Homocon

The AADC then marches on to portray the Muslim community as suffering from a vicious international retaliation orchestrated by the dreaded Zionists, despite the fact that it's Jewish synagogues that are being bombed in Istanbul, Orthodox Jewish Schools torched in Paris, Jewish graves desecrated, Rabbis beaten in Belgium, Jewish students stabbed on London buses, Dutch filmmakers murdered by radical Muslims and German citizens advised not to wear anything in public that will identify them as Jewish because their safety cannot be guaranteed from the country's sizable Muslim minority population.

Oh yeah, the Muslims are way oppressed -- but mostly by each other. So why are Western media outlets still eagerly drinking from the trough of anti-Israeli (and, by extension, anti-American) propaganda as if Israel is the only nation in the world obliged with moral obligations? Is it anti-Zionism (an opposition to the right of a Jewish state in Palestine) that's the underlying cause (and which is usually proffered as the source for what media members and politicos deem their "criticisms of Israel"), or is it the age old beast of anti-semitism stalking to and fro, roaring at whom it wishes to devour?

In a December, 2004 Washington Post article, writer Glenn Kesslar noted that "Senior Arab officials . . . rejected the Bush Administration's assertion that greater democracy would help end terrorism, arguing that the administration's strong support of Israel made it difficult to undertake political reforms or halt extremists driven by hatred of U.S. policies." Kesslar states that one of President Bush's central goals for his second term is to bring greater democracy in the Middle East, yet Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit summed up the problem perfectly when he stated that he resisted the notion that "reform" was necessary: "I prefer the word 'modernity'" he said, saying that reform means something is wrong and needs to be fixed.

Imagine that.

Modernity: "denoting a current or recent style or trend in art, architecture, or other cultural activity marked by a significant departure from traditional styles and values". Okay, so Gheit believes that nothing about Middle Eastern culture needs to be fixed, so how about a significant departure from the traditional style and value of blaming Israel for all the violence and murder their own people commit, and for all the unhappiness and dissatisfaction prevalent in their own populations.

And this is the conundrum with which the Bush Administration, and really, the Western world, is faced: How do you bring reform (or modernity) to a region that won't (not can't) significantly depart from it's traditional styles and values -- styles and values which embrace racial hatred and encourage xenophobic violence? And how do you encourage a reflexively anti-authoritarian media, seemingly stuck in Gunga-Dan style emotives, to separate the very real war against Israel from the rocks in their heads?

In Christian cultures, science managed to eventually trump religion because the Pope was not as powerful as the Caliph, thanks to the wise separation of Church and State. In Islam, there is no separation of Mosque and State, so progressive, liberalizing forces such as classical Greek rationality and contemporary scientific discovery cannot prevail and are ultimately stifled. As late as March, 2005, the Syrian Ministry of Information has approved for publication an updated version to the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", a conspiracy laden and virulently anti-Jewish tract which claims that Jews run the world by proxy, that they drink the blood of Palestinian children and that the Holocaust never happened (and so on).

Oy vey.

The new, revised edition of the of the Protocols was introduced at this past February's Cairo International Book Fair, only months after Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Faisal claimed to the Western Press that, "Let's face it: our (the West's and the Middle East's) differences are neither religious nor cultural. We perceive no clashes of civilization or competing value systems. The real bone of contention is the longest conflict in modern history." That Middle Eastern leaders and spokesmen go virtually unchallenged by Western media sources when they make such claims (that Israel is the source of the present clash between East and West) is what Jewish scholars refer to as the casual indifference of the Western media to blatantly anti-semitic thought.

For example, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer published a June, 2004 interview with the parents of Samia El-Moslimany, a vice-chair member of the local CAIR chapter and someone who believes that international law only matters should Israel be in alleged violation of it, in which the parents stated: "Muslims and Jews have always gotten along until recently with the state of Israel" -- a claim that's meant to imply a contemporary context for the Palestinian suicide bombings (which only begs the question of why we're bothering to attempt an "objective" discourse with those who believe suicide bombers have context), but which deliberately neglects to mention the very real Jewish hatred ensconced in ancient Muslim holy texts themselves (i.e. Hadith Volume 4, Book 52, Number 176: "Allah's Apostle said, "You (Muslims) will fight with the Jews till some of them will hide behind stones. The stones will (betray them) saying, 'O, (slave of Allah)! There is a Jew hiding behind me; so kill him.'".

I guess that explains the videos of Daniel Pearl and Nick Berg . . .

Douglas Davis, writing in a November, 2003 essay for AIJAC, talks about media bias against Israel: "I do not deny the BBC's right -- the right of any news organization -- to be critical of Israel. Criticism of politicians and political institutions is an integral part of the democratic process . . . but the BBC's relentless, one-dimensional portrayal of Israel as a criminal state and Israelis as brutal oppressors responsible for all the ills of the region bears the hallmarks of a concerted campaign of vilification . . ." But Mitchell Bard, in his excellent April, 2005 article for the Israel Insider titled, "Does the Media's anti-Israel Bias Matter?" notes that "journalists usually justify their anti-Israel bias by claiming they get just as many complaints from the Arabs as the Jews, which they rationalize as an indication their coverage is balanced."

Jonathan Freedland, in an articled titled "Is Anti-Zionism Anti-Semitism?", writes that "Loosely translated, Zionism represents nothing more than a belief in the right of a Jewish state in Palestine to exist", which would mean that anti-Zionism is an opposition to this specific idea (whereas anti-Semitism is a broad opposition to Jews, period), and it's here that the boundaries get very blurry. Freedland continues (as most authors are wont to do, and which I'm afraid this post will continue to do, as well): "If the right to self-determination is honored in every other case -- Palestinians and Basques and Algerians are all allowed to describe themselves and chart their own destinies, but not Jews -- then we are confronted with a straightforward case of discrimination . . . If our anti-Zionist(s) took the same hard line on all new societies founded by immigrants who displaced the earlier inhabitants . . . if (they) denied the right of, say, the United States, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and whole swathes of Latin America to exist, then (they) would be immune to charges of anti-Semitism."

Yet Israel is often relegated to the role of stand-in for all previous population displacements, hence the paradox of American and European anti-Zionist outrage against Israel while contentedly living on property brutally yanked out from underneath native populations of their own.

Brendan O'Neill at TomPaine.com claims that the United States is "no longer the all out supporter of Israel and Israeli interests it once was", but Mr. Bard puts forth the salient factor that a 2004 Gallup poll showed that 55% of Americans sympathize with Israel, and handily points out the difference in anti-Israel bias in the United States as opposed to Britain and the rest of the E.U. in this way: "For those who are convinced the (anti-Israel) bias is universal and irrevocable, I have two words for you: Fox News. Actually, let me add three more: Wall Street Journal."

But though the American conversation about Israel isn't as full of invective as, say, the BBC, O'Neill quotes an anonymous U.S. journalist who says, "People should realize how difficult this is for us -- reporting on such a divisive issue. It can be confusing, and hard to get right all the time", but Douglas Davis offers this explanation as to why the media finds reporting on Israel so "hard to get right" -- "Israel's continued existence remains a profound affront to the fine sensibilities of a Sixties generation which now occupies the high table of establishments . . . In (their) collective world-view, Israel is the imperial outpost of power-crazed, oil-hungry America; a bastion of white, American hegemony in the Middle East; a proxy to be vilified; and an illegitimate, artificial state to be trashed, just as the kids of the Sixties trashed their university campuses in a frenzy of anti-American violence."

Though how this explains the likes of political anti-Zionists like Pat Buchanan ("Either Israel gets out, or it pays the price of staying in: terrorism", which, beyond its Blame the Jews rhetoric, can only be a rationale for a philosophy of political isolationism, considered a dead-end foreign policy since WW2) and George Soros ("Anti-semitism is the result of the policies of Israel and the United States", with its bizarro "I'm a Jew and I take full responsibility for 'The Protocols of the Elders of Zion'" mentality ) is beyond me.

Anti-Jewish sentiment is an old problem, most likely dating back thousands of years to when the Hebrew nation was a conquering force that swept through Canaan with full military and religious fervor, and able to do so precisely because they were "the other" -- a nation of people who followed strict dietary regulations, copious social limitations and vastly (for the time) unusual religious conventions which bound them tightly to one another. Plug into that a cultural support for intellectual property and merchandizing (which has only recently become a respectable, and very profitable, occupation) and you've got a pressure-cooker of social resentments, both old and new, with everybody eager to point fingers at just who's responsible for the lid occasionally blowing off the pot.

Despite what has been hailed as cultural progressions across the board, European and Middle Eastern, and to a lesser extent, American thought continues to suffer from the snaggletoothed baying of racial and cultural isolationists. European media seems to almost aggressively undermine Israel as the region's one open and liberal society while virtually contorting themselves to excuse extremist Islamic clerics and Arab dictators, their lack of even a basic human-rights charter be damned. Jonathan Kay of Canada's National Post once remarked that "if Robert Mugabe walked into an Arab League summit, he would be the most democratically legitimate leader in the room" -- yet the howls of outrage are aimed at Ariel Sharon and the Israeli military, instead.

Perhaps we, all dressed up in Western academic theory, approach the Arab-Muslim culture with what is referred to as "the soft bigotry of low expectations" -- the resultant chaos and violence in Gaza after the evacuation of Israel is barely remarked upon because nobody considered there would be anything different? The billions of dollars missing that were to go towards building a viable Palestinian state go uninvestigated because Arab corruption is only to be expected? Terrorism is an inevitable result of the presence of the Israeli nation because Arabs are savages and who cares if they blow themselves up anyway (as long as they're only taking Israelis along with them)?

Whatever.

Maybe if we raised our expectations for Arab democracy and liberalization to match our human rights rhetoric, and Western society as a whole rose up and confronted rather than excused violent fundamentalism and anti-Jewish bias on the part of devout Muslims (not to mention undevout Muslims, the European media and American terrorist-apologias), we'd truly watch anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism go down the drain, along with cultural conflict in the Middle East.

I'd gladly blame the Jews for that . . .