Yet there are proliferating signs that in too many places, and too many ways, the world is tacitly coming to accept not only persecution of the Jews, but the possibility of a second genocide--not necessarily by way of active complicity, but under labels familiar from the last century: It was not our fault. There was nothing we could do.

Compared with the world's population today of 6.7 billion, the entire Jewish population worldwide is infinitesimal, estimated at roughly 14 million. Some 40% of those Jews live in the U.S. Some 40% live in the world's only Jewish state, Israel.

The rest are scattered from France to Canada, the United Kingdom, Russia, Argentina, Australia and beyond. Collectively, they account for no more than about 0.2% of humanity.

That's also miniscule compared with a worldwide Muslim population very roughly estimated at some 1.5 billion. And Israel, for all its U.S. support, walks a lonely and beleaguered path compared to the 57-member strong Saudi-headquartered Organization of the Islamic Conference--one of the core lobbying blocs in the UN General Assembly.

Many Muslims may well desire simply to live in peace. Unfortunately, some of the most vocal, politically active and militarily aggressive among them--ruling Iran and Gaza, and harbored in places such as Syria and Lebanon--are explicitly dedicated to destroying Israel.

Through Internet and television propaganda, through pronouncements from the UN stage, through everything from subsidies to anti-Semitic lobbying associations to money and arms for terrorist groups, they spend considerable resources fueling movements to boycott, denigrate and attack Jews.

There are many spokes in the anti-Semitic web now being re-woven around the globe, from Saudi Arabia to the Palestinian schools and media that feature maps without Israel, and role models such as a martyred version of Mickey Mouse.

But as Obama takes office, two hubs stand out. One is Iran, supporter of terrorists, source of genocidal proclamations against Israel and seeker of nuclear bombs.

Whatever the doubts about that bomb program raised by the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate of late 2007, Obama's pick for cabinet-rank ambassador to the UN, Susan Rice, clearly sees a problem. In her written testimony for her confirmation hearing Jan. 15, she noted that "Iran continues its illicit nuclear program unabated."

The other hub is the United Nations, which, despite its own sanctions on Iran and its own 1945 charter which aims to avert such horrors as another holocaust, continues to dignify Tehran and some of its fellow anti-Semitic despotic states with a slew of important UN posts, while treating Israel as a pariah state.

Though a democracy, Israel has never been allowed to hold one of the 10 rotating seats on a Security Council that in recent years has welcomed such tyrannies as Syria and Libya.

Currently, Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon is fueling the problem--publicly condemning Israel's battle to stop the terrorist attacks by Hamas, touring Gaza and demanding a probe of Israeli actions, while offering no viable protection to Israelis.

Don't hold your breath for a UN inquiry into weapons and training supplied to Hamas by the same Iranian regime whose nuclear bomb program the UN’s leaky sanctions have failed to stop.

In this, Ban is carrying on a deep-seated UN tradition of bias against Jews and Israel. That is broadly obvious from the UN's torrent of anti-Israel statements, resolutions and so forth, including plans to hold a repeat in Geneva this April of the UN's anti-Israel 2001 conference in Durban, South Africa, ostensibly convened to discuss racism. But if anyone wants more detail, an illuminating account of the UN's anti-Semitic inner circles can be found in the memoir of a former senior UN official, Pedro Sanjuan, The UN Gang, published in 2005.

Sanjuan, who served at the UN in the 1980s and early 1990s, but kept in touch with it well after that, devotes an entire chapter, rich in anecdote, to "The Anti-Semitic UN Culture." Sanjuan writes that though he himself is not a Jew, what bothered him most during his years at the UN was "this unrelenting bigotry" against them.

During Israel's recent battle with Hamas in Gaza, attacks both verbal and physical against Jews have risen worldwide. To cite just a small sample, there have been reports of a double shooting in Denmark, Molotov cocktails hurled at synagogues in France, a Jewish burial chapel fire-bombed in Sweden, graffiti scrawled across British buildings saying "Jihad 4 Israel" and "Kill Jews," schools and synagogues desecrated on the North Side of Chicago, and--in an echo of Germany's 1938 Kristallnacht--rocks shattering the 50-year-old stained glass windows of a Jewish temple in Knoxville, Tenn.

At risk of being written off as hysterics--which the rising stack of evidence suggests they are not--a handful of journalists have tackled the story. These include syndicated columnist Mark Steyn, who in an article last week on "The Oldest Hatred, Resurgent," reeled off a staggering list of epithets, threats and physical attacks targeting Jews, including a crowd in Amsterdam chanting "Hamas! Hamas! Jews to the gas!," and Palestinian demonstrators in Florida sneering, "You need a big oven, that's what you need."

From Britain, writing in The Wall Street Journal Europe, social critic Melanie Phillips describes a demonstration at which Hamas supporters showed up dressed as "hook-nosed Jews pretending to drink the blood of Palestinian babies."

The message British authorities gave to pro-Israeli demonstrators who turned up at the same scene was to put away their Israeli flags because these were deemed "inflammatory."

But whatever surge of anti-Semitism might have accompanied Israel's battle to stop terrorist attacks by Hamas out of Gaza, the rising prejudice and malice dates back well before that.

Last year, a State Department report to Congress on "Contemporary Global Anti-Semitism" noted that "Over the last decade, U.S. embassies and consulates have reported an upsurge in anti-Semitism." That would be the decade in which Israel pulled out of Lebanon (2000), accepted the "roadmap" that sought to establish a democratic Palestinian state (2003) and withdrew from Gaza (2005).

Government-affiliated studies in recent years in both Europe and Britain have reported that, in the words of a 2006 UK all-party parliamentary inquiry: "It is clear that violence, desecration of property and intimidation directed toward Jews is on the rise."

A report leaked in 2003 from the former Vienna-based European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia, an independent body of the European Union, observed an outbreak of anti-Semitic acts in Europe following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

These included conspiracy theories that Jews were behind those attacks, denial of the holocaust and "desecration of synagogues, cemeteries, swastika graffiti, threatening and insulting mail." There were "physical attacks" on Jews and Jewish temples, "often committed by young Muslim perpetrators."

The study also described some of the anti-Jewish acts to young people who reportedly had no "specific anti-Semitic prejudices," but joined the Jew-baiting "just for fun."

Nor are Jews in the U.S. entirely spared. In the hate-crime statistics released each year by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, attacks on Jews routinely outnumber religiously based attacks against any other group.

For 2007, FBI figures show that among 1,477 religiously motivated hate crimes reported by U.S. law enforcement authorities, 9% were anti-Islamic, 9.5% were "anti-other religion," 4.4% were anti-Catholic and, by far outstripping any other category, "68.4% were anti-Jewish."

While much of the world may live today in the shadow of terrorist threats, actual attacks over many years have zeroed in repeatedly and specifically on Jews. That's why one now sees Jewish centers in places such as Manhattan surrounded by security barriers. From the bombings in Argentina of the Israeli embassy in 1992 (killing 32) and Jewish community center in 1993 (killing 87), to attacks on synagogues and other Jewish watering holes in places such as Tunisia, Turkey, France and, just two months ago, the terrorist slaughter in Mumbai, which specifically included a Jewish chabad, actual attacks have zeroed in again and again on the Jews.

This scene is also part of a world in which President Obama has become a symbol of what freedom, hope and virtue can do to deliver better days to a long embattled minority. What will he do about the Jews? Forbes.

Claudia Rosett, a journalist-in-residence with the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, writes a weekly column on foreign affairs for Forbes