Those Who Forget the Past Page 11

  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 Stre
et 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.

  WHAT CAN BE DONE?

  The instant and prolific dissemination of incitement is not just an issue in the Middle East. Campaigns of mutual animosity between India and Pakistan underlie the menacing brinksmanship of the moment. I believe that leaders of the media in this age of the Immediate Big Lie/the Complex Half Truth have more than a responsibility neutrally to record countervailing statements; they have a responsibility to seek out falsehood, promote objective truth, and nurture political discourse. Mr. Jonathan Steele wrote in The Guardian that New York today is like Brezhnev’s Moscow because nobody dares question the party line on the war on terrorism. Perhaps nobody wants much to question it. As an unknowing prisoner in the gulag, I have to say, however, that Mr. Steele dramatized a good point. Patriotism running high can run amok, its natural passions exploited in times of crisis to justify encroachments on freedom of speech and free inquiry. That is happening to some extent now in the United States with the Vice President suggesting that it is unpatriotic to investigate the intelligence blunders that preceded 9/11. He has it exactly upside down.

  SOME THINGS communicators might do:

  Locate the poison bottles I have described—and others —and take the initiative to label them for what they are. Not just for the sake of the West or Israel. Fundamentalist regimes will be more onerous for the ordinary people; see Iran, see Afghanistan.

  Expose deceptive websites. Run “Lies Coming Your Way” features when inflammatory stories are running. Promote corrective websites: I would mention the Daily Howler, which nails with great comic gusto the sins of the wayward press in America. Barbara and David P. Mikkelson at snopes.com make lacerating fun of a multiplicity of rumors. I also commend the world of bloggers, or blogworld, as the U.S. News & World Report columnist John Leo calls it. Bloggers are opinionated folk concerned with public affairs who log on the Web every day to correct falsehood. InstaPundit, run by Glenn Reynolds, a law professor, is a fine example.

  Promote higher professional standards of journalism between adversaries. The Guardian has just staged a splendid initiative in bringing Palestinians and Israelis to hear counsel from old antagonists in Ireland on how to break out of a cycle of anarchy and nihilism. It must be warmly congratulated. I propose that The Guardian present Index with the birthday gift by helping it to sponsor meetings between editors and writers from the warring ideologies of the Middle East—all the Arab countries and Israel, and editors and television correspondents who report on them in the Western media. They would meet for mutual criticism, not so much to solve the political problems, as to agree on a civilized professional framework in which differences can be reported, devoid of hate and lies, and perhaps to achieve some greater understanding of their responsibilities to objective truth. Thirty years ago in the International Press Institute we found that adversaries’ meetings such as that helped to defuse tensions then dangerously high between Greece and Turkey and India and Pakistan.

  Fourth and finally, all of us should have as much care with the explosive power of words as Heathrow does with our luggage. Words like . . .

  Martyrs/war crimes/massacres/

  Nazis/atrocities/genocide

  As Churchill said, words are the only things that last forever. We cannot think morally without a reverence for the meaning of words. Take just that one noun, “martyrs.” There have been close on one hundred suicide bombings in

  Israel. They are deluded youth and hired killers, paid by the Saudis and the Iraqis and organized under the Palestinian Authority—until Arafat’s recent attempt to distance himself on the high moral ground that they are bad for Palestine’s “image.” Of course, Palestinians can call their bombers “martyrs” if they choose; but the rest of us should respect the classical integrity of the meaning of the word “martyr,” someone who gives up his own life to save others—not randomly to kill babes in arms, old men in wheelchairs, mothers and fathers going their innocuous ways. To describe the assassins as “martyrs,” which a headline I saw recently did, is to be emotionally complicit in what classical Islam itself regards as a double transgression, suicide and murder.

  Thank you for your forbearance during a long and no doubt depressing catalogue of hatred and falsehood. To sum it all up, I would like to call in aid an objective truth noted by my most celebrated predecessor as the editor of The Times. Sir William Haley, addressing the staff on the day he retired, left them with this thought, as I do with you tonight:

  There are things which are bad, and false, and ugly, and no amount of specious casuistry will make them good, or true, or beautiful.

  LAWRENCE SUMMERS

  Address at Morning Prayers

  Memorial Church, Harvard University,

  September 17, 2002

  I SPEAK WITH YOU TODAY not as president of the university but as a concerned member of our community about something that I never thought I would become seriously worried about—the issue of anti-Semitism.

  I am Jewish, identified but hardly devout. In my lifetime, anti-Semitism has been remote from my experience. My family all left Europe at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Holocaust is for me a matter of history, not personal memory. To be sure, there were country clubs where I grew up that had few if any Jewish members, but not ones that included people I knew. My experience in college and graduate school, as a faculty member, as a government official—all involved little notice of my religion.

  Indeed, I was struck during my years in the Clinton administration that the existence of an economic leadership team with people like Robert Rubin, Alan Greenspan, Charlene Barshefsky, and many others that was very heavily Jewish passed without comment or notice—it was something that would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago, as indeed it would have been inconceivable a generation or two ago that Harvard could have a Jewish president.

  Without thinking about it much, I attributed all of this to progress—to an ascendancy of enlightenment and tolerance. A view that prejudice is increasingly put aside. A view that while the politics of the Middle East was enormously complex, and contentious, the question of the right of a Jewish state to exist had been settled in the affirmative by the world community.

  But today, I am less complacent. Less complacent and comfortable because there is disturbing evidence of an upturn in anti-Semitism globally, and also because of some developments closer to home.

  Consider some of the global events of the last year:

  There have been synagogue burnings, physical assaults on Jews, or the painting of swastikas on Jewish memorials in every country in Europe. Observers in many countries have pointed to the worst outbreak of attacks against the Jews since the Second World War.

  Candidates who denied the significance of the Holocaust
reached the runoff stage of elections for the nation’s highest office in France and Denmark. State-sponsored television stations in many nations of the world spew anti-Zionist propaganda.

  The United Nations–sponsored World Conference on Racism—while failing to mention human rights abuses in China, Rwanda, or anyplace in the Arab world—spoke of Israel’s policies prior to recent struggles under the Barak government as constituting ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity. The NGO declaration at the same conference was even more virulent.

  I could go on. But I want to bring this closer to home. Of course academic communities should be and always will be places that allow any viewpoint to be expressed. And certainly there is much to be debated about the Middle East and much in Israel’s foreign and defense policy that can be and should be vigorously challenged.

  But where anti-Semitism and views that are profoundly anti-Israel have traditionally been the primary preserve of poorly educated right-wing populists, profoundly anti-Israel views are increasingly finding support in progressive intellectual communities. Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect if not their intent.

  For example:

  Hundreds of European academics have called for an end to support for Israeli researchers, though not for an end to support for researchers from any other nation.

  Israeli scholars this past spring were forced off the board of an international literature journal.

  At the same rallies where protesters, many of them university students, condemn the IMF and global capitalism and raise questions about globalization, it is becoming increasingly common to also lash out at Israel. Indeed, at the anti-IMF rallies last spring, chants were heard equating Hitler and Sharon.