A collage of causes are triggering rises in both anti-Semitism and anti-Israel sentiment in the Arab world, says an expert on religious extremism.

Neil Kressel, a professor of social psychology at William Paterson University in Wayne, told a meeting of the Anti-Defamation League’s regional board Oct. 4 that hostilities against Israel and Jews in general “have long been a sanctioned way for people to let out frustrations in the Middle East.”

“You can’t complain about the government. You can’t complain about the religion. There are a lot of things you can do that are dangerous. But complaining about Israel is not dangerous,” he said.

Kressel spoke before 20 ADL staff and board members in a meeting room at the Leon & Toby Cooperman JCC, Ross Family Campus, in West Orange.

Kressel is the author of Mass Hate: The Global Rise of Genocide and Terror, which includes discussion of murderous bigotry by Bosnian Serb soldiers and of the terrorists who bombed Manhattan’s World Trade Center in 1993. The book was recently updated to include a discussion of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

In his overview of Muslim hostility to Jews and Israel, he said much of it was born after the Arab nations’ defeat in the 1967 Six-Day War.

“They had been led to expect a victory, and then they found this terrible, terrible defeat,” he said.

At the same time, he argued that the failure of secular governments in the Arab world also have bred resentment of anything associated with the West.

“A lot of the roots of extremism come in the idea that ‘Well, we tried the Western way. We tried the modern way. Now maybe we should look at some of these other ways.’”

Kressel said that hostility also stems from the view that “Jews are seen as the ultimate representative of modernity, and Israel is also. America to a large extent and Jews to a smaller extent are hated because they are representative of this modern way of doing things.”

Kressel said a hatred of Israel is found in the educational systems, the religious services, and politicians’ rhetoric of some Arab countries. “Here’s the tricky part,” he said. “The Muslim religious tradition provides ample material for anybody who wants to be an anti-Semite.”

He said the Koran includes a number of passages calling for violence against Jews. However, he said, “I’m not sure it is in the interest of Jews to call attention to them. But there is also a great deal of respect that Mohammed showed at various times for the Jews — mostly at the beginning, when he thought he could win them over to Islam. The text has many pro-Jewish things and the idea that Jews are supposed to be tolerated. It probably makes sense to play up these positive elements of the tradition, but from an intellectually honest perspective, you have to acknowledge there are both elements.”

Compounding the problem of mass hate are the Internet and other “new media” emanating from and available in the Middle East. “The potential for radicalization is probably greater than it was 30 or 40 years ago,” he said.

Kressel acknowledged that he is “stronger on diagnosis than solutions,” but said one way to combat such hatred might be through religious dialogue, by focusing “on positive tendencies in the religious tradition. You have to acknowledge that Jews have extremism within our own camp, and the idea has to be to condemn extremism across the board.”

But, he added, “if we try to find a true [Arab] moderate who is acceptable to us, he won’t be acceptable in the region. If he can defend his views in Washington, he is not going to be able to defend his views in Pakistan or in Iran or in Saudi Arabia. What we are supposed to do is find bad guys who aren’t so bad and then hope we can control them. But that is a very dangerous strategy.”

Interviewed after his speech, Kressel told NJ Jewish News that “a person can be anti-Israel without being anti-Jewish or even anti-Jewish without being anti-Israel, but for the most part in the Muslim world, a very large percent of people are both.”

He said that a “small percentage of Israelis on the West Bank” have hateful feelings toward Muslims, “but if the Arab-Israeli conflict were resolved tomorrow, Jews would like nothing better than to get on with their lives and do business with the Arab world.”

And while he accepts the notion that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a cause, and not just a symptom, of Arab hatred and that “ending the occupation and achieving a two-state solution” would reduce the militancy of Islamic fundamentalism and suicide bombing, “the problem is getting there.”

In that regard, he viewed the summer’s war on Hizbullah as a setback.

“By not having a decisive victory in the war in Lebanon, Israel has helped create the image of Hizbullah as possibly the wave of the future, and that has been counterproductive,” he said. “It wasn’t that the war was a bad idea. I think the way it was conducted and Israel doing so poorly was a bad idea.”