Those Who Forget the Past

by Ron Rosenbaum

  Under Nikita Khrushchev’s somewhat erratic but bold de-Stalinization policy, there was a temporary respite, though Soviet adventurism in the Third World and domestic campaigns against religion ensured that prejudices against Israel, the Jews, and Judaism continued to fester. After the Israeli victory in the Six Day War, a new Soviet-style version of the “Protocols” emerged behind a thin veneer of Marxist-Leninist verbiage. Relentless Communist Party propaganda unleashed a massive campaign portraying Zionism as “Fascist,” “Nazi,” “racist,” driven by “hatred toward all peoples” and a “chosen people” superiority complex. It was no accident that Moscow played such a major role in masterminding the infamous UN resolution equating Zionism with racism.

  These ideological fictions had little to do with the actual policies of the Jewish state. They assumed the existence of a dark Jewish conspiracy, linked to America and freemasonry, that sought planetary domination. The Zionist goals were allegedly to overthrow the communist systems in the USSR and Eastern Europe, to dominate the economy of the largest capitalist states, and to liquidate national-liberation movements throughout the Third World. The so-called Zionist “bourgeoisie” aimed to reduce the Arabs and the Third World to servitude. The “socialist” camp, led by the USSR, saw itself as the main obstacle to this perfidious design.

  By the 1970s, Zionism was considered one of the darkest forces of world reaction, an ideology and an organization no less dangerous than Hitlerism and “Aryan” racism. History was rewritten by Soviet propagandists to make Zionism the source of inspiration for the Nazis! It was even branded as an active agent of “collaboration” in the German implementation of the Holocaust. In the Brezhnev era of Soviet expansion, “anti-Zionist” anti-Semitism became a cardinal feature of the official chauvinist ideology. This was the first major political campaign to totally defame Zionism as the incarnation of evil and to discredit the Torah as a book of hatred, preaching genocide. The Jewish religion was systematically slandered as a teaching of racial exclusion and its messianic ideals smeared as a justification for Lebensraum. As in contemporary Islamic and Arab literature, the grand sweep of Jewish and Zionist history was twisted into a narrative of pure criminality, sadism, and immorality.

  The Soviet anti-Semitic demonology of Zionism did not immediately collapse with the fall of communism. In the early 1990s, the so-called “Red-Brown” alliance of neo-Stalinists and Russian ultra-nationalists, animated by their belief in the international Zionist conspiracy, continued to preach anti-Jewish doctrines of hate. The alliance claimed that Jews controlled the channels of mass communication throughout the world, insisted that they had deliberately ruined Russia through the Communist Revolution, and proclaimed that Jewish oligarchs were now delivering the nation into the hands of a rapacious cosmopolitan clique working on behalf of American imperialist designs. This was the credo of Vladimir Zhirinovsky, who, ten years ago, won a quarter of all ballots cast in the Russian elections. Depicted in the media as the Russian Hitler, he specialized in ethnic slurs against Balts, Armenians, Caucasians, and blacks as well as Jews; he established close ties with the German and Austrian radical Right (including neo-Nazis) and talked openly of restoring a Greater Russian dominion. Just as he execrated Jews and Zionists, so he identified strongly with Arab nationalist dictators like Saddam Hussein.

  PAN-ARABIST AND ISLAMIST VERSIONS

  The Russian communist model, like that of German Nazism, was an important formative influence in Saddam’s version of Ba’athism. The Iraqi leader grew up in the framework of this dogmatic ideology, which not only glorified the Arabs as a “master race” but also emphasized the need for relentless struggle and perpetual revolution in the name of the pan-Arab cause. Saddam imbibed his radical nationalism from Michel Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian born in Damascus who had turned his back on all Western ideas to create the Arab Renaissance in the 1940s. In the Aflaqian concept, the Arab nation was the culmination of spiritual perfection, far superior in its traditions and culture to the superficiality of Western civilization. But Arab unity would remain a dream without sacrifice, conflict, martyrdom, and bloodshed.

  Saddam adopted Aflaq’s highly charged ideological style while accentuating the Leninist party structures of Ba’athism in order to consolidate his grip on power. He embraced a quasi-mystical view of the Arabs which assumed that an exalted eschatological mission had been assigned to them by God himself. Saddam added to this belief a tremendous emphasis on the will to power, the need to crush a world of enemies, to prepare for endless war and perpetuate the revolution as a sacred task of the Ba’ath Party. For the Iraqi leader, there was never any question about his right to murder “inferior” groups such as the Kurds or anyone defined as an internal “enemy” of the regime. It was also an axiom that America and its civilization must be humiliated. It was no less self-evident to him that the “Zionist entity” must be eradicated.

  For the Ba’athis, Israel was always an artificial “implant” in the Middle East, a multi-tentacled “octopus,” a “deadly cancer” or an “AIDS virus” to be burned up, as Saddam Hussein publicly threatened to do shortly before the first Gulf War. Only two years ago he declared on Iraqi television: “Palestine is Arab and must be liberated from the river to the sea and all the Zionists who emigrated to the land of Palestine must leave.” The fact that Saddam filled his speeches with references to Nebuchadnezzar (the Babylonian ruler who destroyed the first Jewish Temple) and Saladin demonstrated not only megalomania but also his determination to destroy the Jewish State and teach the Western “Christian” Crusaders a lesson they would never forget. In Saddam’s totalitarian version of pan-Arabism, Jews were by definition “outsiders,” “aliens,” and enemies of the Arab nation. Hence it is no surprise to find that Israelis are completely dehumanized as murderers, criminals, and the scum of the earth in Iraqi (as well as in Syrian) Ba’athi literature. Wiping out Israel meant expelling or killing a collection of “rootless nomads” who stole a land that was not their own. For Islamic fundamentalists, the “liberation of Palestine” is no less of an ideological and political imperative than it is for the Ba’athis, but it is also a “war of civilizations” in a more far-reaching and even apocalyptic sense. In their confrontation with Israel and Zionism, the Islamists appeal to a 1,400-year-old history and repeatedly invoke Quranic precedents. Muhammad’s war with the Jews in seventh-century Arabia is for them a vitally important guideline for the present. But this return to the distant past has not prevented Islamists from borrowing extensively from the much execrated Western culture’s most extreme anti-Semitic motifs. Thus, fundamentalist Muslims have enthusiastically revived the blood libel of medieval Christianity and adopted the scenario of a “final struggle” with the Jews as part of their Islamic Heilsgeschichte.

  The September 11, 2001, attack on America escalated such trends to new heights of defamation. The Al-Qaeda assault on the World Trade Center in New York was not only a declaration of war against the greatest metropolis of international capitalism. It was also seen by its perpetrators as a blow against the nerve-center of “world Jewry.” There is a line of continuity running from Hitler to Ramzi Yousef, who planned the World Trade Center bombings of 1993, and Mohamed Atta, who masterminded the 9/11 atrocity. The Islamo-fascists, like the Nazis before them, are genuinely convinced that a corrupt America is in Jewish hands. Hence, the jihad to liberate Muslims across the world from oppression and injustice is simultaneously anti-American and anti-Jewish. It is also viscerally opposed to liberalism, individualism, and modernity as such. It goes without saying that the Islamists reject laissez-faire principles in economics, politics, and culture. It is axiomatic that they deeply despise the political liberties of the West, such as freedom of speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of association and assembly. In these respects they often find common ground with anti-globalist leftists and right-wing radicals in the West today, who concentrate all their spleen on the “sins” of America and Israel while dismissing the threat posed by international te
rrorism.

  In its attitude toward the Jews, Islamic fundamentalism displays many parallels with Nazism and Stalinist communism as well. The identification of Judaism with threatening forces of modernity such as secularism, capitalism, liberalism, and moral lassitude is a pattern that applies to each of these ideologies. There is the same obsession with Jews as a revolutionary, subversive, and corrosive force; with their hidden, occult, manipulative activities; with their boundless “materialism” and abstract rationalism and its imagined undermining of “sacred values” like family, nation, and state. Global conspiracy theories reappear in fundamentalist Islam in apocalyptic colors reminiscent of those favored by its Christian and post-Christian totalitarian predecessors. In the Manichean struggle of the Forces of Light, Goodness, and Truth against those of darkness, evil, and falsehood, it is clear that the Jews are a spearhead of the Devil’s legions. Sixty years ago, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the leader of the Palestinian Arab national movement (who spent much of World War II in Berlin), insisted that there were strong ideological parallels between Islam and National Socialism. By way of example, he pointed to a common authoritarianism, anti-communism, Anglophobia, and hatred of the Jews. His speeches would often begin with anti-Jewish quotations from the Quran. In March 1944, speaking on Radio Berlin, he called on the Arabs to rise up: “Kill the Jews, wherever you find them. This pleases God, history, and religion.” A few months earlier, celebrating the friendship and ideological links between the German Nazis and Arabs, Haj Amin expressed his admiration for the way “they [the Germans] have definitively solved the Jewish problem.” In the light of what has been happening in the past two years, one has to ask if anything fundamental has changed. Neither Yasir Arafat, the Fatah Al-Aqsa Brigades, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, nor Hizballah differ from Haj Amin in their desire to see the eradication of Israel and its replacement by a “liberated” Palestine. Like the global jihadists of Al-Qaeda, Palestinian Islamists are driven by a violently anti-Western and anti-Jewish religious fanaticism. Israel and the Jews are perceived as an existential threat to Muslim culture and collective identity. The Jewish state is theologically and ontologically intolerable because no “protected people” (dhimmis) can exercise state sovereignty on what is defined as “sacred Muslim territory.” This is understood as an affront to the “God-given right” of Muslims to enjoy exclusive political hegemony in dar al-Islam (the House of Islam). This outlook is shared by millions of Sunni and Shi’a Muslims, conservative Wahhabi Saudis, Iranian Ayatollahs, Al-Qaeda, Hizballah, Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood, Islamic Jihad, and many secular Arab nationalists, despite the many differences among these groups. But the Islamist ideology remains the most intransigent of all the totalitarian options since it insists that permanent war—the jihad— must be waged against “infidels” until the Day of Judgment. No strategic compromise is possible with the American or Israeli “devils,” let alone with Muslim “heretics” (i.e., normal, pious Muslims). There can certainly be no “normalization” with a Jewish state, since its very existence is the symptom of the malaise, decadence, and corruption in Islam as it is practiced today.

  As was the case with Nazism, only the comprehensive and decisive defeat of these dark and irrational forces in the Islamic world can clear the road for peace in the Middle East and a genuine “dialogue of civilizations.” Saddam’s defeat will undoubtedly be a powerful blow in that cause, not only by eliminating the specter of deadly weapons in the hands of a ruthless dictator and stopping bonuses for the suicide-killers in the Palestinian territories and Israel, but by destroying one of the historic patrons of global terrorism. But this is also a war of ideas as much as it is a military and political confrontation. Its long-term success will depend on a dramatic awakening of the moderate and rational forces within the Arab-Muslim world, forces that have hitherto been strangled by the terrible legacies of totalitarianism, jihad, and anti-Semitism. Hopefully, that long-term reformation of Islam will begin in the aftermath of the Iraq War, even if its fruits may take time to mature.

  We see that Nazism, communism, radical pan-Arab nationalism, and Islamism share a remarkably similar demonology of the Jew. Each of these modern ideologies declared war in different ways on Judeo-Christian and Enlightenment values and sought, or is seeking, the downfall of Western liberal democracy. They all share the same penchant for conspiracy theories of history, society, and civilization, as well as the same closed system of beliefs, addiction to mystical or salvationist politics, and will to power. In the case of the jihadist, the return of anti-Semitism also needs to be seen as a powerful backlash against Western and Israeli visions of a “new Middle East,” as well as the rejection of a new world order, a global economy, “normalization” with the Jewish state, and the idea of a negotiated peace. Indeed, “world Zionism” is today perceived as the driving force behind globalization (“Americanization”) much as a century ago “international Jewry” was depicted by European anti-Semites as the satanic engine of finance capitalism and supranational cosmopolitanism. The new anti-Semitism eagerly scavenges this arsenal of older images which, since the onset of modernity, have stereotyped the Jews as a dangerously mobile, rootless, abstract, and transnational mafia uniquely tuned to exploit capitalist economy and culture. The protean caricature of the Jew has been given a new lease on life by the contemporary Islamist apostles of jihad. Israel and Jewry have become their great surrogate in the holy war against America and the corrupt modern world of jahiliyya . Uncle Sam, so to speak, has coalesced with Shylock into a terrifying specter of globalization that threatens to swamp the world of Islam.

  One can see this syndrome clearly at work in the ongoing radicalization of Pakistan, where obscurantist, intolerant, and misogynist Islamist parties were the biggest winners in the October 2002 elections. This Sunni Muslim nuclear-armed state has become increasingly Islamicized in the past two decades. Its Wahhabi influenced and funded private Islamic educational system has been thoroughly penetrated by a fundamentalist creed in which hatred of Western civilization, Jews, and Hindus is matched only by loathing for Shi’a Muslims. Such fanaticism produced the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in January 2002 (both a Jew and an American). It stokes the fantastic conspiracy theories, so widely believed in Pakistan, that the Mossad engineered the 9/11 massacre, and it carries with it the danger of a nuclear confrontation with India. Pakistani “anti-Semitism” has no connection to the empirical world or Israelis and Jews as real people. It is a pure ideological product of totalitarian Islam—paid for and nurtured by the House of Saud.

  A century ago, partisans of the radical Right and Left first began to converge in a common hatred of “materialist” values represented by international capitalism. They discovered in political anti-Semitism a powerful new weapon against the liberal, democratic order. The German Social Democrat August Bebel once called this kind of bigotry the “socialism of fools.” However, like so many others on the Left and in the liberal center, he hugely underestimated the genocidal potential of this ideology once it was harnessed by ruthless totalitarian parties or movements. The simplistic belief that, thanks to technological and scientific progress, the twenty-first century would usher in universal peace across the globe has proven to be no less naive. Today, in the context of a far more media-saturated and globalized village, anti-Semitism (often masquerading as anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism) has recharged its batteries with a vengeance.

  In the Islamic world (and increasingly in western Europe), it has become a dangerous form of auto-intoxication and self-destruction—the intellectual equivalent of the suicide bomb. In the first half of the twentieth century, many good-hearted, rational people refused to accept that such highly irrational beliefs could be taken seriously by many people. They were wrong. This is an error well worth avoiding in the first half of the twenty-first century.

  BEREL LANG

  Self-Description and the Anti-Semite: Denying Privileged Access

  IN A RECENT REVIEW of a comprehensive history of Europe, the
reviewer pointed out certain blatant distortions in the book’s account of European Jewish history—but concluded that since the book’s author had denied being anti-Semitic, this explanation of the distortions could be ruled out: “On that matter,” the reviewer wrote, “we have to take the author at his word.” 24 In a letter to the editor (published, no doubt, because of its brevity), I asked a simple question about this conclusion: “Why?” The question seemed to me obvious, not only as it applied to that book’s author, but to any writer or speaker who asserts that he or she is not anti-Semitic or an anti-Semite. It is not that self-descriptions of this sort should not count as evidence at all, but that they are at most only partial evidence (in both senses: fragmentary and self-interested) to be considered in judging the presence or absence of anti-Semitism.

  On the surface, this thesis will seem no more than a commonplace. After all, a large number of public figures who by any reasonable measure were clearly anti-Semitic have, for a variety of reasons, explicitly rejected that description. (I think here, at an extreme, of Eichmann’s memorable line, that he had “nothing personal” against the Jews.) Such denials, when confronted by independent and contradictory evidence, are no more persuasive or interesting than other mistaken or deceptive self-descriptions, which are, after all, a familiar part of our moral and psychological landscape. But a conceptual issue is at stake here that goes more deeply into the ascription of antiSemitism than the fact that certain anti-Semites (like many other people) may lie or deceive themselves about their private feelings.

  The issue I refer to here is part of a broader one in the theory of knowledge; it concerns assertions which claim “privileged access”—that is, the group of statements made by speakers who are supposedly in a position of special (in the event, final) authority so far as concerns their truth or falsity. In the statement, “I feel warm,” for example, the speaker might of course be lying because of a wish to deceive the person(s) being addressed. But putting this possibility aside (it applies, after all, to any statement), we would not ordinarily consider responding to that statement by disagreeing: “No, you’re mistaken; you don’t feel that way.” And we would not venture this response even if everyone else in the room had just been commenting on how cold the room was. (Someone might suggest that the person who “felt warm” was ill [or ironic], but these are different matters.)