Odd no, you'd think that if Jews ruled the world and controlled the media and all the powerful governments and business and financial corporations, they wouldn't let Mahathir criticize them, would they? And if they're so arrogant, why don't they send their hit-men in American Delta Forces and some squandrons of British SAS commandos to do the great truth-teller in? Apparently, Jewish string-pulling of the world's 6 billion puppets doesn't extend to harming Mahathir himself. Who knows? Like the way blood-sucking Draculas in Transylvania can be warded off by illiterate but pawky peasants there when they cross two sticks at 90 degrees, are we to assume that Mahathir possesses some magical elixir to exorcise the emissaries of the blood-sucking Jewish overlords?

But then logic isn't one of Mahathir's strong points. It never has been. Maybe, then, he's just a demagogic fool, growing rich after 20 years of corrupt rule in Malaysia while jailing any likely rivals on trumped up sexual charges.

Back in 1997, as connoisseurs of idiotic conspiratorial delusions will remember, he criticized Jews for master-minding the financial crisis that overtook his country and the rest of Pacific Asia. To say the least, an original thesis. Most knowledgeable observers, you see --- especially economists --- thought that the crisis reflected major deficiencies in the financial institutions and political corrupt of Asian capitalism, plus problems of hot-footed portfolio investment money in the world, hundreds of billions of dollars worth. But no again. It was all the fault of the Jews. The same is true of democracy, the notion of universal human rights, socialism, globalization, and modernity . . . all big threats to the rule of Platonic thugs like Mahathir. Believe it or not, according to Mahathir in the same crackpot racist drivel that he delivered to the admiring Muslim audience of notables, these ideals and trends are all clever intellectual schemes invented by none other than Jews, and for a clear reason that bold truth-tellers can immediately grasp: to bemuse and bewilder decent but slower-witted people like Mahathir and his despotic chums from 56 other Muslim nations in order to fend off assaults by the Jews' enraged neighbors.

And where does France, with the largest Muslim population in the EU, stand on Mathahir's obscene racism, which could have been taken from almost any of Hitler's rambling pathological ruminations of the Nazi era?

Well, where you might think. Where else? Mathahir no sooner finished his racist rant last week than he was rebuked by almost all the EU governments, plus the US and Australia. A few days later, Bush personally met with him at an APEC conference in Thailand and rebuked him for his bigotry --- but not by the French government. Not, at any rate, the way almost all the other EU governments wanted to at a EU summit being held the same time when Mahathir was mouthing his racist conspiratorial stuff. Specifically, President Jacques Chirac blocked a scathing EU statement that deplored Mathahir's rabid anti-Semitism. It wasn't, according to the news reports in Malaysia and elsewhere, the polite thing for the EU to express itself so explicitly and harshly. Mathahir, according to the same Malaysian newspapers, expressed his "gratitude" for Chirac's "understanding."

No doubt, French diplomatic stock rose in some of the same conspiratorial-minded circles in the Middle East as well.





 

What We're Up To Here

What we're up to is two related matters. Both are the topics of what follows in this long analysis.

1. The Backlash Worries and Disenchantment Among Many US Radicals, Many of Them Jewish, Fearful of Left-Wing Intellectual Blockage and Self-Righteous Animosities in the War on Terrorism



It is in part for left-wing tolerance in this country and elsewhere for growing Muslim anti-Semitism --- and at times active support for it in some students circles here and in Europe --- that many former radicals have torn into their former colleagues, whose further connivance in vicious anti-Americanism, mindless pc slogans, apologetics for brutally violent dictatorial regimes as long as they are sufficiently anti-American --- and at times, as we'll see by looking at the testimony of some of the most prominent if disillusioned radicals or former radicals --- gleeful support for terrorism against an imagined Imperial America and even thousands of American citizens on 9/11. The themes here are important. They merit a separate article devoted to them.

Hence the reason for republishing the first half of the following lengthy commentary, which originally appeared as Part Four of the previous article . . . plus quite a few added observations.

2. Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism Go Hand in Hand in Much of the Arab World and in Europe Now

Among the added observations, you'll find in the remaining half of this article some new analysis and documentation of the racist Jew-hating filth that is now rampant in the Arab world: in its state-controlled media, in mosques run by fundamentalists, in fundamentalist movements, and freely on sale in bookstores and for that matter --- including Nazi propaganda like Mein Kamp and the Tsarist Russian forgery Elders of the Zion, blood-libel literature, Holocaust denial, jubilant eulogies of Hitler and the Nazis, and laments that they didn't kill off all the Jews of the world --- in book and magazine shops in tony international hotels and in airports. Peoples and countries under strain like to look for scapegoats to explain their troubles. That was true of the Germans in the interwar period; it's also true of the Arab peoples today.

[For a recent article praising Nazi efforts by Arab visitors to a former death-camp, now a museum in Slovakia, see this article. Among the lovely things said by the Arabs who signed the guest-book was this filth:



1. This exhibit testifies to the quality of organization and handling [of the mission. From a historical perspective, what Hitler did to the Jews is exactly what they deserve. Still, we would have wished that he could have finished incinerating all the Jews in the world, but time ran out on him and therefore Allah's curse be on him and on them. (-) Khaled al-Zahraya from Saudi Arabia, 07.09.03

2. This is a museum showing a restaurant [specializing in] Jewish meat, which is what they deserve. Sons of apes and pigs. The day after the attempt to murder Ahmad Yasin. 'Umar al-Da'm, Yemen 07.09.03

3. Ibrahim al-'Arimi, Sultanate of Oman The most beautiful sights of Jews. (-) 07. 09.03

4. I say what they all say, and will just add that they [Jews] are cursed in this world and the next. Madih, Yemen.] 07.09.2003



The hatred has also spread to Europe again. As you'll see --- the results clearly documented in two scientifically administered surveys of public opinion --- anti-Semitic racism has recently made a big comeback in the EU. There have been thousands of documented attacks as well on Jewish synagogues, cultural centers, elderly Jews out walking, and on rabbis. In France alone in March and April 2002, there were close to a 1000 such incidents (220 alone in the first two weeks of April, according to a deuxieme-chaine media report that the buggy prof watched on TV). And even in traditionally tolerant Sweden and Norway --- with very tiny Jewish populations, hardly 1/20th of 1.0% --- attacks on Jews by Muslim immigrant thugs have repeatedly occurred and spread alarm and fear in the Jewish communities. All this will be documented below. In Sweden alone last year, according to a recent article by two Swedish journalists, there have been 131 anti-Semitic attacks and crimes against Jews that were reported to the police. What's more,

"Nobody knows how many incidents go unreported but the security police expect the number to be large. Jews in Sweden today are living in the shadow of a very concrete anti-Semitism. Jews in Sweden today often feel compelled to hide their religious identity in public: necklaces with stars of David are carefully hidden under sweaters and orthodox Jewish men change their kippot to more discrete caps or hats when they are outdoors. Jews in Sweden nowadays get secret telephone numbers to avoid harassment. In Sweden. Today."

As we'll see, Sweden is no exception in West Europe.

Remember, this racist filth and violence --- together with related virulent anti-Americanism, including in radical left-wing circles in this country according to the disenchanted radicals or ex-radical intellectuals we are about to examine --- are the background against which their disenchantment and increasingly vocal criticisms have to be understood.







 





PART ONE: Ex-Radical or Just Repentant and Other Self-Searching Left-Wing Views of 9/11 and Iraq

Note the reference in the Christian Science Monitor article --- which dealt with the noticeable progress being made in the effort to reconstruct and transform Iraq --- to similar conclusions arrived at by even certain left-wing journalists like Christopher Hitchens, a free-lance journalist who used to have a regular column in Nation, the major weekly of left-wing liberals and radicals. Hitchens' case is instructive --- also a sign of the times.

A long-time left-wing critic of US foreign policies --- no friend of Bill Clinton either, just the contrary --- Hitchens is a British ex-pat and now US citizen who couldn't stomach the apologies and barely concealed glee that seized the mind of most of his former radical colleagues, especially those writing for the Nation, after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Small wonder. Who with any sense could? Ever since 9/11, the general thrust in the Nation's commentary and almost all its reporting follow a standard-model radical line: the US was largely responsible for the attacks, it was going to stumble into a hopeless quagmire in Afghanistan, the war on terrorism has emerged as a right-wing ideological crusade of neo-imperial thrust, the Bush administration is crushing the liberties of Americans under the guise of fighting terrorism, the oil lobby seems to dominate Bush foreign policy, and the war to topple the brutal, mass-murdering Saddamite regime would lead to a catastrophe. [For Hitchens recent article on Iraq, What If It Works? click on the link.]

[Note the term in bold above: glee. As you'll see three or so paragraphs later on here, this isn't an original buggy term. It appears in a stunning assault on radical intellectuals by one of their most prominent, the editor of Dissent magazine, Michael Walzer: he refers to "the barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved." The specific link to Walzer's article, Can There Be A Decent Left? where this phrase appeared, will be given in a moment or two.]

Such radically chic defense and apology for anti-American adversaries, including glee in some radical circles, is nothing new in The Nation. It has long been a fount of apologetics for the Stalinist and post-Stalinist Soviet regime, a frequent defender of Asian Communisms --- the more brutal as in the Maoist era, it seems, the better --- Castro's Cuba, and almost any crackpot despotic regime ruining its country that came to power in the developing countries after 1945 and spouted anti-American and anti-capitalist rhetoric. See Hitchen's article of a year ago, "Why I Left the Nation" For some wider perspective here on the Hitchens break with the Nation, see this article. On the Nation's continued apologetics --- which have degenerated anyway into tiresome weariness, something even the L.A. Weekly now admits --- see the article in the latter radical alternative here.

 

Anti-Americanism or The US Is Always To Blame

Something else to consider here: Americanism generally in the EU media and elsewhere. In particular, Paul Hollander --- British in origin, like Christopher Hitchens --- is a retired professor of sociology from the University of Mass. who has been systematically writing for 25 years now on left-wing and foreign apologetics for communism. He has been paricularly perceptive and scathingly critical when it comes to left-wing cheer-leading and hosannahs for an endless number of crackpot third-world dictators, whether the left-wing fools are Americans or their fawning intellectual sycophants in the EU. All of these left-wing apologists for totalitarianism and bankrupt, brutal dictatorships are rooted, he argues rightly, in a quixotic search for a firm ideological resting-point that will that will salvage and justify these intellectuals own rippling raw hostility to capitalism, globalizing tendencies, modernity, bourgeois democracy, and above all the US . . . the bastion, in their view and probably rightly so, of their triumphant tendencies in the world, especially with the collapse of communism and socialist dreams. Never mind how savage and destructive these foreign tyrants happen to be. What counts is their ideological conformity in rhetoric to the left-wing's quest after some meaningful surrogate religion, something that will make sense of a frustrating world full of inevitable conflict and disappointments.

At bottom, as Hollander notes, the anti-Americanism is a projection outward of the intellectuals' own rootlessness and identity problems, a loud protest against the modern world in which they feel ill at ease and in disarray . . . the US itself the purist form yet of modernity, its avant-garde society for good or bad. See, for instance, his remarks in this article and again in this symposium.

Then 9/11's homicidal attacks on American soil erupted. Since then, as we know, lots of other home-grown US radicals have reassessed their former smug convictions and beliefs and their colleagues who still cling to them. In the upshot, they have moved brusquely toward the center in disgust at the bursting hostility to American life and American policies --- not to the mention growing anti-Semitism in left-wing circles, either openly or through apologetics for it --- that they now recognize prevail in hard-core circles . . . catered to by Edward Said and Noam Chomsky and a whole retinue of writers for The Nation and a slew of unreadable academic journals full of post-modernist illiteracies.

Among these now self-questioning radicals --- distancing himself from his former pieties without really renouncing them squarely --- is Michael Walzer, a political philosopher at Princeton. Also, the editor of Dissent . . . a far more intellectually serious and solid form of fairly tame radical criticism. In the spring of 2002, he wrote that widely read article in that journal that roasted his colleagues' smug, self-righteous hostility to the US and its global role, not to mention their defense of the indefensible. Its title? Revealing enough, as we noted earlier, it's "Can There Be A Decent Left?"

Walzer's answer: he's no longer certain --- even as he clings to his radical convictions. Should he be congratulated or condemned? It depends, no? One thing for sure, he no longer has any doubt that lots of the intellectual left manifested "barely concealed glee that the imperial state had finally gotten what it deserved" on 9/11.

 

The Case of Todd Gitlin

Then too there is Todd Gitlin, a former founder of Students for Democratic Action --- a radical anti-war movement of the 1960s --- and a professor of the media formerly at UC Berkeley and now in New York who denounced his former colleagues simple-minded transfer of anti-war radicalism to the Bush administration immediately after 9/11. See this article More recently, Gitlin has also denounced the growing acceptance of anti-Semitism in radical and liberal progressive circles. Elsewhere, he also warned against knee-jerk anti-Americanism in those circles, a view endorsed by another leading radical sociologist of the late 1960s and 1970s, William Dumhoff. Later, in 2003, Gitlin gathered several of his articles critical of the current left-wing radicalism and published them in a book, Letters To An Activist, that tears into left-wing anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism, mindless politically correct orthodoxies, support for revolutionary vanguards abroad who are mainly tyrannical, vicious crackpots, and the like.

Not that Gitlin --- remember, a former founder of Students for Democratic Action and its president as well as a leading intellectual luminary in radical politics for four decades --- isn't willing to dig into the sources of anti-Semitism in certain left-wing circles, including, as Gitlin is dismayed to note, student circles. Specifically, in The Rough Beast Returns --- the article on left-wing tolerance of and connivance in anti-Semitism --- Gitlin notes at one point:

Wicked anti-Semitism is back. The worst crackpot notions that circulate through the violent Middle East are also roaming around America, and if that wasn't bad enough, students are spreading the gibberish. Students! As if the bloc to which we have long looked for intelligent dissent has decided to junk any pretense of standards.

A student movement is not just a student movement. It's a student movement. Students, whether they are progressive or not, have the responsibility of knowing things, of thinking and discerning, of studying. A student movement should maintain the highest of standards, not ape the formulas of its elders or outdo them in virulence.

 

An Accident, This Left-Wing Stridency and Conspiratorial Racism?

Looking over Gitlin's rebukes of the left, a professor who has witnessed with dismay the growing raw anti-Semitism in numerous left-wing circles around the country rebukes him in turn. He or she asks --- there's no specific author cited --- where in heavens' name these student activists ever derived their views of the world from Fanon, Sartre, Chomsky, Edward Said, Michel Foucault, and other confused and muddled writers full of grudges and resentments? These views didn't work their way up the sewer pipes of intellectual life on their own after all. No, they have been pushed systematically by politically correct professors for a whole generation now, including Todd Gitlin, while using all sorts of thuggish techniques of political control to ensure their orthodoxies weren't challenged effectively: hate-speech codes, witch-hunt tribunals that spit on the US Constitution, kangaroo courts, the tolerance of student brawlers who burst into non pc-professors' classrooms and drive off campus any speakers to the right of Al Gore, lopsided course syllabi, and a general atmosphere in these pc-classrooms of intimidation should anyone dare publicly disagree. Until recently.

 

Paul Berman and Other Dismayed Radicals Who Still Won't Face the Full Searing Truth

Then, too, there's Paul Berman, a gifted political theorist whose writings the buggy prof has used in the past. Another prominent radical intellectual, Berman has been taken aback by the growth of anti-Semitism and Jew-hating viciousness in the anti-globalization movement, whether in this country or abroad. See his article of last year here. He too, however, seems to think this gutter-level storm-trooping hatred suddenly emerged out of nowhere, as though it has no links to his, Walzer's, Gitlin's, and other prominent radicals intellectual endorsements and views they've spread over the last three or four decades. Eventually, though --- like Gitlin --- he gathered his more recent views into a book, Terror and Liberalism, and like Gitlin's Letters To An Activist, he has come closer to a more honest self-scrutiny of what and why his earlier radical views have gone more astray than he had ever anticipated back in the more ebullient days of the 1960s and 1970s.

See the informative customer reviews of Terror and Liberalism at Amazon: they'll give you a good idea of the book's themes and how they relate to the failure of liberalism and radicalism to take seriously the totalitarian hatreds of America that flourished in the 20th century --- fascism, nazism, communism --- and still do in much of the Islamic world and among the left and far right in Europe. Interestingly, Berman's views about Islamo-fascism, fundamentalism extremism, and terrorism were set out independently by the buggy prof in an earlier article here. See fascism and the war on terrorism, itself little more than an update of a gordon-newspost argument sent to that listserver subscribers the year before.

 

Other Disillusioned Radicals

Richard Rorty on Left-Wing PC "Creeps", His Own Term

Not for nothing has the only really first-rate thinker of enduring and original intellectual influence to be associated with radical pc-movements on campus and elsewhere --- including the encouragement of writers like Foucault, Derrida, other French post-modernists, and so on --- recently broken with these movements and denounced them for their political mindlessness, rancorous self-righteousness, and sheer semi-literacy. We're referring to Richard Rorty, a philosopher who has justifiably had a big influence, no doubt enduring, even when you disagree with them. And not for nothing does he dub his former radical colleagues as "creeps" and denounce them for their lack of even elementary patriotism. See the earlier buggy article on Rorty's views here.

For a fascinating, far-ranging perspective on Gitlin and other disillusioned radicals who still cling to radical hopes after 9/11, see David Horowtiz's article on them . . . Horowitz, the former editor of the 1960s radical bible, Ramparts magazine, who grew up in a Communist family, went to UC Berkeley, met several dozens of other radicals --- including Robert Scheer, the L.A. Times journalist who was the publisher of Ramparts --- only to be repelled by the violence and descent into nihilism in those radical circles during the 1970s. Horowitz is now the editor of the conservative Frontpage magazine, and in the article just mentioned that he wrote on radicals like Gitlin, he spells out some of his own reasons for breaking with radical circles. (His book, Radical Son, is an absorbing account of his family life, education, radicalism, and rupture with it. Note that his co-editor of Ramparts, Larry Collier, has also renounced his radical background and moved toward the right.)

Another former prominent radical is the noted historian Ronald Radosh --- once like Horowitz a Communist, only like him to be appalled by activist radical politics and violence by the 1970s and to move rightward. See his astute article on The Nation and its long-time publisher: The Persistence of Anti Anti-Communism. As for the ways radical and other left-wing historians continue to push apologetics for the Soviet Union in the cold war and to assume the US was the worse of the two superpowers, see this article by Arnold Beichman, a noted journalist at the Hoover Institute.



 



Jew-Hating Racism in the Islamic World

At one time, roughly for a thousand years until Jews were given citizenship in the liberal and moderates states of Northwestern Europe in the 19th century --- Britain, Scandinavia, Holland, and France (plus later in the century Italy) --- Jews in Arabic countries and the Ottoman Empire were generally not subject to the same degree of discrimination and anti-Jewish sentiments that prevailed in Europe until then. Not that Jews were treated as equals in those Islamic countries. They weren't. Along with the Christian minorities, they were considered Dhimmi: tolerated but inferior minorities, who weren't regarded as worth of equal regard or treatment in the wider Muslim communities: who couldn't commingle freely on social terms with Muslims, couldn't hold certain occupations, and were forced to pay special taxes to the dominant Muslim leaders. On traditional Muslim discrimination against Jews, see Daniel Pipes

Still, Jews weren't expelled from Muslim countries as they had been in virtually every European country, off and on, from the 12th century on; weren't hounded, tortured, or killed by an Inquisition as in Spain and Portugal; weren't slaughtered in frenzied pogroms as in Germany and East Europe and Russia, and could generally count on surviving their lifetimes without being murdered by their neighbors. By contrast, it has been estimated that even before the Holocaust, half the Jews in Europe between 1000 and the Nazi regime had been killed that way, by neighboring members of the same regional or national communities. For a good history of anti-Semitism in Christian Europe, see this article. It's part of a wider series on Jew-hatred and discrimination historically: see series.

Nor, until the 1960s, was there much equivalent in the Arab world of the pseudo-Darwinian racism that began to flourish in Europe by the late 19th century, grafted onto traditional anti-semitism and then worked out as part of a cosmic ideological explanation of all of Germany's problems by Hitler and the Nazis after WWI . . . a simplistic system of beliefs and fantasies, shot through with conspiratorial paranoia, which found Jews simultaneously dominating Bolshevik Russia, Wall Street America, and poor Germany and Europe through a secret, globe-spanning cabal, not least by means of contaminated Jewish thought and art --- aka, modernity and modernism. All this, alas, has changed dramatically since then.

For the last three decades, the Arab world has been rife with Jew-hatred of the most putrid racist sort, including the sale of Mein Kampf and the forged Elders of Zion and blood-libel charges at international hotels anywhere in the Arab countries. The state-controlled media in all those countries too regularly vents such racist filth, day-in-day out. Here is one such sewer-laden stuff, which appeared in the Egyptian Government Daily, an ode and appeal to Hitler. See gordon-newspost May 2002 for the source.

Remember, this is not just a state-controlled, state-censored newspaper. Such censorship is pervasive in all the Arab countries, save American-occupied Iraq now. There is no intellectual freedom, no civil liberties in any meaningful sense in any of those other 21 countries or Iran --- something, to repeat, the recent UN Arab Human Development Report 2003 documented one more time, assuming any more documentation were needed. About all one can say is that the degree of censorship, repression, violence, and secret-police crackdowns vary somewhat across these Arab countries, again with Iraq now an exception, where hundreds of freely published newspapers now flourish. Again, for a good brief analysis, see Daniel Pipes.

 

Columnist for Egyptian Government Daily to Hitler:'If Only You Had Done It, Brother'

The following are excerpts from an article by Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud titled "Accursed Forever and Ever," which recently appeared in the Egyptian government daily Al-Akhbar:

"They are accursed in heaven and on earth. They are accursed from the day the human race was created and from the day their mothers bore them. They are accursed also because they murdered the Prophets. They murdered the Prophet John the Baptist and served up his head on a golden platter to the singer and dancer Salome. Allah also cursed them with a thousand curses when they argued with and resisted his words of truth, deceived the Prophet Moses, and worshiped the golden calf that they created with their own hands!!"

"These accursed ones are a catastrophe for the human race. They are the virus of the generation, doomed to a life of humiliation and wretchedness until Judgement Day. They are also accursed because they repeatedly tried to murder the Prophet Muhammad. They threw a stone at him, but missed. Another time, they tried to mix poison in his food, but providence saved him from their treachery and their crimes. Allah cursed them when they carried out the criminal massacre of the peaceful Palestinians in Sabra and Shatilla."

"They are accursed, they, their fathers, and their forefathers… until Judgment Day, because they burst into Al-Aqsa Mosque with their defiled, filthy feet and violated its sanctity."

"Finally, they are accursed, fundamentally, because they are the plague of the generation and the bacterium of all time. Their history always was and always will be stained with treachery, falseness, and lying. Historical documents prove it."

"Thus, the Jews are accursed - the Jews of our time, those who preceded them and those who will come after them, if any Jews come after them."

"With regard to the fraud of the Holocaust… Many French studies have proven that this is no more than a fabrication, a lie, and a fraud!! That is, it is a 'scenario' the plot of which was carefully tailored, using several faked photos completely unconnected to the truth. Yes, it is a film, no more and no less. Hitler himself, whom they accuse of Nazism, is in my eyes no more than a modest 'pupil' in the world of murder and bloodshed. He is completely innocent of the charge of frying them in the hell of his false Holocaust!!"

"The entire matter, as many French and British scientists and researchers have proven, is nothing more than a huge Israeli plot aimed at extorting the German government in particular and the European countries in general. But I, personally and in light of this imaginary tale, complain to Hitler, even saying to him from the bottom of my heart, '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.'"

"Since their birth, the Jews [have amassed] hatred and hostility towards Islam and the Muslims. They have always laid traps for the Muslims, woven conspiracies and crimes against them, and been biased in favor of their enemies and occupiers…"

"They always try to warp and distort everything fair and beautiful!! Basically, they are a model of moral ugliness, debasement, and degradation. If only Allah would curse them more and more, to the end of all generations. Amen." [1]

 

Some Further Comments on Jew-Hating Racism in the Arab World

These comments appeared originally in a gordon-newspost article sent to its subscribers in May 2002, at a time of jihad-fervor among Muslim Student Organizations in this country on US campuses, not least the notorious racism and attacks on a small, pacific group of pious Jewish students at San Francisco State University just a few days before.

The violence, brutality of the hatred, the racist pornographic materials the Muslim students and their Red Guard accomplices in the Bay Area spewed on campus --- including a picture of Jews preparing a Muslim baby for cannibalistic purposes --- was too much even for the authorities on campus, and subsequently disciplinary action was taken. About the same time, anti-Semitic graffiti was found sprayed on a dormitory building at the UC Santa Barbara campus. Not long afterwards, the UCSB Middle East Studies Center was found purveying blood-libel and other vicious Jew-hating racist stuff from the Middle East in its newsletters --- not, you understand, in any critical spirit, to demonstrate the rife racism there. It was put in those newsletters as matter-of-fact observations, and the tolerance and complicity in both virulent Jew-hatred and anti-Americanism that marked some of that Center's behavior then and earlier were what led to inquiries and subsequent official criticisms and promises by the Center to improve its "scholarly" work. On anti-Semitism tolerated or encouraged on US campuses by much of the orthodox pc left-wing, see the ADL survey.

 

Unhinged Paranoid Fantasies and Delusive Quests For Revenge Against Imaginary Scapegoated Enemies

1) As these commentaries have frequently noted, the Arab world --- and Islam generally --- was historically free of anti-Semitism in the European sense. Jews and Christian minorities lived peacefully in all Arab countries and Iran while brutal anti-Semitism infected almost every European country for 1600 years --- until the emergence of liberal moderate democratic states in parts of West Europe in the 19th century, which gave Jews full citizenship. And there was never anything remotely --- until recently --- equivalent to the racist versions of Jew-hatred that flourished in Europe, again with some exceptions of a small groups of moderate liberal democracies (not, alas, France where modern racist anti-Semitism began with Count Gobineau in the late 19th century), culminating in the Holocaust where the Nazis and their fanatical devotees elsewhere in Europe systematically resorted to factory-extermination and killed 6 million Jews. Had the Nazis won WWII, they would have been able to exterminate another 5 million in Russia as well.

Alas, all this has changed in the Arab world. And it is important that all Americans and all the world know what kinds of hatreds and vicious racisms are afoot there and elsewhere in Islamic countries.

 

2) In particular: the worst forms of Nazi propaganda --- including the earlier Elders of the Zion --- are now vented all over the Arab countries, including the state-controlled media (where nothing of significance is every printed that the secret police and the censors oppose).

And this brutal racism hooks up with the surging anti-Westernism, anti-Americanism that has been spread by the rapid growth of radical Islamist fundamentalist groups and terrorist networks associated with them in the Arab and other Islamic countries the last 30 years. The causes? No doubt many. Still, this much can be said: such vicious racist attitudes are part of that conspiratorial outlook --- rife in large sectors of societies and abetted by the thuggish governments --- that blames the outside world. especially Jews and Americans (at times, Hindus and Russians and just the West as a whole), for the rampant troubles and related psychological dislocations and resentments that flourish in the authoritarian kleptocratic and thug-o-cratic Arab and Islamic states run by worried autocrats and dictators -- some our good-guy autocrats, others extraordinarily brutal --- who are bent on diverting the bone-grinding grudges and hatreds and resentments onto scapegoats as a systematic diversionary tactic.

 

3) Just recently, the Middle East Media Research Institute has documented this insidious paranoid hate-filled piece from the Egyptian GOVERNMENT OWNED daily paper Al-Akhbarr. I reprint this vicious racist filth below in full. I precede it by a quote from the horrifying racist slander that papered in a weekly column in the London-based Arabic paper Al Sharq ak Awsat (hence not a state-controlled paper): it is by an Yassar Arafat aide Bassam Abu Sharif.

And last week, I sent a fully documented wire-dispatch about the visit of the Pope to the blood-soaked, utterly brutal Assad-dictatorship in Syria last year when Bashar Assad publicly urged the Pope to form a Christian-Muslim crusade, world-wide, against what Assad called the Christ-torturing, Christ-killing Jews (who were also said to have tried to kill Mohammed). It was followed the day after by the Syrian Defense Minister publicly saying it was the duty of Muslims everywhere to kill Jews. Certainly, whatever else this filthy racism is, a novel form of diplomacy, no?

And it is common in the Arab media to find recurrent cruel slurs against Jews as vampires, monkeys, predators, blood-suckers . . . the whole Nazi litany, with Herr Goebbels --- the Nazi propaganda minister --- do doubt very pleased with his following in the Arab and Islamic world out of his scorching residence in Hell.

For a ongoing effort to track many of these vicious hateful racist attacks in the Arab and other Islamic media, go to the web site of the Mideast Media Research Institute



 

4) Hatred of Christian minorities expressed openly too?

Yes, unfortunately . . . though not nearly so much or so ugly as the vicious Jew-hating filth.

In fact I am happy to document that there are hate-mongering types in the Islamic world who often express open threats and even death-wishes in the start of prayer sessions against various Christians minorities there. In fact, one of my student critics since 1999, when these commentaries started, admitted in a tête-à-tête with me that the students' parents --- when they lived in an Arab country --- were repeatedly faced with such chants on Fridays through electronic loudspeakers by various imams. Even back in the late 1970s, decades ago, one of my Palestinian students whose Christian family had lived on the West Bank for nearly 1600 years talked about the growing ominous anti-Christian sentiments beginning to spread among the family's neighbors.

No, except in a court of law should it ever come to that, I will not give their names. I protect my students at all costs. There are hate-filled nuts around . . . not many, but you never know. Just two weeks ago, a student in 121 of presumably Islamic faith said that the student had been the victim of a hate-crime. I commiserated twice, indicated I would do anything to help out (including with the tasks in the course), and have done what any decent American would do. I hate and revile hate-mongers and racists, whether they are anti-Muslim racists or Jew-haters or persecutors of African-Americans or Hispanic Americans or Asian-Americans . . . all of us, in neo-Nazi filth, the mud-peoples.

 



5) Fortunately, as I mentioned, the situation of most Jews in the world isn't perilous in the face of this rampant vicious racist Jew-hatred in the Arab and Islamic media and in sermons that can be found preached by the Imams against Jews in parts of the Islamic world (in Teheran every Friday, the prayer sessions including the chant DEATH TO THE JEWS, DEATH TO ISRAEL, DEATH TO AMERICA).

For one thing, Israel has the military power --- jet planes, armor, hundreds of nuclear warheads, hundreds of missiles, submarines --- to destroy any Jew-persecuting state in the world. Half the Jews born since the year 1000 have been killed, it's estimated, by their neighbors (mainly Europe) . . . this before the Holocaust, when the Nazis were able to introduce their systematic factory-killings with German thoroughness and modern science, finding enthusiastic Jew-haters throughout Europe to collaborate in the extermination.

For another thing, there is our wonderfully tolerant, decent country --- whose President immediately, within two days of the Sept 11th attack, met publicly with the leaders of the US Muslim community and urged tolerance by everybody (a gesture not echoed anywhere in West Europe), a sentiment I have repeatedly underscored in these commentaries.



(6) Remember here: fortunately, the US is also powerful economically, technologically, and militarily without rival in world history. its people overwhelmingly identify with a fellow western-oriented democracy in Israel, whose people --- while numerous Palestinians were jubilantly cheering the news of 3000 American and American-resident deaths in the streets of PA-controlled areas --- flew their flags at half-mast to shown sympathy and commiseration with us.

Unlike France and most of our EU allies, the US does not practice automatic appeasement of every vicious Arab or Islamic or Christian or Shinto or Confucian or pagan or animist or atheistic or New Age dictator . . . nor do our leaders, again in contrast to the EU governments, pretend in self-delusive ways (abetted by the EU dominant pc-media) that the best way to deal with explosive crime and terrorist groups on their soil and rapidly growing anti-Muslim racism (as well as militant fundamentalist sentiments in the immigrant communities there) is by pretending nothing bad is happening and that they live in some sort of peachy-creamy social-democratic world full of social justice. The US government, by contrast, stands by its democratic allies. It will not abandon democratic Taiwan, however much it might be bullied or threatened. And it will not abandon Israel either.

That's not the way our government and people operate, whatever else goes on in the EU or Japan.

And so? And so, the vicious Jew-haters in the world, not least those swelling in number in the Arab and Islamic countries --- whatever their actual size and percentage of the populations (something only poll data could establish, and something the thug-o-cratic regimes won't permit) --- need to be on guard. This time, they'll be meeting with a far different kind of response. This time, their racist filth will lead to a much quicker, surer destruction than Hitler met with . . . should it come down to that.

 

7) Anti-Semitism is also making a noticeable return in West Europe, not least among the rapidly growing Islamic populations there. See the ADL links and studies. Two ADL sponsored scientifically sound opinion surveys in the EU in 2002 found that about 40% of West Europeans held various kinds of anti-Jewish prejudice. It did vary across countries. It was much worse in Spain and Germany and France, where more than a third of the populations were found to hold strongly anti-Semitic racist views, and much lower in the traditionally tolerant countries of Holland and Denmark. For a lengthy analysis of these ADL

 

Final Comments: The Palestinian Plight

Over the years, in my writings and class, I have myself

* Repeatedly praised the great cultural creativity of the Arab peoples, not least in their empire in Spain and Portugal across North Africa and the Levant through Persia after the start of the 8th century and down until roughly the 12th century . . . after which the creativity, artistic and intellectual, of the Arab people rigidified into orthodoxies of a fundamentalist dogmatic sort and led to their steady decline in influence, wealth, intellectual discovery, and eventual conquest and rule by the Ottoman Turks and later the Europeans.

* Repeatedly indicated sympathy with the plight of the Palestinian people,victims above all of an astonishingly inept and overreaching unrealistic Palestinian leadership stretching back to WWI:



Starting with support for the Ottoman Empire in that war, then in the interwar period support by the spiritual head of the Palestinians, the Mufti of Jerusalem, of the Nazis in WWII (he lived in Nazi Berlin and was condemned as a Nazi war criminal in the Nuremberg Trials), then the support by the PLO of theSoviet Union in the cold war, of Saddam Hussein in 1990-91.

Nor was that all, this sad and lengthy litany of leadership folly and flight into delusive violent fantasies of ultimate triumph and revenge.

It also includes the repeated line of failures of the PLO leadership to accept compromises of peace with the Jews and later Israel after 1947, even when the terms were highly favorable, a perverse, self-destructive rejectionism that stretches back to the 1937 British Peel Commission offer to partition British-governed Palestine --- where no Arab regime had ruled for several hundred years --- roughly 70-75% in favor of the Arabs, then again in 1947 when the UN partitioned the land in ways highly biased in favor of the Arabs, then the refusal to accept an exchange of land for peace and recognition after the Six Day war in June 1967, and the latest rejection, mediated by the US in conformity with the Oslo Agreement, to establish a Palestinian state with 95-97% of the West Bank, a corridor linking it to Gaza, shared rule over Jerusalem, the elimination of Israeli settlements save those immediately contiguous to Jerusalem, and $31 billion of compensation for Palestinian refugees. That was the offer, guided by Dennis Ross --- the US chief envoy to the Middle East --- after Camp David in 2000 and signed by Prime Minister Barak of Israel in early December that year.

And of course, the Palestinians are further victims of the economic mismanagement and corruption of their leaders, who ruined one of the best Arab economies in the Middle East after it was integrated with Israel from 1967 until the PA took over the West Bank and Gaza in 1996. On this economic crash, see the buggy article published this last winter: it includes an analysis by a World Bank labor economist who specializes in the Middle East of the flourishing Palestinian economy after 1967, when the Israelis took over the West Bank --- until then a backwater area of the backward Jordanian economy --- and what has happened since 1996.

It gets worse. Don't forget the PLO leadership's efforts to start a bloody and lost civil war in Jordan in 1970, which led to huge suffering among the Palestinians there and the PLO's expulsion to Lebanon. As if that weren't destructively foolish enough, the PLO then immediately helped precipitate the bloody and prolonged civil war in Lebanon; twice, as a result, Arafat and the PLO were expelled in the 1980s by hostile Lebanese, Syrian, and Israeli forces, each time requiring that they be rescued by outside countries --- the US included. Not to overlook the giant error of supporting Saddam Hussein in 1991 . . . capped by the Gulf States then expelling several hundred thousand Palestinian workers, enjoying decently paid jobs there until that point. And then, the peak of self-deluded folly, there's the new self-defeating, self-destructive violence since September 2000, right down to a glorification of murderous suicide terrorists among the Palestinian masses . . . the last thing they need if they're to have any future at all.

*Repeatedly praised the contributions of our American Muslim community (and descendants of Arab Christian immigrants), and noted they have better educational credentials and incomes than the average American,

* Repeatedly praised not just the contributions of our fellow Arab and Islamic citizens but those of all immigrant heritage,

* Repeatedly warned against the dangers of racist anti-Muslim sentiments that can be found all over Europe, adding that those misguided Arab and other Islamic youth attacking in vast numbers recently Jewish synagogues, cultural centers, and persons in West Europe --- 360 in France alone the first 3 weeks last month --- are flirting with napalm-size fires, unleashing racial furies that could easily engulf them. Racism is racism. And yet . . .

 

Where Are the Arab Critics of Racist Jew-Hatred That Flourishes in The Middle East?

And yet, to repeat what I've said before: have never had any member I know of in the UCSB Middle Eastern Association --- nor any of the students in my classes or elsewhere who have been unhappy with my commentaries (to which criticisms, if solid and not insulting, I always try to reply in detail with evidence) --- ever (I repeat: EVER) denounce this vicious racist filth that is on the upsurge in the Arab and Islamic world.

Are they embarrassed or humiliated by it?

Do they not care?

Do they use blatant and vicious double-standards?

Do they endorse such vicious racist filth?

Do they hope that if they bury their heads in the sand and say nothing, this ugly brutal racism will simply fade away soon?