Those Who Forget the Past (18 page)

The years since 1995—years in which, according to the Anti-Defamation League's annual survey, anti-Semitism as a whole declined in America—also witnessed an upsurge of violent incidents connected to the Middle East and in most cases perpetrated by Arabs. This was especially pronounced after the beginning of the latest intifada in September 2000. Within months, at least 34 incidents—primarily vandalism and arson but including physical attacks on individuals—were reported in New York State alone.

Heightened security after September 11 seems to have brought about a decrease in violence of this kind, but lately the pace has picked up again. In Berkeley, California, for example, “Jewish residents have been attacked on the streets,”
The Daily
Californian
reported in late April. The university's Hillel society building was defaced with anti-Semitic graffiti, and the city's largest synagogue has received a stream of threats, including one in which a telephone caller said that all Jews should be “annihilated” and “holocausted.” The mayor has proposed creating a special police unit to deal with the rash of death threats against Jews and bomb scares at synagogues.

But mention of Berkeley, one of the most advanced academic locales in the country, should remind us that no more than in Europe are anti-Semitic attitudes here limited to Arabs or Muslims, or to the uneducated. Rather, they have found a home in what are presumably the most enlightened precincts of society. “Die Jew. Die, die, die, die, die, die. Stop living, die, die, DIE! Do us all a favor and build yourself [an] . . . oven,” were the words in a student newspaper at Rutgers. “How have Judaism, the Jews, and the international forces all permitted Zionism to become a wild, destructive beast capable of perpetrating atrocities?” are the words of a tenured professor of sociology at Georgetown, a leading American university. In many elite universities, radical professors have joined with Arab students to compel their institutions to divest from the “apartheid” state of Israel. One need only scan the dozens of names of distinguished faculty sponsors of such initiatives to grasp that a significant movement is gathering force.
²⁶

The political address of this movement is once again on the Left. True, the nefarious reach of “world Zionism” has long been a favorite theme of American white supremacists like David Duke, just as it has been of the British Holocaust-denier David Irving. But even in its more genteel incarnations, as in the now-marginalized Patrick J. Buchanan, this brand of antiSemitism is in relative eclipse, whereas on the Left it has become the glue of a new coalition. The environmentalists and anarchists who in past years satisfied themselves by hurling rocks through the windows of Starbucks coffee shops have now joined forces with Arab radicals to calumniate the Jewish state. “Hey, hey! Ho, ho! IMF has got to go!” was one slogan at an April rally in Washington, D.C. The other was “Sharon and Hitler are the same. Only difference is the name.”

Among the most active elements of the Left-Arab alliance are, sad to say, a number of Jews. For years, figures like Noam Chomsky and his acolyte Norman Finkelstein have traded in extreme denunciations of Israel, to relatively little effect.
²⁷
Of late, they are finding greater traction. The principal activity of a new organization called “Jews for Peace in Palestine and Israel” is organizing rallies in support of the PLO. “There are many American Jews who are flat-out embarrassed by the fact the prime minister of Israel is guilty of war crimes,” says its executive director, Josh Ruebner. Rabbi Michael Lerner, editor of
Tikkun
magazine, and dozens of his associates, including Chomsky and such non-Jewish luminaries as the black activist professor Cornel West, recently placed a full-page ad in
The
New York Times
in which, in classic anti-Semitic form, either Ariel Sharon or one of his “supporters” was presented in a cartoon caricature as a hook-nosed, evil-looking Jew, the state of Israel was characterized as a “Pharaoh,” and Israeli soldiers were likened to Nazis blindly “following orders” in “a brutal occupation” that “violates international law, human rights, and the basic ethical standards of humanity.”

In the decades before World War II, a mass of anti-Semitic rhetoric, from “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” through
Mein Kampf
and beyond, helped prepare the intellectual and cultural groundwork for the catastrophe that followed. Today, the ceaseless denunciations of Israel on the part of the international Left, including some of its most respected and respectable spokesmen, cannot help striking one as possessing the seeds of a macabre replay. What George F. Will has called the “centrality of anti-Semitism” to the current Middle East crisis may yet develop the potential of transforming that crisis into (to quote Will again) “the second—and final?—phase of the struggle for a ‘final solution' to the Jewish question.”

European leaders would heatedly abjure any such objective; yet in their hands, the anti-Israel and anti-Jewish campaign has generated real momentum. The European states are militarily weak, but they have other levers of power to exercise. They have already played a major role in Israel's political and diplomatic isolation, and they could conceivably attempt to strangle it economically by means of the boycotts and sanctions they have threatened to impose. By virtue of their influence in international organizations, and through the moral cachet they continue, however unaccountably, to deploy in centers of elite opinion elsewhere around the world, they have been instrumental in chipping away at Israel's very legitimacy.

One does not wish to exaggerate. Today's virulent antiSemitism is, in part, an epiphenomenon of the Israel-Arab conflict—or, more accurately, of Israel's effort to withstand the Arab determination to destroy it. To the degree that Israel succeeds in thwarting or turning aside that determination, the rhetoric may abate, and explicit anti-Semitism may diminish. (By contrast, the perception of Jewish weakness has historically always fed the appetite of anti-Jewish aggression.) But there is also no denying that the new anti-Semitism has taken on a life of its own, gathering strength from long-repressed theological hatreds suddenly given license to emerge, from all sorts of misplaced social resentments that have nothing to do with the Jews, and (to judge from the Left-Arab coalition) from broader ideological agendas in which Israel is a mere stand-in, a conveniently vulnerable target for those not yet willing or able to take on the mighty United States.

One small but very disturbing sign of the headway being made by the new anti-Semitism is the speculation that has suddenly sprung up in the most disparate places about the possibility of a world without Israel—as if it were a perfectly ordinary prospect for a thriving democracy of nearly five million Jews simply to disappear. That a leader of Hamas like Ismail Abu Shanab should contemplate the extinction of Israel is understandable; that he should feel comfortable in talking about it publicly—“There are,” he has amiably explained, “a lot of open areas in the United States that could absorb the Jews”—tells us a good deal about what has come to be considered permissible discourse in the presence of reporters. But then, Tom Paulin and A. N. Wilson have followed close behind—and similar sorts of thoughts, suitably qualified, have even appeared under the bylines of avowed friends of the Jewish state here at home. As one of them, Richard John Neuhaus, has lately written, while personally disclaiming any such sentiment, even to “wish that Israel ‘would cease to exist' is . . . not necessarily a wish to destroy the Jews, since one might at the same time hope that the minority of the world's Jews living in Israel would find a secure home elsewhere, notably in the U.S.” Such are the tortuous rationalizations to which the swell of worldwide anti-Semitism has led.

Great shocks, as we know from the last century, can produce political flux beyond all foresight. In the last years the world has been subjected to a series of such shocks, September 11 being the greatest, and more may well be on the way. Where their repercussions will end no one can yet say, but the concomitant and hardly accidental revival of the ancient fear and hatred known as anti-Semitism must make one tremble. The story of twentieth-century Europe, wrote the historian Norman Cohn in the concluding words of
Warrant for Genocide,
his 1966 study of European anti-Semitism in the years before World War II, is a story of how a “grossly delusional view of the world, based on infantile fears and hatreds, was able to find expression in murder and torture beyond all imagining. It is a case history in collective psychopathology, and its deepest implications reach far beyond anti-Semitism and the fate of the Jews.”

Those words remain frighteningly relevant today.

PART THREE

ONE DEATH, ONE LIE

One Death

JUDEA PEARL

This Tide of Madness

The World Must Stand Against the Evil
That Took My Son's Life

TOMORROW WILL MARK the first anniversary of the day the world learned of the murder of my son Daniel Pearl, a reporter for this newspaper. It is time to step back and reflect on the significance of this tragedy.

Much has been written on the new challenges that Danny's murder represents to international journalism. But relatively little attention was given to one aspect of the motives of the perpetrators, specifically to the role of anti-American and anti-Semitic sentiments in the planning and execution of the murder. In fact, what shocked and united people from all over the world was the nature of those motives.

The murder weapon in Danny's case was aimed not at a faceless enemy or institution, but at a gentle human being—one whose face is now familiar to millions of people around the world. Danny's murderers spent a week with him; they must have seen his radiating humanity. Killing him so brutally, and in front of a video camera, marked a new low in man's inhumanity to man. People of all faiths were thus shocked to realize that mankind can still be dragged to such depths by certain myths and ideologies.

Danny was killed because he represented us, namely the ideals that every civilized person aspires to uphold—modernity, openness, pluralism, freedom of inquiry, truth, honesty, and respect for all people. Decent people of all backgrounds have consequently felt personally targeted in this crime, and have been motivated to carry on Danny's spirit.

Reactions to Danny's death varied from community to community. In Pakistan, many have condemned the murder as a barbaric act carried out by a minority of fanatics at the fringe of society, while some find absolution in assuming that Danny was a spy. Sadly, anti-Semitism and sympathies with the perpetrators, as revealed in the trial of Omar Sheikh, seem to be more widespread than openly admitted. The trial itself is at a puzzling standstill, with no date set for an appeal decision. In Saudi Arabia, the murder video has been used to arouse and recruit new members to terrorist organizations. In Europe, Danny's murder has been condemned as an attack against journalism, while the anti-American, anti-Jewish sentiments were played down considerably. This is understandable, considering the anti-American and anti-Western sentiment echoed in editorials in some respectable European newspapers.

In contrast, Danny's captors concentrated on his Jewish and Israeli heritage. Evidently the murderers were confident that Danny's Jewish connections were sufficient to license the gruesome murder they were about to commit. Such a brazen call to condone the killing of a human being by virtue of his religion or heritage is strongly reminiscent of the horrors perpetrated by Nazi Germany.

In a world governed by reason and leadership, one would expect world leaders to immediately denounce such racist calls before they become an epidemic. However, President Bush was the only world leader to acknowledge the connection between Danny's murder and the rise of anti-Semitism: “We reject the ancient evil of anti-Semitism whether it is practiced by the killers of Daniel Pearl or by those who burn synagogues in France.” No European head of state rose to John F. Kennedy's “Ich bin ein Berliner” with the morally equivalent statement “Today, I am a Jew.”

Not surprisingly, our unguided world has seen an alarming rise of anti-Semitic activity in the past year. Tens of millions of Muslims have become unshakably convinced that Jews were responsible for the September 11 attack. Egypt's state-controlled television aired a forty-one-part program based on the notorious anti-Semitic book “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” and Egyptians were fed another fantasy, that Jews are plotting to take over the world. Syria's defense minister, Mustafa Tlas, released the eighth edition of his book,
The
Matzah of Zion,
in which he accuses Jews of using the blood of Christians to bake matzah for Passover. And on the sideline, while these flames of hatred were consuming sizable chunks of the world's population, traditionally vocal champions of anti-racism remained silent.

Against this tide of madness the world is about to remember Daniel Pearl—a Jew, a citizen of the world, and a dialogue maker who formed genuine connections among people of different backgrounds. In Danny's spirit, we have asked every community that plans to commemorate the anniversary of his death to invite a neighboring synagogue, mosque, church, or temple of different faith to join in a prayer for a sane and humane world, a world free of the hatred that took Danny's life. Interfaith memorials will take place, starting tonight, in Los Angeles, New York, Toronto, London, and Jerusalem, with additional services planned world-wide.

We hope that the combination of multifaith attendance, joint statements against intolerance, and the unifying global spirit of the day will serve as catalysts for building alliances against the rising tide of fanaticism, dehumanization, and xenophobia.

THANE ROSENBAUM

Danny Pearl

IN THE MIDDLE EAST, where martyrdom is measured only in human sacrifice, where human bombs are indistinguishable from human remains, where the sound of an explosive is both an anthem and an alarm, where the future of the Palestinian people is mortgaged all too cheaply for the price of shrapnel, and where a slice of pizza can be a final meal or what's still grasped at the end of a severed arm—in short, in a region so grisly, why is the murder of Daniel Pearl a special reminder of what it means to be a Jew in an unspeakably horrible post– September 11 world?

“I'm a Jewish American. I come from a . . . on my father's side . . . a family of Zionists. My father's Jewish. My mother's Jewish. I'm Jewish. My family follows Judaism. We've made numerous family visits to Israel. In the town of B'nei Brak in Israel, there's a street called Haim Pearl Street, which was named after my great-grandfather, who was one of the founders.”

Those are not my words. They were the final words of Daniel Pearl. But they weren't his words, either. He was forced to say them by his captors right before he was decapitated. And all of it was videotaped, not as a ransom note, because their hostage was dead, but as a scripted ritual murder, complete with a script for Pearl to recite, a passion play performed by those far too passionate about who this particular victim was.

Since these were the words of the murderers, it's fair to ask what was intended by this communication. Surely they could have killed Pearl without the cameras rolling, without his having to read these molesting lines of dialogue before his head was severed and held aloft like a trophy. Why did his murderers go through all this choreography when a simple bullet would have done nicely? In lieu of giving Pearl his last rites, they treated themselves to a party over his spilled blood.

There has been much written about the ethical and journalistic values that were either tarnished or elevated by making the entire video of the execution available over the Internet. I don't have a strong view of whether
The Boston Phoenix
performed a morally transgressive act, or whether they simply, in relying on the killers' own archival instincts, reported the news in the most graphically accurate way possible.

What I do know is that such matters of taste and judgment are ultimately a distraction from a more central point. The video offered a new development in the Daniel Pearl story. Its newsworthiness was not that a murder had taken place. That was old news. Daniel Pearl was dead. That we already knew. But what we didn't know, and perhaps this was something we needed to know, was that Pearl's murder wasn't designed as a simple death, not just another routine casualty in an exponentially escalating Middle East, Persian Gulf body count. These men were obviously hardened killers, desensitized to human loss. They are not natural tear-shedders. Had Pearl pleaded for mercy, it surely wasn't forthcoming. They were inured to death, and yet somehow this death among others was a special one, rousing them from the complacency of their usual endeavors, enough to make a show out of it.

Daniel Pearl's murder had to be recorded and preserved, if not for posterity, then as a kind of prurient, hard-porn reminder of the special hate for Jews that animates the consciousness and convictions of his murderers. The video, more than anything else, speaks not only to the execution, but goes beyond it, to an entirely different type of crime, one done to the spirit—the murder of the soul. It is this crime, as much as the decapitation, that depravedly speaks to what was inside the hearts of the men who killed him.

But first, a lesson from another era worth recalling at this time. The Nazis, in addition to everything else that might be said about them, were geniuses at genocide. They knew that the body was beside the point. In order for there to be a true final solution, it wasn't enough to merely exterminate Jews physically. It was equally necessary for them to be divested of dignity, to be reduced to hollow men and women, empty of spirit and life. All those forced separations, the branding of those yellow stars, the humiliation that came from shaved heads and numbered arms, the prolonging of imminent death. These acts of torture were yet another dimension in the Nazis' death strategy: the defilement, the extinguishing of hope, the erasure of identity, the starvation of the spirit. Soon the soul would die; the body would follow. Had the Nazis killed no one, but instead had endlessly dehumanized Six Million Jews, would they not have been guilty of mass murder and genocide?

The Daniel Pearl execution video, and the shamefully barbaric acts that it recorded, is damning evidence of a similar pathology: the impulse to kill his spirit before even bothering with his body, to force him to reveal the only name, rank, and serial number that these people cared about—his Jewish parentage. And while he was indeed an American, he was going to receive a Jewish death. Make no mistake about it: Before he was killed, Daniel Pearl was first branded. And even after his death, the humiliation continued in the showcasing of his severed head.

The knife may have slit Pearl's throat, but the words that were forced out of his mouth were equal in their violence, an act of spiritual murder that preceded his physical death. He did not speak these words of Jewish identity proudly, because they were not his words. He would have perhaps chosen to say something else altogether. Instead these words were given to him as an alibi for his murderers, justification for their cause and the manner in which they carried it out. There was no remorse, but rather giddy and purposeful satisfaction.

This is the way it always is with murderous anti-Semitism: The persecutors are obsessed with their ideology or religion, and it reaches a boiling point of fanaticism. But they're not all that particular about the passions of their victims, whether they too are obsessed, in this case, with being Jewish. To the Nazis it didn't matter whether the gas was going into the lungs of practicing Jews or Jews who had never stepped foot inside a synagogue. These were deaths without any reprieve or pardon. All that mattered was that the victim was Jewish, regardless of how tenuous their connection was to the tribe, or how adamantly they claimed to fit in elsewhere.

It is not surprising that the Pearl family wished to highlight Danny's humanistic, universal impulses as a way to convince his killers that they had the wrong man. But his killers didn't care. Actually, they had the right man. It must have been a tremendous coincidence for them to learn that the Pearls had a street named after them in Israel. Indeed, his murderers had hit the hostage jackpot: a Jewish-American journalist with Zionist roots. But they would have killed him anyway, even if he had never been to Israel, even if he didn't know what a Zionist was. Daniel Pearl transcended the ranks of a mere prisoner. His murderers marked him for death because of one central truth in his biographical data: Stripped down to his essence, Daniel Pearl was a Jew.

But imagine this, if Daniel Pearl had been an American journalist and a practicing Catholic, would they have required him to recite his relevant church affiliation? And would they have had him beheaded? Whether one chooses to see the tape or not, the gory message is clear: all Jews are now Daniel Pearl.