepted by impressionable teenagers and college students as "fact", spawning a whole new generation of anti-Semites.