CORROSIVE CONFLUENCE:

Anti-Americanism & the New Anti-Semitism: The New War Against The Jews (HILLEL HALKIN, June 28, 2005, NY Sun)

The scary thing is that once again, 50 years after the Holocaust, the Jews have so many enemies. And make no mistake about it: They are dangerous.

Nor are all of them primitives out of the Middle Ages. Some are very suave, very cultivated gentlemen. They wear three-piece suits and they speak with Oxonian accents and they say things like "bloody nuisance" and "spot on." Some are even leaders of the Anglican Church.

You may have noticed it. The international advisory body of that church voted last Friday in London to urge its congregations, which have 75 million members worldwide, to disinvest in Israel because of its "oppression" of the Palestinians.

These are not benighted Slavophiles. They are sophisticated High Churchmen. With them one can argue. One can say: "Of all the world's 'oppressing' countries - China, which oppresses Tibet; India, which oppresses Kashmir; Russia, which oppresses Chechnya, et cetera, et cetera - the one you've decided to boycott as good Christians is the country of the Jewish people? The country of the same Jews whom you Christians have hounded throughout your history and whom you Anglicans and Englishmen watched as they were slaughtered by the millions in Europe while you did nothing to rescue them and barred the gates of Palestine and England to those of them who might have fled? Have you no shame? No honor? No awareness of your own appalling hypocrisy?"

No, they have no shame, no honor, no awareness of their own appalling hypocrisy. And they are anti-Semites no less than State Prosecutor Ustinov and his 500 imbeciles. In fact, they are State Prosecutor Ustinov's allies.

This cannot be said too often. In an age in which a Jewish state's right to exist is still not recognized by much of the world - in which tens of millions of Arabs and hundreds of millions of Muslims regularly clamor for its destruction - in which a Muslim country now in the process of arming itself with nuclear weapons openly refers to it as an outlaw creation that must be wiped from the face of the earth - anyone deliberately undermining this state's legitimacy, even if he wears a respectable English clergyman's collar, is contributing to another possible genocide of the Jews.

Criticism of Israel? By all means. This is perfectly legitimate. So is concern for the Palestinians. But disinvestment is not criticism. It is an attempt to turn Israel into a pariah state. And Jews, having been treated as pariahs by Christian civilization since the age of Constantine, know exactly what this means.

Half a century after the Holocaust, a new war against the Jews has been declared. We are only now - innocents that we have been, lulled by the world and our own wishful thinking into believing that widespread Jew-hatred is a thing of the past - waking up to its true dimensions.

It is not a war that we Jews will necessarily win, although it is not one that we can afford to lose.

Three ideologies are aligning to create a new strain of anti-Semitism that threatens Jews first in Israel, second in Europe, and third throughout the world:

1. Not only do the destruction of Israel and elimination of the Jewish people obsess Islamic extremists and terrorists, historian Paul Johnson notes in the June 2005 Commentary in his article “The Anti-Semitic Disease” that “over the last half-century, anti-Semitism has been the essential ideology of the Arab world.” This hatred is not limited to the extremist few on the fringe.

2. The Political Hard Left in the United States and Europe has adopted the Palestinians as their cause celebre with the support of allies in the media. It’s easy for articulate university professors to promote a picture of the Middle East conflict which lays all the blame on Israel, the Jews, and a claimed neoconservative (code word for Jewish) cabal that allegedly run United States foreign policy. Political Conservatives have tended to support Israel, as have Evangelical Christians, but well known is Pat Buchanan’s 1990 comment that support for Israel goes too far -- “"Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory. In addition, there are campaigns on approximately two dozen university campuses and by at least two mainstream Protestant denominations -- the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the United Church of Christ -- that urge divestment of stock in corporations that do business with Israel. They incorrectly claim that the Middle East situation is similar to apartheid in South Africa.

Both 1 and 2 fail to understand (or intentionally manipulate for their own purposes) that the Arab power elite and Islamic extremists are using Israel and the Jews as a scapegoat for Arab social problems that are actually arising from the resistance to the momentum of modernity throughout the Third World.

3. Arabs and Islamic extremists are funding and supporting Neo-Nazis in United States and Europe

Accompanying this anti-Semitism is a powerful anti-Americanism. Paul Johnson explains: “Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have proceeded hand in hand in today’s Europe just as they once did in Hitler’s mind (as the unpublished second half of Mein Kampf decisively shows)….(Among) academics and intellectuals, where it … becoming more virulent, widespread, and intractable ever since the United States began to shoulder the duties of the war against international terrorism.”

I have not seen recent poll data about Americans’ perceptions about the terrorist threat. But I suspect that many Americans have become complacent as we approach the fourth anniversary of 9-11. These people hate us and they want to kill us or control us. Not just all Jews. All Americans. Concessions will not stop them. Hope that they would play by our rules if we only gave them a chance, if only we talked more, will fail. Who can argue that appeasement stopped Hitler? Why would it stop terrorists who rammed jets into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon? Or chop off heads? Or massacre hundreds of Russian school children? Weakness encourages them.

Stanford professor Russell A. Berman describes what he calls “the psychology of appeasement”:

“In her classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt explored a basic component in the psychology of appeasement. Why was it, she wondered, that much of the outside world was long reluctant to believe in the enormity of the crimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia? …. Her answer involves the recognition that the everyday life of democracies lacks the extraordinary violence of totalitarian settings. Because democratic political life assumes that individuals are treated with a modicum of respect within the context of the rule of law, it becomes difficult to imagine that regimes of terror prevail elsewhere. As she wrote, ‘The normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes.’… Accustomed to such democratic normalcy, the public tends not only to dismiss accounts of extraordinary atrocities but to believe that the totalitarian leaders act in good faith….

”Particularly in Europe, the argument is made that Islamic radicalism is simply about Israel, and if only the West would abandon its support for Israeli democracy—just as the West abandoned Czech democracy in 1938—the terrorists would promptly turn into trustworthy partners. Other elements enter into this European stance, especially a rapidly growing anti-Semitism. At its core, however, the psychology of appeasement involves the profound misjudgment that terrorists act in a rational and utilitarian manner to achieve specific and limited policy goals through compromise.

“Yet nothing indicates that Al Qaeda or associated terrorist groups are susceptible to rational argument or negotiation. It is characteristic that the September 11 attacks were not linked to any particular set of specific demands, hence the extensive and inconclusive speculation regarding the terrorists’ true goals. Eradication of Israel? Islamic rule in Kashmir? The very ambiguity indicates the absence of a rational political agenda. The only constant is a rhetoric of martyrdom: ‘You love life, but we love death,’ as the terrorists claiming responsibility for the Madrid bombing put it with horrifying clarity. Similarly, after the lynching of four American contractors in Fallujah, a militant declared, ‘We are not afraid of death. We are going to heaven’(presumably for mutilating corpses). This fanaticism is not interested in the normal give-and-take of politics. Still, the proponents of appeasement regularly proceed from a blind preference for negotiation and compromise. Arendt’s phrasing is again quite apt: because it is used to a well-mannered normalcy, democratic public opinion ‘indulges in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity.’

Appeasement is the political strategy of pursuing compromise with an uncompromising opponent. It involves a denial of the opponent’s fanatic character and is, therefore, precisely as Arendt put it, a matter of shirking reality. The only real alternative, however, entails subduing the opponent. Such a course of action presupposes the will to use force and to face the attendant costs. Appeasement is a way to avoid recognizing these costs, but only in the short term, until that time in the future when the costs of defeat become unmistakable.

Last year a friend forwarded a letter that a retired attorney wrote in May 2004 to his four grown sons to give them a longer term point of view that “fewer and fewer of (his) generation are left to speak to.” He says: “Our country is now facing the most serious threat to its existence, as we know it, that we have faced in your lifetime and mine (which includes WWII). The deadly seriousness is greatly compounded by the fact that there are very few of us who think we can possibly lose this war (on terrorism) and even fewer who realize what losing really means.” He adds:

“(Americans) have been criticized for many years as being 'arrogant'. That charge is valid in at least one respect. We are arrogant in that we believe that we are so good, powerful and smart, that we can win the hearts and minds of all those who attack us, and that with both hands tied behind our back, we can defeat anything bad in the world. We can't. If we don't recognize this, our nation as we know it will not survive, and no other free country in the World will survive if we are defeated. And finally, name any Muslim countries throughout the world that allow freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of the Press, equal rights for anyone - let alone everyone, equal status or any status for women, or that have been productive in one single way that contributes to the good of the World.

”If we don't win this war right now, keep a close eye on how the Muslims take over France in the next 5 years or less. They will continue to increase the Muslim population of France and continue to encroach little by little on the established French traditions. The French will be fighting among themselves over what should or should not be done, which will continue to weaken them and keep them from any united resolve. Doesn't that sound eerily familiar?

”Democracies don't have their freedoms taken away from them by some external military force. Instead, they give their freedoms away, politically correct piece by politically correct piece. And they are giving those freedoms away to those who have shown, worldwide, that they abhor freedom and will not apply it to you or even to themselves, once they are in power. They have universally shown that when they have taken over, they then start brutally killing each other over who will be the few who control the masses.”

Countries where people are free to choose their own constitution and leaders will not choose a dictator who will export terror that threatens the United States. I do not see this as imposing American-style democracy on another country. I see it helping a countries like Afghanistan or Iraq who had been ruled by despots gain the chance to create the form of democracy that fits their culture.

Creating a democratic society following decades of totalitarian rule is bound to be difficult. Stopping terrorists will require patience and perseverance for many years. Those who are dissatisfied that Iraq is not being rebuilt overnight forget the years it took to reconstruct Japan and Germany after World War II. Remember the Marshall Plan? We forget it took ten years for the United States to institute the Constitution with the Bill of Rights following Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. The difficult path ran from the toothless Articles of Confederation which went into effect in 1781, to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, to the battle in the press between the Federalists (for the Constitution) and the anti-Federalists (against) to win ratification by the states in 1788, to the addition of the Bill of Rights and its ratification by the end of 1791. With the tensions, debates and negotiations that characterized the Constitutional Convention, George Washington and James Madison both described the Constitution’s passage as “The Miracle at Philadelphia.” Iraq had an interim constitution a year after the start of war.

The media focus on incidences of violence in Iraq and pretty much ignore a huge amount of tangible progress in terms of infrastructure and the like.

For the latest data on that, Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff every two weeks summarizes good news @ http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/

Source for Paul Johnson quotes is http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11906035_1

Source for Russell Berman quote is http://www.hooverdigest.org/043/berman.html

Posted by Jim Siegel at June 28, 2005 2:00 PM