Topic: Decline of the West
World leaders—including, sadly, the President of the United States—are competing energetically for the Suck Up to a Genocidal Maniac Award. And Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must be laughing himself silly. The crazier he gets, the more desperately the “world community” scrambles to appease him and the regime he represents. The latest offender is the widely admired President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. He will be hosting Ahmadinejad next month, when the latter pays an official state visit to Brazil. And David Harris of the American Jewish Committee just can’t figure it out.
Let me suggest one possibility. The Holocaust, which consumed the lives and bodies of some 6 million Jews, finally terminated anti-Semitism’s status as an overt, mainstream prejudice. With exception of fringe kooks such as Holocaust deniers, the West abandoned overt Jew hatred.
But anti-Semitism, perhaps the world’s oldest form of racial prejudice, proved too hardy a perennial to be uprooted by even the Holocaust. The desire to hate the Jews remained, and the establishment of the State of Israel eventually provided it with a respectable outlet. Now it’s possible for anti-Semites such as Pat Buchanan to bash the Jews to their hearts’ content. They’ve got nothing against Jews, you see, it’s just those wicked Israelis they can’t stand.
When progressives whine about the “neocons” and Israel’s supposed lock on US foreign policy, they’re simply recycling old conspiracy theories in an updated form. The Jews, it seems, are still plotting to take over the world, and their evil influence circles the globe. Now wonder that the ousted president of tiny Honduras (holed up in the Brazilian Embassy in Tegucigalpa, come to think of it) has claimed that “Israeli mercenaries” are shooting death rays into his head.
That the establishment of Israel has given anti-Semitism a new lease on life is a sad historical irony. I suspect, however, that if Israel did not exist, something else would have come along to reanimate this ancient prejudice. We’d do well to remember that hate can be as vital as love.
