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PIPES'
LINE
A weekly column by Daniel
Pipes, President George W Bush's controversial
appointment to the board of directors of the federally
funded United States Institute for Peace.
Another
Holocaust?
The Prime Minister of
Malaysia, Mahathir Mohamad, informed the world on
October 16, among other things, that "Jews rule this
world by proxy. They get others to fight and die for
them". In reaction, Condoleezza Rice, the US National
Security Adviser, described Mahathir's comments as
"hateful, they are outrageous".
She then added,
"I don't think they are emblematic of the Muslim world."
If only she were right about that.
In
fact, Mahathir's views are precisely emblematic of
Muslim discourse about Jews - symbolized by the standing
ovation his speech received from an all-Muslim audience
of leaders representing 57 states. Then, a Saudi
newspaper reports, when Western leaders criticized
Mahathir, "Muslim leaders closed ranks" around him with
words of praise ("very correct", "a very, very wise
assessment").
Although anti-Jewish sentiments
among Muslims go back centuries, today's hostility
results from two main developments: Jewish success in
modern times and the establishment of Israel. Until
about 1970, however, Muslim resentment and fear of
Jewish power remained relatively quiet.
This
changed in the 1970s, when a further political
radicalization combined with an oil boom gave states
like Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Libya the will and the
means to sponsor anti-Jewish ideas worldwide. With
barely a Muslim voice to counter ever-more outlandish
theories, these multiplied and deepened. For the first
time, the Muslim world became the main locus of
anti-Jewish theories.
By now, notes Morton Klein
of the Zionist Organization of America, "Hatred of Jews
is widespread throughout the Muslim world. It is taught
in the schools and preached in the mosques. Cartoons in
Muslim newspapers routinely portray Jews in blatantly
anti-Semitic terms."
Indeed, Mahathir is hardly
the only Muslim ruler to make anti-Jewish statements.
President Bashar al-Assad of Syria said in 2001 that
Israelis try "to kill the principles of all religions
with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus
Christ". The Iranian ayatollahs and Saudi princes have a
rich history of anti-Jewish venom, as of course do
Egyptian television programs and Palestinian textbooks.
Of the many examples, one stands out for me: a
June 2002 interview with a three-year-old girl named
Basmallah on Saudi television, made available by the
Middle East Media and Research Institute:
Anchor: Basmallah, are you familiar with
the Jews?
Basmallah: Yes.
Anchor:
Do you like them?
Basmallah: No.
Anchor: Why don't you like
them?
Basmallah: Because ...
Anchor: Because they are what?
Basmallah: They're apes and
pigs.
Anchor: Because they are apes and pigs.
Who said they are so?
Basmallah: Our
God.
Anchor: Where did he say this?
Basmallah: In the Koran.
The little
girl is wrong, but her words show that, contrary to
Condoleezza Rice's analysis, Muslim antisemitism extends
even to the youngest children. That Mahathir himself is
no Islamist but (in the words of New York Times
columnist Paul Krugman) "about as forward-looking a
Muslim leader as we're likely to find" also points to
the pervasiveness of anti-Jewish bias.
In its
attitudes toward Jews, the Muslim world today resembles
Germany of the 1930s - a time when insults, caricatures,
conspiracy theories, and sporadic violence prepared
Germans for the mass murder that followed.
The
same might be happening today. Wild accusatory comments
like Mahathir's have become banal. Against Israelis,
violence has already reached a rate approaching one
death per day over the past three years. Outside Israel,
violence against Jews is also persistent: a Jewish
building blown up in Argentina, Daniel Pearl's murder in
Pakistan, stabbings in France, the Brooklyn Bridge and
LAX killings in the United States.
These
episodes, plus calling Jews "apes and pigs" could serve
as the psychological preparation that one day leads to
assaulting Israel with weapons of mass destruction.
Armaments - chemical, biological and nuclear - would be
the successors of Auschwitz, Buchenwald and Dachau.
Millions of Jews would perish in another Holocaust.
As in the 1930s, the world at large - including
the US government - again seems not to note the
deadliness of processes now under way. Anti-Jewish
rhetoric and violence are decried, to be sure, but with
little sense of urgency and even less of their
cumulative impact.
Condoleezza Rice and other
top-ranking officials need to recognize the power and
reach of the anti-Jewish ideology among Muslims, then
develop active ways to combat it. This evil has already
taken innocent lives; unless combated it could take many
more.
Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is
director of the Middle East Forum and author of
Militant Islam Reaches America (W W Norton).
(Copyright 2003 Daniel Pipes)
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