A blockbuster revives an ancient warning. It’s one we still haven’t learned.

Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster film The Odyssey has catapulted one of Western civilization’s most enduring images back into the public imagination: the Trojan horse. It was a ruse that accomplished in a single terrible night what ten years of siege could not. Troy did not fall because its walls were breached by force. It fell because it welcomed its own destroyer.

The horse was received by the Trojans as a gift. A gift from the gods, some believed. The lone dissenter, the priest Laocoön, warned them not to trust it. “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts,” he cried. But the weary Trojans were in no mood for such a gloomy warning. Laocoön was dismissed as a madman, and when serpents rose from the sea and killed him, the people interpreted his death as proof that the gods had condemned his skepticism.

The wooden horse was not smuggled secretly into the city. It was welcomed in full public view. The Trojans themselves hauled it from the shore, widened their own gates to admit it, and placed it in a position of honor within the city walls. They saw it as a tribute, a memorial, an acknowledgment by the defeated Greeks that the long war was finally over.

That belief was the real weapon: it provided the delivery mechanism for their destruction.

The horse did not need to be made of gold. It did not need to be indestructible. It simply needed to be welcomed. The city was exhausted after ten years of war. The people celebrated. They feasted. They went to sleep convinced that peace had arrived.

But, as they slept, the horse opened. Greek soldiers emerged from its hollow interior, opened the gates to the waiting army, and destroyed the city from within. Troy’s massive walls had not failed. Its judgment had.

The Trojan horse remains one of history’s most powerful metaphors because it illustrates a timeless truth: the greatest threats to a civilization are often those it willingly invites inside.

Antisemitism works in much the same way. It is the container concealing........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)