Those Who Forget the Past (12 page)

THE TIDAL WAVE OF ANTI-SEMITISM

We have to look very hard in the distorting mirrors of the Middle East for the absolute knowledge of Enlightenment presumptions. But the Internet, for all its elephant traps, does enable us at least to know to an unprecedented degree what is being retailed, what people are thinking and being told. Before I lift the lid an inch or two on this Pandora's box, you are entitled to know where I am coming from. I see Israel, for all its warts, and its origins in terrorist violence against the British, as the parliamentary democracy envisaged by the famous editor of The Guardian, C. P. Scott, when in 1917 he introduced Chaim Weizmann to Lloyd George and A. J. Balfour. That led to the Balfour declaration for a Jewish national home. At the same time, I have never hesitated whenever I thought Israel was failing to live up to its ideals or being intransigent in negotiation. At the
Sunday Times,
I was the subject of a great deal of criticism for documenting in detail cases of ill treatment of Arabs held prisoner on the West Bank by the Israeli military. I believe occupation is inevitably an ugly and humiliating thing. Israel would be well advised to stop building settlements; indeed as some peace groups in Israel suggest, it might be possible to break the cycle of violence by formally withdrawing from an abandoned settlement and letting it be known that more will follow if the gesture is reciprocated.

But none of the Palestinians' grievances can justify what they are doing today. Nothing, I believe, nothing, can justify that random murder of Israeli citizenry, wherever they are—in pre-'67 Israel, or the West Bank or Gaza. And nothing can justify the anti-Semitism that foments such terrorism. It is a big dark shadow on the world, and it is not simply a consequence of the Palestinian conflict, as conventional media portrays it— insofar as it portrays it at all, which is scandalously little. The leading authority on anti-Semitism, the author and scholar Professor Robert Wistrich, Neuberger Professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, judges that today's level of antiSemitism is unprecedented, and anyone who makes the most cursory examination cannot fail to be stunned. The effluent is from official sources and newspapers in Arab states, from schools and government-funded mosques, from Arab columnists and editorial writers, cartoonists, clerics, and intellectuals, from websites that trail into an infinity of iniquity. Hostility to Israel is pumped into millions of homes every day by the pan-Arab TV satellite channel, Al-Jazeera. It is said to be “objective.” At the start of the Afghan campaign, it gave twice as much airtime to Bin Laden and his supporters as the coalition. Recently, it showed its priorities very clearly by giving an easy ride to the anti-Semitic Le Pen and a rough ride to Tony Blair. The appearance of modernity in the Arab media is illusory. More important than the presence of the hardware is the absence of the software, the notion of a ruggedly independent self-critical free press. CNN will film American bomb damage in Afghanistan. Al-Jazeera and the Middle East stations would never dream of talking to the orphans and widows whose loved ones were blown apart by a suicide bomber. An Arab critic of America and the coalition is always given the last word.

Wherever you apportion the balance of blame on the emotive issue of Palestine, vertigo is surely induced by seeing the ghost walk again: the specter of anti-Semitism that haunted Europe in the thirties to its ghastly fulfillment is now revived whole in the Arab media and in some of the European press, too. Certainly, in too much of European dialogue, Israel is supported, in Lenin's words, like a rope supports a hanging man. Outright anti-Semitism is not a common feature, and there may be a token gesture to the right of Israel to exist, but much Middle East reporting falls into the impartiality trap. It gives equal weight to information from corrupt police states and proven liars as to information from a self-critical democracy. The pious but fatuous posture is that this is somehow fair, as if truth existed in a moral vacuum, something to be measured by the yard like calico. Five million Jews in Israel are a vulnerable minority surrounded by 300 million Muslims, who for the most part are governed by authoritarian regimes, quasi–police states, that in more than fifty years have never ceased trying to wipe it out by war and terrorism. They muzzle dissent and critical reporting, they run vengeful penal systems, they have failed in almost every measure of social and political justice from the rights of women to fair trials and freedom of the press, they deflect the frustrations of their streets to the scapegoat of Zionism, and they breed and finance international terrorism. Yet it is Israel that is regarded with skepticism and sometimes hostility. Take the battle of Jenin.
The Guardian
was moved to write the editorial opinion that Israel's attacks on Jenin were “every bit as repellent” as Osama bin Laden's attack on New York on September 11. Every bit? Every bit as repellent? Did we miss something? Was there some American provocation of Osama comparable to the murder of nineteen Israelis at Passover? Was something going on in the World Trade Center as menacing as the making of bombs in Jenin, known to Palestinians as Suicide Capital?

The presumption in the Jenin feeding frenzy in print and in hours and hours of television was that the Palestinian stories of 3,000 killed and buried in secret mass graves must be true, yet the main spokesman Saeb Erekat has been shown time and time again to be a liar. Human Rights Watch now puts the death toll at a total of 54, and on their count 22 civilians—the Israelis say 3. Some Palestinian militants in fact claim Jenin as a victory in the killing of 23 Israeli soldiers.

Of course, the press had a duty to report the Palestinians' allegations; it was entitled to raise questions and express alarm in the editorial columns. But truth did not lie in the balance between competing statements, and it was ill-served by hysteria. Big stories like this demand rigor in the reporting, restraint in the language, scrupulous care in the headlining, proper attribution of sources, and above all a sense of responsibility: “Genocide” is too agonizing when real for it to be devalued by its use as small change. Benjamin Pogrund is one of the bravest journalists I have ever met. He has practiced and defended the freedom of the press with his life all his life. He risked prison and beating bringing blacks and whites together during apartheid; he is doing something like that now in Israel promoting dialogue between Jews and Arabs in the West Bank, and he told me last week that the unskeptical reporting of Jenin made his hair stand on end.

LET ME REJECT the sophistry that to question such matters is to excuse everything done under the guise of protesting antiSemitism. It is not anti-Semitic to raise questions about Jenin, no more than it is anti-press to raise questions about the reporting. It is not anti-Semitic to protest ill treatment of Palestinians. It is not anti-Semitic to consider whether Sharon's past belies his promises for the future. It is not anti-Semitic to deplore the long occupation, though originally brought by Arab leaders in instigating and losing three wars.

It
is
anti-Semitic to vilify the state of Israel as a diabolical abstraction, reserving tolerance for the individual Jew but not the collective Jew; it
is
anti-Semitic to invent malignant outrages; it
is
anti-Semitic to consistently condemn in Israel what you ignore or condone elsewhere; it
is,
above all, anti-Semitic to dehumanize Judaism and the Jewish people so as to incite and justify their extermination. That is what has been done thousands and thousands of times over on a preposterous scale.

Anti-Semitism on the scale it is today is something relatively new in the Islamic world. There was more tolerance for Jews in the Islamic empire than ever there was in Christian Europe. I was aware, as we all are, that Israelis are unpopular because of the prolonged occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. What I did not realize until I began looking into it for this talk was how frenzied, vociferous, paranoid, vicious, and prolific— underscore prolific—the new anti-Semitism is, and how little this fact has been reported, analyzed, and commented on in the West by press, academia, church, and governments. Yes, everyone threw up their hands in horror about Le Pen—it is always satisfying to find fault with the French!—but Europe turns a blind eye to worse. A single skinhead assault on a synagogue in Europe is news, but not the unremitting daily assault on Jews waged from Morocco to Cairo to Damascus, from Baghdad to Teheran, the Gaza Strip to Karachi. The media in the Middle East is an open sewer. Let's not get trapped in a game of moral equivalency. In terms of abuse Muslims altogether suffer nothing comparable to the incessant warfare now. Twenty years ago Israeli school textbooks were disfigured by stereotypes of Arabs as treacherous, mendacious, stupid, and murderous. But not now. They have cleaned up. Israelis and Arabs have worked to good effect together here.

But the Palestinian Authority uses European money to run a stream of hate propaganda through the schools, the mosques, on television and radio, in political rallies and summer camps. They film little girls singing their dedication to martyrdom. The degree of infection was manifest at Al-Najah University in the city of Nablus where the students put on an exhibition entitled “The Sbarro Café Exhibition.”

The Sbarro café was the pizza parlor where on August 9 a Palestinian suicide bomber murdered fifteen people taking a meal. The exhibit, according to the Associated Press and Israeli media, included pizza slices and body parts strewn across the room. The walls were painted red to represent scattered blood.

It is hard looking for sanity to put in the picture. I found it in the Department of Psychiatry at Ein Shams University in Cairo. Here is Dr. Adel Sadeq, who is also chairman of the Arab Psychiatrists' Association, on suicide bombings:

As a professional psychiatrist, I say that the height of bliss comes with the end of the countdown: ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. When the martyr reaches “one” and he explodes he has a sense of himself flying, because he knows for certain that he is not dead. It is a transition to another, more beautiful world. None in the Western world would sacrifice his life for his homeland. If his homeland is drowning, he is the first to jump ship. In our culture it is different. . . . This is the only Arab weapon there is and anyone who says otherwise is a conspirator.

Next patient, please!

The Muslim world's relentless caricatures of the Jew are boringly on the same one note; Jews are always dirty, hook-nosed, money-grubbing, vindictive, and scheming parasites. They are barbarians who deliberately spread vice, drugs, and prostitution and poison water. Among the fabrications:

Israeli authorities infected by injection 300 Palestinian children with HIV virus during the years of the intifada (charge by Nabil Ramlawi, March 17, 1997, at the UN Commission on Human Rights, Geneva).

Israel poisoned Palestinians with uranium and nerve gas. (Charge by Yasser Arafat at the 2001 World Economic Forum. Clips to show victims racked by convulsions and vomiting were fabricated by the Palestinian Authority, reports Fiamma Nirenstein.)

Israel is giving out drug-laced chewing gum and candy intended to make women sexually corrupt and to kill children (Egyptian and Jordanian news stories).

Jews use the blood of gentiles to make matzos for Passover (
Al-Ahram,
Cairo). In the Saudi government daily
Al-Riyadh
on March 12 this year, Dr. Umayma Ahmad Al-Jalahma of King Faisal University in Al-Dammam, describing the Jewish holiday of Purim, offered us this: “The blood of Christian and Muslim children under the age of 10 must be used. . . . Let us now examine how the victims' blood is spilled. For this, a needle-studded barrel is used . . . , with extremely sharp needles set in it on all sides. [These] pierce the victim's body from the moment he is placed in the barrel.

These needles do the job, and the victim's blood drips from him very slowly. Thus, the victim suffers dreadful torment—torment that affords the Jewish vampires great delight . . .”

This April the state-funded San Francisco students I mentioned have put out a poster of a baby “slaughtered according to Jewish rites under American license.”

Incredibly, the Arab and Muslim media, and behind them their states, have resurrected that notorious Bolshevik forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” This supposedly occult document, which reads like something discarded as too ridiculous for the script for Mel Brooks'
The Producers,
is the secret Zionist plan by which satanic Jews will gain world domination. It has had more scholarly stakes through its heart than the umpteen re-enactments of
Dracula,
but this bizarre counterfeit is common currency in the Muslim world. A multi-million thirty-part series was produced in Egypt by Arab Radio and Television. With a cast of 400! And not as satire.

It is “The Protocols” that inspire Hamas, the Islamic Resistance Movement, to teach their children that the Jews control the world's wealth and mass media. According to Hamas—and who will be there in the classroom or on the street to raise a question?—Jews deliberately instigated the French and Russian revolutions, and World War I, so that they could wipe out the Islamic caliphate and establish the League of Nations “in order to rule the world by their intermediary.” When I checked the website Palestine Watch, by the way, to check on what they were telling the world about Israeli propaganda, I drew a blank, but there it described Hamas as seeking nothing other than peace with dignity, forbearing to mention the small matter that Hamas is dedicated to the destruction of the state of Israel.

HOLOCAUST

Apart from the volume and intensity of the multi-media global campaign, there has been an ominous change in political direction. Arab frustration with the recognition of the state of Israel after World War II has for decades been expressed as “why should the Arabs have to compensate the Jews for the Holocaust perpetrated by Europeans?”

Today the theme is that the Holocaust is a Zionist invention. It is expressed with a vehemence as astounding as the contempt for scholarship.

A typical columnist in
Al-Akhbar,
the Egyptian government daily, on April 29: “The entire matter [the Holocaust], as many French and British scientists have proven, is nothing more than a huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German government in particular and the European countries. I personally and in the light of this imaginary tale complain to Hitler, even saying to him, ‘If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief [without] their evil and sin.' ”

Hiri Manzour in the official Palestinian newspaper: “the figure of six million Jews cremated in the Nazi Auschwitz camps is a lie,” a hoax promoted by Jews as part of their international “marketing operation.”

Seif al-Al Jarawn in the Palestinian newspaper
Al-Hayat
Al-Jadeeda:
“They concocted horrible stories of gas chambers which Hitler, they claimed, used to burn them alive. The press overflowed with pictures of Jews being gunned down . . . or being pushed into gas chambers. The truth is that such malicious persecution was a malicious fabrication by the Jews.”

Clearly here is a consistent attempt to undermine the moral foundations of the state of Israel, and it is espoused by a number of supposedly moderate people. The former president of Iran, Ali Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani, had this to say on Tehran Radio: “One atomic bomb would wipe out Israel without trace while the Islamic world would only be damaged rather than destroyed by Israeli nuclear retaliation.”

The brilliance of the whole campaign of anti-Semitism is its stupefying perversity: the Arab and Muslim media and mosque depict Israelis as Nazis—even the conciliatory Barak and the hawkish Sharon are alike dressed up in swastikas with fangs dripping with blood—but media and mosque peddle the same Judeophobia that paved the way to Auschwitz. How can you talk to someone who conducts all discourse standing on his head screaming? People in the West who adopt the same murderous metaphor for Israel, and I have heard it often on this visit, may be regarded as a joke in their own country, but that is not where the action is. They are moral idiots but they lend [credibility] to malevolent liars in the Middle East.

BY COMPARISON with the phantasmagoria I have described, it seems a small matter that without exception Palestinian school textbooks supplied by the Palestinian Authority, and funded by Europe, have no space in the maps for the sovereign state of Israel, no mention of its five million people, no recognition of the Jews' historic links to Jerusalem.

What many people in Europe do not realize is that while the Palestinian claim to a state might be reasonably supported, the cause is being exploited with “Jew” as a code word for extremist incitement of hatred of America and the West. Dr. Ahmad Abu Halabiya, former rector of the Islamic University in Gaza, speaks the message: “Wherever you are, kill the Jews, the Americans who are like them, and those who stand by them.”

This is Jihad. It is aimed at us all, at Europeans who “look like” Americans because they believe in liberal democracy and are infected by American culture. But its first victims are the Palestinians and the frustrated masses of the Muslim world. Their leaders have led them into ignominy in three wars. They have failed to reform their corrupt and incompetent societies, failed in almost every measure of social and political justice, from the rights of women to fair trials and freedom of the press. It is no surprise that the Arab Street is angry. It is convenient to deflect the despair and anger of the Street to Israel and the Jews who supposedly control the West, but terror and hate have a way of poisoning the very society they are supposed to be helping. See Algeria, see Ireland. When Bernard Lewis observed sixteen years ago that anti-Semitism was becoming part of Arab intellectual life “almost as much as happened in Nazi Germany,” he added the comforting thought that it lacked the visceral quality of Central and East European anti-Semitism, being “still largely political and ideological, intellectual and literary,” lacking any deep personal animosity or popular resonance, something cynically exploited by Arab rulers and elites, a polemical weapon to be discarded when no longer required.

But that was before the Palestinians signed on for suicide bombings, before the full force of the tidal wave I have sketched, before 9/11. Habits of mind tending to sanction terror are becoming ingrained in the Muslim world, sanctioned by the lethargy and prejudice in Europe: those Palestinians who danced for joy on 9/11 and those students who staged the grisly exhibition of pizza parlor murders were not Al Qaeda, but their acceptance of terror as a substitute for politics does not augur well for the future of Palestine as a separate state or the possibilities of peaceful political dialogue in any of the Arab states.