Author:
Publication: The New Republic
Date: November 5, 2001
http://www.andrewsullivan.com/text/hits_article.html?6,thewar
One of the most vivid experiences
of my time as a graduate student at Harvard was a seminar I took with the
preeminent liberal political theorist John Rawls. The discussion centered
on Rawls's later work, in which he divorced his liberalism from the claim
of absolute truth. His argument was only cogent, he averred, if read and
understood by people who already shared some basic premises--the need for
consent, the reliance on reason, a tone of civility, a relatively open
mind. With characteristic tactlessness, I asked him what his response would
be if Hitler joined the debate and disagreed with him. Rawls answered that
there could be no discourse with Hitler. We would have to agree that he
was simply crazy, a madman at a Cambridge dinner party, a figure outside
the conversation. To Hitler, Rawls had nothing to say, except please go
away.
But what if Hitler refuses to go
away? My mind has drifted back to that conversation recently, as we try
to grapple with the reality staring us in the face: Something like Hitler
is back, and it is waging war on the United States. Part of the current
crisis is that many of us simply do not have a philosophy capable of countering
him.
Is this a grotesque exaggeration?
The argument ad Hitlerum is, after all, such a high-school debating tactic
that it should be employed only with extreme caution. The reason I invoke
it is not simply because we have an irrational, lethal movement stirring
many people across the globe in a call to mass murder. But because one
central element of that movement, which we are doing our best to ignore,
but which is increasingly unignorable, is pathological anti-Semitism.
Yes, of course, the geopolitical
differences between anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany and anti-Semitism in
the Arab world are vast. Germany was the preeminent military power of its
time; the Arab nations are decidedly not. Germany had a large, and largely
defenseless, Jewish population within its borders and millions more on
its doorstep; the Arab states have only Israel, which despite its tiny
size is hardly defenseless. But ignoring a virulent ideology because we
believe those who hold it to be weak is the kind of thinking that recently
enabled the murder of 5,000 people in New York. So consider the following:
According to a recent Newsweek poll, 48 percent of Pakistanis believe Jews
were responsible for the World Trade Center bombing. A plurality of Egyptians
agree.
This should come as no surprise.
Vicious anti-Semitism is now the official doctrine of most Arab governments
and their organs of propaganda. The official Palestinian Authority newspaper,
Al-Hayat Al-Jadeeda, for example, regularly contains references to the
"Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the loopy nineteenth-century hoax that
suggests Jews run the world. As one article put it (at the height of the
Oslo peace process, no less): "It is important to conduct the conflict
according to the foundations which both are leaning on... particularly
the Jews... such as the Torah, the Talmud and the Protocols [of the Elders
of Zion].... All signs unequivocally prove that the conflict between the
Jews and the Muslims is an eternal on-going conflict, even if it stops
for short intervals.... This conflict resembles the conflict between man
and Satan.... This is the fate of the Muslim nation, and beyond that the
fate of all the nations of the world, to be tormented by this nation [the
Jews]. The fate of the Palestinian people is to struggle against the Jews
on behalf of the Arab peoples, the Islamic peoples and the peoples of the
entire world."
Here's a summary of a gem that appeared
in Egypt's Al Ahram, the largest newspaper in that country: "A compilation
of the 'investigative' work of four reporters on Jewish control of the
world states that Jews have become the political decision-makers and control
the media in most capitals of the world (Washington, Paris, London, Berlin,
Athens, Ankara) and says that the main apparatus for the Jews to control
the world is the international Jewish lobby which works for Israel." It
is worth noting here that every word Al Ahram prints is vetted and approved
by the Egyptian government, a regime to which the United States--i.e.,
you and I--contributes $2 billion a year.
Or take Syria, a thugocracy whose
leader indulged in an anti-Semitic outburst in front of the pope, but a
state that Colin Powell nonetheless wishes to bring into his grand coalition.
In 1983 Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass wrote a book entitled The
Matzah of Zion, claiming that Jews murder Arab children to knead their
blood into matzahs for Passover. An article about the book that appeared
in Al Ahram one year ago (and was noted by the invaluable Middle East Media
Research Institute) concluded with the following sentences: "The bestial
drive to knead Passover matzahs with the blood of non-Jews is [confirmed]
in the records of the Palestinian police where there are many recorded
cases of the bodies of Arab children who had disappeared being found, torn
to pieces without a single drop of blood. The most reasonable explanation
is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into the dough of extremist Jews
to be used in matzahs to be devoured during Passover." If this is the "most
reasonable explanation," can you imagine an unreasonable one? But it gets
worse. The Matzah of Zion will soon be turned into a movie. According to
memri, "the producer stated that the primary goal of the film is 'to respond
to all of the Zionist films distributed by the American film industry,
which is backed by the Zionist propaganda apparatus. Among these films
is Schindler's List, which supports the idea of the Jews' right to the
land of Palestine.'" Schindler's List versus The Matzah of Zion: just a
battle of ideas.
The sobering truth is that somewhere
in my head, I knew all this already. It is not a revelation that large
segments of the Arab world--at all levels of society--are not just anti-Israel,
but fanatically anti-Semitic. Bernard Lewis wrote in 1986: "The demonization
of Jews goes further than it had ever done in Western literature, with
the exception of Germany during the period of Nazi rule. In most Western
countries, anti-Semitic divagations on Jewish history, religion, and literature
are more than offset by a great body of genuine scholarship... In modern
Arabic writing there are few such countervailing elements." So why did
I look the other way? Why did I discount this anti-Semitism on the grounds
that these are alien cultures and we cannot fully understand them, or because
these pathologies are allied with more legitimate (if to my mind unpersuasive)
critiques of Israeli policy? I guess I was thinking like John Rawls. We
in the West simply do not want to believe that this kind of hatred still
exists; and when it emerges, we feel uncomfortable. We do everything we
can to change the subject. Why the denial, I ask myself? What is it about
this sickness that we do not understand by now? And what possible excuse
do we have not to expose and confront it with all the might we have?
