Second Holocaust,’ Roth’s Invention, Isn’t Novelistic

by Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, April 15, 2002

The Second Holocaust. It’s a phrase we may have to begin thinking about. A possibility we may have to contemplate. A reality we may have to witness. Somebody has to think about the unthinkable, about the unbearable, and the way it looks now, it’s at least as likely to happen as not. One can imagine several ways it will happen: the current, terrible situation devolves from slow-motion mutual slaughter into instantaneous conflagration, nuclear, chemical or biological. Scenarios that remain regional. Scenarios that go global.

What is harder to imagine are ways in which it won’t happen. A peace process? Goodwill among men? An end to suicidal fanaticism? In your dreams.

Instead we must begin to examine the variety of nightmare scenarios.

The Second Holocaust. It’s a phrase first coined, as far as I know, by Philip Roth in his 1993 novel Operation Shylock. It’s a novel which seemed incredibly bleak back then. And yet, reexamining Mr. Roth’s use of the phrase "Second Holocaust" less than a decade later, even his darkest imaginings seem optimistic now. Especially when examined by the glare of burning synagogues in France.

I was reminded of Mr. Roth’s Second Holocaust scenario when I came across an excerpt from Operation Shylock on the Web site of a Canadian blogger (www.davidartemiw.com) via the all-seeing Instapundit.com.

Here’s the crucial exchange between a character Roth calls the "Diasporist" and the novel’s narrator:

"The meanings of the Holocaust," says the Diasporist "are for us to determine, but one thing is sure—its meaning will be no less tragic than it is now if there is a second Holocaust and the offspring of the European Jews who evacuated Europe for a seemingly safer haven should meet collective annihilation in the Middle East … but a second Holocaust could happen here all too easily, and, if the conflict between Arab and Jew escalates much longer, it will—it must. The destruction of Israel in a nuclear exchange is a possibility much less far-fetched today than was the Holocaust itself fifty years ago."

"The resettlement in Europe of more than a million Jews … It sounds to me that you are proposing the final solution to the Jewish problem for Yasir Arafat."

"No. Arafat’s final solution is the same as Hitler’s: extermination. I am proposing the alternate to extermination [the return of the Jews from Israel to Europe]."

"You speak about resettling the Jews in Poland, Romania, Germany? In Slovakia, the Ukraine, Yugoslavia, the Baltic states? And you realize do you … how much hatred for Jews still exists in most of these countries?"

"Whatever hatred for Jews may be present in Europe … there are ranged against this residual anti-Semitism powerful currents of enlightenment and morality that are sustained by the memory of the Holocaust, a horror that operates now as a bulwark against European anti-Semitism."

Here, it is clear, is where Roth’s darkest fantasy is too optimistic. Here is where we have to examine the dynamic going on in the mind of Europe at this moment: a dynamic that suggests that Europeans, on some deep if not entirely conscious level, are willing to be complicit in the murder of the Jews again.

The novel’s narrator believes that there are in Europe "powerful currents of enlightenment and morality that are sustained by the memory of the Holocaust … a bulwark against European anti-Semitism," however virulent. It may be true in the case of some Europeans, although if so they have been very quiet about it. In fact, it seems that the memory of the Holocaust is precisely what ignites the darker currents in the European soul. The memory of the Holocaust is precisely what explains the one-sided anti-Israel stance of the European press, the European politicians, European culture. The complacency about synagogue burnings, the preference for focusing on the Israeli response to suicide bombers blowing up families at prayer, rather than on the mass murderers (as the suicide bombers should more properly be called) and those who subsidize them and throw parties for their families ….

There is a horrid but obvious dynamic going on here: At some deep level, Europeans, European politicians, European culture is aware that almost without exception every European nation was deeply complicit in Hitler’s genocide. Some manned the death camps, others stamped the orders for the transport of the Jews to the death camps, everyone knew what was going on—and yet the Nazis didn’t have to use much if any force to make them accomplices. For the most part, Europeans volunteered. That is why "European civilization" will always be a kind of oxymoron for anyone who looks too closely at things, beginning with the foolish and unnecessary slaughters of World War I, Holocaust-scale slaughter that paved the way for Hitler’s more focused effort.

And so, at some deep level, there is a need to blame someone else for the shame of "European civilization." To blame the victim. To blame the Jews. And the more European nations can focus one-sidedly on the Israeli response to terror and not to the terror itself, the more they can portray the Jews as the real villains, as Nazis, the more salve to their collective conscience for their complicity in collective mass murder in the past. Hitler may have gone too far, and perhaps we shouldn’t have been so cowardly and slavish in assisting him, but look at what the Jews are doing

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Isn’t it interesting that you didn’t see any "European peace activists" volunteering to "put their bodies on the line" by announcing that they would place themselves in real danger—in the Tel Aviv cafés and pizza parlors, favorite targets of the suicide bombers. Why no "European peace activists" at the Seders of Netanya or the streets of Jerusalem? Instead, "European peace activists" do their best to protect the brave sponsors of the suicide bombers in Ramallah.

One has to put the European guilt complex not just in the context of complicity during World War II. One must also consider the malign neglect involved in the creation of the state of Israel. The begrudging grant of an indefensible sliver of desert in a sea of hostile peoples, to get the surviving Jews—reminders of European shame—off the continent, and leave the European peoples in possession of the property stolen from the Jews during the war. And that was when they didn’t continue murdering Jews, the way some Poles did when some Jews were foolish enough to try to return to their stolen homes.

Someone remarked recently at the astonishing hypocrisy of European diplomats and politicians in supporting the Palestinian "right of return" when so many Europeans are still living in homes stolen from Jews they helped murder.

Make no mistake of it, the Palestinians are victims of history as well as the Jews. The last thing the nations of Europe wanted to do was the right thing, which would be to restore the Jews to their stolen homes, and so they acquiesced in the creation of a Jewish state and then did nothing to make it viable for either the Jews or the Palestinians, preferring to wash their hands of the destruction: let the Semites murder each other and blame the Jews, the Semites they were more familiar with hating.

And now it’s so much easier for the Europeans to persecute the Jews, because they can just allow their own Arab populations to burn synagogues and beat Jews on the street for them. The way Hitler used the eager Croatians, for instance, as death-camp guards. Still, there’s something particularly repulsive about the synagogue-burnings in France. I think in a way it goes a long way toward explaining why the Israeli government is acting the way it is now—with a little less restraint against those who murder their children. Yes, restraint: If Israel were to act with true ruthlessness to end the suicide bombings, they would tell the prospective bombers—who go to their deaths expecting that their families will celebrate their mass murders with a subsidized party and reap lucrative financial rewards courtesy of the Saudis and Saddam—that their families instead will share the exact same fate of the people the bombers blow up. That might put a crimp into the recruiting and the partying over dead Jewish children. But the Israelis won’t do that, and that is why there’s likely to be a second Holocaust. Not because the Israelis are acting without restraint, but because they are, so far, still acting with restraint despite the massacres making their country uninhabitable.

Consider that remarkable Joel Brinkley story in the April 4 edition of The Times, in which the leaders of Hamas spoke joyfully and complacently of their great triumph in the Passover massacre and the subsequent slaughters in Jerusalem and Haifa. Two things made this interview remarkable. One was the unashamed assertion that they had no interest in any "peace process" that would produce a viable Palestinian state living side-by-side with a Jewish state. They only wanted the destruction of the Jewish state and its replacement with one in which "the Jews could remain living ‘in an Islamic state with Islamic law.’"

That defines the reality that has been hidden by the illusion of hope placed in a "peace process." The Palestinians, along with their 300 million "Arab brothers" surrounding the five million Jews, are not interested in a "negotiated settlement."

Israelis are forever being criticized for not negotiating, for not giving away enough of their security, but they have no one to negotiate with who doesn’t, in their heart of hearts, want to exterminate their state and their people as well, if necessary.

The other thing that made the Times interview such a defining document was the description of its setting. The interview with one of the four directors of the Hamas mass murderers, a Dr. Zahar, was conducted in a comfortable home in which "Dr. Zahar, a surgeon, has a table tennis set in his vast living room for his seven children."

If the Israelis were as ruthless as the Europeans take great pleasure in calling them, there would be, let’s say, no ping-pong playing for the murderer of their children.

Now let’s talk further about the relationship between the first Holocaust and the next. The relationship between the European response to the first one and the likely Israeli response to the one in the making.

I think it might best be summed up by that old proverb: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me."

The first time, when the Jewish people were threatened by someone who called for their extinction, they trusted to the "enlightenment" values of the European people, as Philip Roth’s character put it.

Civilized people wouldn’t let something like that happen. Pogroms, well yes, but death camps, extermination? Never. They’re transporting us to camps, yes, but what could it be, labor camps at worst? The world wouldn’t let such a thing happen.

Well, the world did let it happen—with extraordinary complacency, a deaf ear, a blind eye and not a little pleasure on the part of some. And it’s clear from the reaction of Europe today that the world is prepared, is preparing itself, to let it happen again.

But I suspect that deep in the heart of most Israelis is the idea that this time we’re not going to depend on others to prevent it from happening. We’re not going to hope that the world will care that they’re killing our children. This time, we won’t go quietly; this time, if we go down, we’ll go down fighting and take them with us and take more of them if we can, and the rest of the world be damned. Fool us twice, shame on us.

I feel bad for the plight of the Palestinians; I believe they deserve a state. But they had a state: They were part of a state, a state called Jordan, that declared war on the state of Israel, that invaded it in order to destroy it—and lost the war. There are consequences to losing a war, and the consequences should at least in part be laid at the feet of the three nations that sought and lost the war. One sympathizes with the plight of the Palestinians, but one wonders what the plight of the Israelis might have been had they lost that war. One doesn’t envision spacious homes and ping-pong for their leaders.

But somehow the Israelis are told that they must trust the world—trust the European Union as guarantors of their safety, trust the Arab League’s promises of "normal relations," trust the Saudis who subsidize suicide-bomber parties and ignore the exterminationist textbooks the Arab world tutors its children with. The Israelis must learn to make nice; the Jews must behave better with people who want to kill them. I don’t think so.

As a secular Jew, I’ve always been more of a diasporist than a Zionist. I’ve supported the Jewish state, but thought that it was a necessary but not ideal solution with a pronounced dark side: The concentration of so many Jews in one place—and I use the word "concentration" advisedly—gives the world a chance to kill the Jews en masse again. And I also thought that Jews flourished best where they were no longer under the thumb of Orthodox rabbis and could bring to the whole world—indeed, the whole universe—the exegetical skills that are the glory of the people: reading the universe as the Torah, as Einstein and Spinoza did, rather than the Torah as the universe, as the Orthodox do.

But the implacable hatred of Arab fundamentalism makes no distinction between Jewish fundamentalists and Jewish secularists, just as Hitler didn’t. It’s not just the settlements they want to extirpate, it’s the Jewish state, the Jewish people.

This is the way it is likely to happen: Sooner or later, a nuclear weapon is detonated in Tel Aviv, and sooner, not later, there is nuclear retaliation—Baghdad, Damascus, Tehran, perhaps all three. Someone once said that while Jesus called on Christians to "turn the other cheek," it’s the Jews who have been the only ones who have actually practiced that. Not this time. The unspoken corollary of the slogan "Never again" is: "And if again, not us alone."

So the time has come to think about the Second Holocaust. It’s coming sooner or later; it’s not "whether," but when. I hope I don’t live to see it. It will be unbearable for those who do. That is, for all but the Europeans—whose consciences, as always, will be clear and untroubled.

[PAC Comment:  For more on the continuing institution of European anti Semitism now promoted by the Left, see, "Anti-Semitism and Ethnicity in Europe," by John Rosenthal.  Some Paraphrasing:

Anti-Semitic attacks are just the pursuit by other means of the latest cause célèbre of Parisian intellectuals and students, with disaffected and déclassé North African teenagers happily assuming the role of “shock troops” for their more privileged comrades.  The left has developed a kind of logic whereby the targeting French Jews in retribution for Israeli policies is somehow self-evident: Muslim youth can, after all, be forgiven for taking offense at Israel’s “heavy-handed” treatment of their co-religionists in the Middle East conflict.  While one might have thought that the escalation of the suicide bombings should have led to increased solidarity with the largely Jewish victims and a taking of distance from the organizers of the attacks, on the left exactly the opposite transpired: the more indiscriminately Palestinian commandos killed Israeli civilians, the more frenetically was the intifada covered with ‘anti-imperialist’ applause.

It has of late become common for “liberal” commentators to charge that reports of European anti-Semitism are greatly exaggerated, part of yet another “vast right-wing conspiracy” fostered by powerful media moguls and designed to delegitimize European support of the Palestinian cause and “deflect” European criticisms of Israel. In fact, however, coverage in the English-language media as a whole, especially indeed the American media, has tended, if anything, to understate the true dimensions of the phenomenon.]

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Does Poison Le Pen Auger Yet Another European Darkness?

by Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, April 29, 2002
 

And now Le Pen. Its seems as if the mask is coming off European anti-Semitism right and left. I don’t want to say I told you so about European—specifically French—anti-Semitism (see my April 15 column on the roots of the Second Holocaust). It doesn’t afford any satisfaction to have one’s darkest imaginings confirmed. But when I heard the news about Le Pen, I was thinking about Amos Oz, the Israeli novelist and longtime dovish advocate of living side-by-side in peace with a Palestinian state, and how he had been driven by events of the past few weeks to ask the question (in The Nation), "Would an end to occupation terminate the Muslim holy war against Israel?"

This is, of course, the key question that the anti-Israel Euro-idiots don’t get, and here Amos Oz, peace-loving man of letters and friend of many Palestinians, says that "If, despite simplistic vision, the end of occupation will not result in peace," he favors war. "Not a war for our full occupancy of the Holy Land"—he’s against the occupation of the West Bank—"but a war for our right to live … in part of the land. A just war, a no-alternative war. A war we will win."

Remember, this is not Ariel Sharon; this is Amos Oz, Israeli dove. I agree with his pessimism about the prospect of avoiding war, because there is no reason to believe that "the Muslim holy war" against Israel will ever end, or that their ambition to extirpate the Jewish state entirely will ever cease.

But, alas, I can’t share his optimism that "we will win" that war. As I suggested in my extremely gloomy previous essay, it’s only prudent to prepare for the ultimate destruction of the state of Israel by Islamo-fascist fury, not to mention weapons of mass destruction.

Believe me, I’d much rather not be writing about this terrible subject. For the past month, I’ve most wanted to write a Jane Austen column. I’ve been working on a revision of my Jane Austen character-typology theory, one of my most popular and controversial columns, in which I analyzed people’s personalities in terms of which Jane Austen novel is their favorite. I’ve now extended that analysis to the recent spate of Jane Austen films and added a searching analysis of the neglected Northanger Abbey character type.

But, as Al Pacino says in my favorite line from Godfather III, "Just when I thought that I was out, they pull me back in"—they being the terrible events in the Middle East that portend a Second Holocaust, they being the years I spent writing a book about Hitler and the first Holocaust. And the way the first Holocaust—particularly European complicity in the past and guilt-ridden anti-Israel sentiment in the present—entails the second, the one now in the making in the Middle East.

What makes me feel a need to return to the subject is the need to express the despair and sadness I feel; to begin the mourning and to chronicle the number of distortions, untruths and, well, lies I find in the coverage of the crisis (and the reaction to my column). Beginning with:

Lie No. 1: There Is No Cause for Alarm

Events are moving far more rapidly and grimly than I could have imagined when I suggested that a Second Holocaust* is becoming a realistic possibility. I had focused in particular on the one-sided European anti-Israel sentiment—the equanimity with which European politicians and people regarded the massacre of Jewish children, and the alacrity with which they condemned attempts by the state of Israel to defend itself from mass murder as "war crimes."

I’d suggested the deep source of this phenomenon was European complicity in the original Holocaust, a few short decades ago. The way demonizing the Israelis now served to "salve their collective conscience" for their sickening collaboration with Hitler: The Jews probably deserved it then, and we can wash our hands of what happens to them now. (I was gratified to see the New York Times’ strong lead editorial on April 21 pick up on my phrase: European "Guilt over the Holocaust may be salved," The Times wrote, by depicting Jews in Israel as cruel.)

Further sad confirmation of my analysis of anti-Israel bias in my previous column came within days, as European anti-Israeli sentiment morphed without much transition at all into outright "death to the Jews" anti-Semitism.

Of course, one expects it from the French, who demonstrated the kind of bravery they’ve shown in past wars with such acts as terrorizing Jewish children on school buses—acts consistent with a culture that has begun the new wave of synagogue burning, a nation that leapt to lick the boots of the Nazis in their eagerness to execute the orders for the transport and murder of their Jewish countrymen. And has now made a racist a serious presidential contender.

And one could hardly claim to be surprised to see the anti-Israeli march in Berlin that featured a poor 5-year-old girl garbed by her sick, hateful parents in a mock-up of a suicide bomber’s explosive belt.

I thought I had lost my power to be shocked by this sort of European pathology, but I must admit that I found it hard to believe when I read the reports about the Oxford professor and poet Tom Paulin, who called for Jews—particularly American Jews, specifically "Brooklyn-born Jews"—to be "shot" if they were found on the West Bank.

Mr. Paulin made the remarks in an interview with Al-Ahrom Weekly, the semi-official newspaper of the Egyptian government, on April 12. The person who forwarded me the transcript of the interview, a sophisticated—and horrified—writer friend, pointed out that "Paulin is a favorite of U.K. leftist publications [such as] The Guardian, The Observer, The Independent, The New Statesman, The London Review of Books. Last year the Observer’s ‘poem of the week’ written by Paulin spoke of the ‘Zionist SS.’"

This time, in his interview with Al-Ahrom Weekly, he said he "never believed the state of Israel had a right to exist." Al-Ahrom Weekly praised him for "berating Guardian columnist Ian Buruma as a Zionist." And as for the Brooklyn-born settlers, "‘They should be shot dead,’ Paulin says forcefully. ‘I think they are Nazi racists, I feel nothing but hatred for them.’"

Perhaps more repulsive than this call for the murder of Jews was the response of the chattering classes in Britain: virtually none. A silence which must be taken as tacit approval. Imagine if, say, a right-wing writer in America had called for the murder of "militant blacks" and said, "They should be shot dead." One hopes the reaction from the entire political spectrum would be volcanic and that such a writer would be forever shunned.

But no, the British left press is too busy trying to portray the Israeli response to mass murderers (the so-called "suicide bombers") as a war crime. When self-defense is defined as a war crime, the very existence of a people is delegitimized—a useful preparation for genocide.

Not that Americans are immune from appearing to welcome the destruction of the Jewish state, with whatever consequences that might have for the Jews left to the mercy of Hamas.

In a special Nightline report about the question of anti-Semitism and its relationship to anti-Israel sentiment, the Nightline correspondent (not Ted Koppel) patted his network on the back for not airing a particularly repulsive piece of footage in a previous broadcast.

It was footage of an anti-Israel rally in Berkeley that featured an interview with a young woman holding a sign depicting Ariel Sharon wearing a swastika armband and giving the Hitler salute. We didn’t run that image, the self-congratulatory Nightline reporter told us, because it was anti-Semitic and it would have been anti-Semitic to show it.

How a man as astute as Ted Koppel allowed such palpable sophistry to air on his broadcast (he was off interviewing Elie Wiesel) is baffling. By censoring just how blatantly anti-Semitic certain of the anti-Israel demonstrators were, you weren’t avoiding being anti-Semitic; you were engaged in a cover-up of the truth of just how much anti-Israel protests have become anti-Semitic protests. Nightline compounded the error by running it as evidence of how enlightened they were.

In fact, what that piece of tape does is add to the growing indications that the infection of anti-Semitism is not confined to the Saudis or the French. It’s right here, right now.

And yet we are told in some quarters (among them a particularly foolish letter writer in The Observer last week) that concern about this situation—the delegitimizing of a nation surrounded by people who want to drive them into the sea or murder them on the ground—is alarmist, unnecessarily raising fears when all that is required is more "education," a deeper study of "Imperialism."

No cause for alarm. This may be the biggest lie of the current crisis: the belief that there is always a solution. The definition of tragedy—or one definition—is a conflict without a solution. This is a tragedy already. It’s going to get worse.

What was disturbing about the letter writer who accused those concerned about a Second Holocaust of alarmism was that it precisely mirrored the language of those who claimed in 1938 that there was no cause for alarm. Yes, there were synagogue burnings in Europe (Kristallnacht and all that), and yes, Hitler had declared his determination to drive the Jews out of Europe dead or alive, but it would be "alarmist" to take such facts and statements seriously. Alas, those who listened to such sentiments were murdered for their complacency.

One of the things that strikes you if you spend any time researching the period before the beginning of the first Holocaust is the following syndrome: Time after time, evidence of Hitler’s genocidal intentions would surface, and time after time, useful idiots would say, "Oh, that’s being alarmist—he doesn’t really mean it."

For years now, the Arab press has been filled with Hitlerian exterminationist rhetoric calling for the murder of the Jews. And the people of Israel—many of them children of Holocaust survivors—are supposed to regard any focus on such exterminationist sentiments, on "death to the Jews" marches in Europe, on Jews "should be shot" remarks by Oxford dons, as "alarmist."

Lie No. 2: Self-Defense Is a War Crime

In addition to the lone cry of "alarmist," I received a number of remarkably supportive reactions. One that meant the most to me came from a Holocaust survivor, who said he’d feared no one would come out and say what he felt. Another that meant a lot to me was a call from a writer I’d admired who publishes in a left-wing weekly and who, like me, had in the past been of the dovish, Peace Now, Shimon Peres, negotiation-will-bring-peace belief.

He said what changed things for him were the "suicide bombers." Not just the suicide bombers—who he believes, like me, should be called by their proper name: "mass murderers"—but the celebration of them, not just by Palestinians but by every Arab populace. And the implicit legitimation of them by European politicians and peoples whose passion for "moral equivalence" ("mass murderer" is equivalent to people attempting to defend themselves from mass murder) is exceeded only by their passion to blame the Jews in the guise of moral equivalence.

Another response that was important to me personally came from a Jewish writer I admired, who said he’d felt a perverse gratitude that someone had said out loud the phrase "Second Holocaust," because formulating it that way "diminishes the sense of loneliness and almost deranging isolation it is possible to feel—reading the misrepresentations of the situation" in the press, here and abroad.

I agree about that sense of isolation and loneliness, but I would go further than "misrepresentations." Some are lies, one of them being that Israelis should suffer mass murders of their civilians in silence—for their sins, presumably—or as a price for their existence, rather than attempt as effectively as possible to stop them. Or that in some Orwellian reversal of the truth, they should respond to the suicide bombing by "negotiation," when in fact the suicide bombings were the Palestinians’ response to an Israeli attempt to negotiate. The lie that the way to stop the killing of Jews is to trade "land for peace" with a people who have made it abundantly clear that what they wish for the Jews in their midst is, "No land, no peace, no Jews."

Which brings us to Lie No. 3: Being "Anti-Israel" is the same as being critical of Israel.

Here I want to begin with an important distinction: I’m not saying that criticism of Israel makes one anti-Semitic. Obviously there are many people, indeed many Jews inside and outside Israel, who are for honorable reasons critical of the tactics of the Israeli government. I was critical of Likud policies for a long time.

But what we’re seeing now, what the issue is now, is not criticism of Israel, it’s what you might call—to use a word popularized by a left-wing pundit—"reflexive" hostility to Israel. And at this point, when the Jewish state is being made uninhabitable by mass-murderers, a one-sided reflexive hostility that denies Jews the right to defend themselves effectively and focuses only on the damge caused by retaliation—that in effect tells them to sit back and let themselves get blown up in the hope that a "peace process" might develop somewhere down the line—this "reflexive" anti-Israel stance can be called, for all practical purposes, anti-Semitic.

Perhaps the best way of explaining what I think is an important distinction—between being critical of Israel and being anti-Israel/anti-Semitic—comes from a column by Rod Liddle in the U.K. Guardian, one of the few writers to speak up against Oxford’s Tom Paulin and his "I want to shoot Jews" declaration.

"The Paulin business shook me out of my Wasp-ish complacency," Mr. Liddle wrote in the Guardian. "I’d been inclined to dismiss as paranoid repeated complaints from British Jews that there was a new mood of anti-Semitism abroad. I was wrong. Paulin will undoubtedly complain that his remarks are not anti-Semitic, but merely anti-Zionist. So might others, generally from the Left, who, when examined about their opposition to what they call Zionism, reveal a deep and visceral hatred of Jews."

Mr. Liddle wonders aloud whether there’s some truth to the view that "the Left’s demonization of capitalism was simply a displaced anti-Semitism" (he adduces the similarity of Marxist caricatures of money-grubbing capitalists to anti-Semitic caricatures of money-grubbing Jews, not to mention—he doesn’t—Marx’s own self-hating anti-Semitism). One can find support for that in the eagerness of the anti-globalization movement, which has taken up the kind of anti-Zionism that demonizes Jews, in the same language that Stalin used to condemn Jews: for their "cosmopolitanism."

Lie No. 4: The Polite Form of Holocaust Denial

Another instance of a kind of visceral anti-Semitism lurking beneath the supposedly neutral "critical discourse" can often be found in those who use the sneering term "Holocaust industry" to deny any connection between the legitimacy of the state of Israel and the crime against the Jews which the civilized nations of Europe collaborated in. "Holocaust industry" is a particularly noxious phrase because it embodies a primal anti-Semitic stereotype: "industry" implies that the Jews are in it for the money or profit. There’s no good-faith reason to remember the murdered millions; it’s just being used for bad-faith commercial reasons, or to justify Israeli "imperialism," or some such nonsense. I saw "Holocaust industry" invoked recently by a letter writer to The Observer who was defending "the progressive values" of the idiotic Mirroring Evil exhibit at the Jewish Museum, and in a headline in Salon about the same controversy: the "entrenched Holocaust industry."

The ostensible philosophic rationale for employing the phrase "Holocaust industry" is that by making such a fuss over millions of dead family members, Jews are "sacralizing" the Holocaust, "removing it from history." There is an argument to be made against "sacralizing" the Holocaust in the name of some ineffable "uniqueness." It’s an argument I make in my own book, in fact. But that’s not what they’re after, the "Holocaust industry" crowd. In a stunning unacknowledged contradiction, they seek to remove the Holocaust from history as well, by denying the obvious, denying the connection between the first Holocaust and the reaction of people who fled from the first and are facing a second in the state of Israel. Just forget about the Holocaust; to remember it is to make an "industry" of something irrelevant to the present. In denying its historical relevance—the reasons Jews are not going to allow themselves to be slaughtered without fighting back—they are engaging in a sanitized form of Holocaust denial.

They don’t say it didn’t happen. They say it didn’t matter, so it might as well not have happened.

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A Posthumous Victory for Adolf Hitler

by Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, 10/23/00
 

WARNING: This column is very dark. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

It’s impossible to write about because it’s unbearable to contemplate. But it’s impossible not to write about it. At the very least, it’s impossible to write about anything else. I tried: I had begun writing a different column, but the good-natured tone of the subject matter (the column topics suggested on Edgy Alliance coupons) was unsustainable given the lynchings and the bombings and the terror attacks all playing on CNN. Still, I guess life has to go on, and I’ll eventually get to that.

But in some ways, I don’t think life will ever be the same. Summit or no summit, any hope for an eventual resolution of the situation seems gone, and we’re left with a choice between slow-motion slaughter and sudden apocalypse.

It’s not that this comes as a surprise to me. In some ways, I’ve been expecting it all my life. Four months ago, in a time of relative optimism–in the weeks during the buildup to the Middle East summit conference at Camp David, in the midst of a column ("Nukeporn Revisited," July 3) about growing up with the conviction that nuclear holocaust was inevitable–I spoke of the way I was still convinced that we are doomed: doomed before long "to witness another Holocaust, this one perhaps combining elements of both Auschwitz and Hiroshima"; this one in the Middle East.

"Think I’m being pessimistic?" I’d asked back then. "Well … does any one really think the ‘peace process’ in the Middle East is going to work? Sure everyone involved should go on acting as if it might work, because that’s the only chance it will. … For a long time I used to hope something could be worked out. I used to believe all problems are soluble because the consequences of not solving this problem were inconceivable. But now I wonder about that. The tragedy of history is that some problems have no solution. Ever. I don’t see love triumphing over hate in history. I see just the opposite. Why should this be different?"

I went into a scenario which seemed impossibly dark back in late June, but now, a few months later, not as improbable. A scenario about a Mideast conflict erupting into nuclear warfare, "Perhaps not a planet-destroying Holocaust, but a local one, and for my people a second one.… While I’ve always loved the idea of the state of Israel, my worst fear has always been that some day, in some way, the ingathering of Jews there would serve a ‘concentration’ function similar to Hitler’s death camps … make it easier to kill the Jews again."

The only thing recent events would cause me to change about all that is the sentence that reads "everyone involved should go on acting as if the peace process might work, because that’s the only chance it will." Now I wonder whether, even if the Camp David summit had succeeded, any peace produced by the peace process would have meant peace. It seems clear that the terrible facts, the terrible acts of history, geography, religious fundamentalism and fundamental human nature will doom any temporary, negotiated peace to erupt sooner or later into war. Now I think that rather than "go on acting as if the peace process might work," it’s time to start contemplating the possibility that the war process has begun, a war that will not end, or will end only in intolerable slaughter. It’s time to think about worst-case scenarios because there are no alternatives, there are nothing but worst cases to come.

I hope I’m wrong, but history doesn’t give much hope for optimism. In the meantime, though, perhaps it’s worth examining who’s really to blame for the horror to come.

Should we blame the Israelis or the Palestinians, or are they both victims of a malignant fate? Despite being in most respects a liberal, I’ve developed over the past few years a sympathy for the secular hard-liners in Israel. I emphasize secular to make clear I’m not thinking about the foolish messianic rabbis and settlement fanatics who falsely attributed the Israeli victory in the 1967 war to God rather than to the Israeli Defense Force. The ones who kept their own children out of the army and forced the children of secular Israelis to risk their lives for them, all the while making themselves an obstacle to any possible peace because they knew God wanted certain political boundaries and would make sure the rabbis got what they wanted. God would take care of the Jews. Just as he did from 1938 to 1945.

Isn’t it about time some of these rabbis began asking themselves just where God was, what exactly He was doing in Europe in the 1940’s; if He exists, just what has He done for the Jewish people lately, except look on while they suffered one Holocaust and head for another?

No, my sympathy has been for secular hard-liners who didn’t trust the peace process because they didn’t want to trust the fate of the Jewish people once again to the goodwill of the "international community."

Here is the way I interpret the unspoken rationale for the secular hard-line position: It goes back to Hitler. In the 1930’s and 1940’s, neither the world nor the Jews (anyway not much of the world, not many of the Jews) believed Hitler meant what he said. Exterminate the Jews of Europe? Just rhetoric, hate speech. Engage him in a peace process and he’d behave like a rational statesman. He wouldn’t actually do what he said he wanted to do (extermination and all that rhetoric), and the world wouldn’t let anything like that happen. But in fact he meant it, he did it and the world let it happen.

Fifty years later, 6 million Jews are surrounded by hundreds of millions of Muslims in states whose rulers, whose preachers, whose grade-school textbooks for God’s sake, call for the destruction of the state of Israel, whose controlled news media routinely whip up frenzied hatred for evil Jews based on ancient sicko conspiracy theories like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and up-to-the-minute Holocaust-denial slime. Six million people facing a Palestinian "peace partner" whose leaders openly speak to their own people of the peace process as the "first step" to the ultimate goal–the destruction of the Jewish state.

It was "just rhetoric," the international community said of Hitler’s extermination threats in the 30’s and 40’s. It’s "just rhetoric," the international community says of Palestinian textbooks that use Hitlerian language about the Jews. Go ahead, make the next withdrawal, the next compromise, the U.S. says to the Israelis; the textbook hate is irrelevant. Pretty soon they’ll be so happy with the Internet and the benefits of globalization that they’ll forget about all that evil-Jew stuff in the textbooks. But it is the textbook hate that breeds the lynchers of Ramallah.

The secular hard-liners have essentially been saying: We made that mistake last time. We trusted the reassurances of the world last time. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. If we err this time, let’s not make the same mistake twice, let’s not err–suicidally–on the side of trust and good faith. The world didn’t exert itself to stop the last Holocaust from happening. This time, we’re not going to wait for help; if we’re going to go down this time, we’ll go down fighting and take a lot of them with us.

But this doesn’t mean blame the Palestinian people–although I would say blame their leaders, and the cynical rulers of the rest of the Arab world, and the hate-filled Islamic fundamentalists who have done so much to turn the difficult process of resolving two peoples’ historical tragedies into a holy war with no solution but terror and slaughter.

To an extent, Palestinians are themselves collateral victims of Hitler. They are the ones forced to live with the consequences of the world’s failure to stop Hitler and his Holocaust, when the remnant of the refugees and survivors arrived at their doorstep.

Frankly, if there were any justice in history (there isn’t), the people and the place that should bear the consequences of the aftermath of Hitler and the Holocaust, the ones who deserve to be displaced to make room for a state for the Jews, are the French. The cowardly failure of the French to lift a finger when Hitler illegally marched into the Rhineland in 1936, when the French Army had overwhelming military superiority–when Hitler was ready to flee at the first sign of resistance and when it might have ended his political career–is an enduring shame that current French governments compound by appeasing terrorists and sucking up to Saddam and enabling his exterminationist aims. Vichy lives!

If there were any justice, the Jews shouldn’t have been given a barren desert like Palestine as their homeland. A better solution would be Paris and the Loire Valley. If there were any justice in history, rather than dispossess the Palestinians, dispossess the French, history’s signature collaborators with evil.

Still, there may be some merit to the secular hard-liners’ argument that the Palestinians did have a state of their own, called Jordan, the greater part of the original British mandate. It was a state that included the entire West Bank, as well–until tinpot-dictator Arab leaders lost it when they tried to destroy the state of Israel in 1967. And made the West Bank the source of the horror that we witness now.

The objection to the secular hard-liners’ position has always been that they never offered any credible alternative to the peace process. But maybe there just was no alternative, no solution. A year or so ago, Commentary published a critique of the peace process that proposed an alternative policy: Take back the guns from Arafat’s Palestinian Authority. It didn’t sound workable; it probably would have gotten us to the same spiraling, out-of-control level of violence that we have now. But perhaps we would have ended up here, at this current moment of horror, no matter what the route–peace process or no peace process–because there are some problems that have no solutions, only tragic endings.

Still, it’s not clear tragedy was inevitable. If Yitzhak Rabin had lived, the peace process might not have died. Perhaps there was still time to make it work, if Israeli religious fanatics like Rabin’s assassin and Islamic suicide bombers hadn’t destroyed the original momentum of hope.

If neither the Jews nor the Palestinians deserve the blame for the horror under way; one has to wonder whether religion itself does. Some years ago, I recall a memorable argument with a very wise woman about the responsibility of religion for history’s tragedies. Look at the history of bloodshed, massacre, war and Holocaust throughout history–all over religion: The world would have been so much better off, I argued, without religion, without people slaughtering each other over the arrogant conviction they knew the truth about God when, in fact, no one does.

"I’m not sure," is what she said. "How do you know things wouldn’t have been much worse if there hadn’t been religion to restrain human nature?"

This was one of the darkest comments on the nature of human nature that one could imagine. It ranks up there with that line Max von Sydow delivered about the Holocaust in Hannah and Her Sisters: "Considering human nature, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened more often."

For a long time, I was half-persuaded by her counterargument–that the primal ugliness of human nature was to blame, that murderous religious fanaticism is an expression rather than a cause of that ugliness. Now I’m not sure. She had argued that things might be much worse without religion. I’m beginning to think things can’t possibly get much worse than they are with religion, because of religion.

But if religion is the Formal Cause of this current horror, the Efficient Cause (in the Aristotelian distinction, the most proximate cause) is Adolf Hitler.

The world is still seeing, the Jews and everyone in the Middle East are still suffering, the consequences of Hitler’s evil–an evil made possible by 19 centuries of religious-sponsored anti-Semitism.

I find it fascinating every now and then when I come across some boosterish reference, in a work of popular history or some World War II greatest-generation tribute, to the idea that "we defeated Hitler." It is one of those moments when I suddenly feel far more Jewish than American; when I want to say, along the lines of the old joke, "Whaddya mean ‘defeated,’ white man?"

Hitler wasn’t defeated, not from the perspective of my people. In many respects, Hitler won. Hitler achieved his war aims to a huge degree. A number of astute analysts of Hitler’s wartime behavior have concluded that he placed a higher priority on murdering millions of Jews than even on winning the war. Why else, the historian J.P. Stern and others have argued, would he take scarce trains and troops that he desperately needed to resist the advance of the Red Army and shift them away from the eastern front, in order to speed up the process of shipping Jews to the death camps?

Hitler got what he wanted most. I don’t have the slightest sense at all that "we defeated Hitler." Or that he was defeated at all.

Certainly not by death. The traumatic, contested establishment of the state of Israel on land shared with Palestinians, the grudging sop thrown to the survivors and victims of Hitler by a world guilty for its failure to care, but not guilty enough to make it work; the immediate declaration of war by the surrounding Arab nations; the abandonment of the Jewish state to its own devices, and the constant state of war ever since–all this is yet another posthumous victory for Adolf Hitler. And now, with another holocaust in the offing, he must be grinning somewhere: He wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.

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Goodbye, All That: How Left Idiocies Drove Me to Flee

by Ron Rosenbaum, The New York Observer, 10/14/02

So I went up to the antiwar demonstration in Central Park this weekend, hoping to hear some persuasive arguments. After a couple of hours there, listening to speeches, reading the hate-America literature, I still don’t know what to think about Iraq—will an attack open a Pandora’s box, or close one?—but I think I know what I feel about this antiwar movement, or at least many of the flock who showed up in the Sheep Meadow.

A movement of Marxist fringe groups and people who are unable to make moral distinctions. An inability summed up by a man holding a big poster that proudly identified him as "NYC TEACHER." The lesson "NYC TEACHER" had for the day was that "BUSH IS A DEVIL … HANDS OFF NORTH KOREA, IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN …. "

Yes, Bush is "a devil" compared to those enlightened regimes that torture and murder dissidents (like "NYC TEACHER"). Bush is certainly "a devil" compared to enlightened leaders like Kim Jong Il, who has reduced the North Korean people in his repulsive police state to eating moss on rocks; or to Saddam Hussein, who tortures and gasses opponents, and starves his people to fund his germ-war labs; or to the Taliban in Afghanistan, who beat women into burqas. Yes, surely compared to them, Bush is "a devil." Thank God New York’s schoolchildren are in such good hands.

Back in 1929, Robert Graves published a memoir with the endlessly evocative title Good-Bye to All That. He was leaving England, saying goodbye to a society he felt was deeply implicated, however triumphant, in the horrors he’d witnessed firsthand in the trenches of the First World War.

Goodbye to all that. The phrase occurred to me when I heard the sad news that Christopher Hitchens was leaving The Nation. Sad more for The Nation, a magazine I’ve read on and off since high school, now deprived of an important dissenting voice amidst lockstep Left opinion. Mr. Hitchens was valuable to The Nation, to the Left as a whole, I argued back on Jan. 14 in these pages, because he challenged "the Left to recognize the terrorists not as somewhat misguided spokesmen for the wretched of the earth, but as ‘Islamo-fascists’—theocratic oppressors of the wretched of the earth." He was leaving in part, he said, because he’d grown tired of trying to make this case in a venue that had become what he called "an echo chamber of those who believe that John Ashcroft is a greater menace than Osama bin Laden."

The Nation still has assets of course: the incomparable polymath literary critic, John Leonard; the fierce polemical intelligence of Katha Pollit, which I admire however much I might disagree with her; some serious investigative reporters. And recently Jack Newfield, who long ago co-authored an important book on the populist tradition—still a faint hope for a non-Marxist Left in America.

But Mr. Hitchens’ loss is a loss not just for the magazine, but for the entire Left; it’s important that America have an intelligent opposition, with a critique not dependent on knee-jerk, neo-Marxist idiocy. And it’s important that potential constituents of that opposition, like Nation readers, be exposed to a brilliant dissenter like Christopher Hitchens.

And the level of idiocy one finds in knee-jerk Left oppositionalism is sometimes astonishing. I’d like to focus on two particular examples that have led me to want to say my own goodbye-to-all-that as well.

Before I get into the two idiocies that tipped the scale for me, I want to make clear that saying goodbye to idiocies on the Left doesn’t mean becoming a conservative, neo- or otherwise. I think I made that clear in a column published here on Jan. 28 of this year, "Where Was the Values Crowd When Dr. King Needed Them?" In that column, I argued that just as the Left had failed to come to terms with its history of indifference to (at best) and support for (at worst) genocidal Marxist regimes abroad, the Right has failed to come to terms with its history of indifference to (at best) and support for (at worst) racism and racist political allies here at home.

It’s ironic, considering what I’m about to write, that I got a nice note from that hard-core Old Red folkie, Pete Seeger, thanking me for my Dr. King column. But you know, I still can understand people like Pete Seeger joining the Party back in the 30’s during the Depression, when it looked like unregulated capitalism had cruelly immiserated America, when racism and lynchings reigned down South and it looked (looked, I said) as if the Soviet Union was the only force willing to stand up to Hitler. But to cling to Marxism now, after all we’ve learned in the past 50 years—not just about the Soviet Union, but China and Cambodia … ?

I must confess that my own learning curve was on the slow side, having grown up reading The Nation and The New Republic and believing that the evils of Soviet Communism were a figment of J. Edgar Hoover’s imagination. My slow learning curve had a lot to do as well with coming of age during the Vietnam War and covering antiwar demonstrations, where I found myself seduced by the brilliant Groucho Marxism of Abbie Hoffman (I still miss his anarchic spirit). And (more culpably) I was fascinated by the Dostoevskian moral absolutism of the Weather Underground, although never, thank God, by the pretensions of Marxism to be a "science of history."

I still identify myself as a contrarian, libertarian, pessimist, secular-humanist, anti-materialist liberal Democrat who distrusts the worship of "the wisdom of the market." Someone who was outraged (and outspoken in these pages) about the Bush-Baker election tactics in Florida, for instance. But not stupid enough to think we’d be better off with Al Gore as President now; not stupid enough to think Al Gore is smart. (See my Nov. 6, 2000, column, "Al’s Screwy Scrawlings Can’t Pass for Intelligence"). Anyway, all this is a preface to the Tale of Two Idiocies that has led to my own goodbye-to-all-that moment.

Let’s begin with the little idiocy, the later one, because I think it was the straw that broke the camel’s back. In fact, I think I came across it shortly before I had heard of Mr. Hitchens’ farewell. One irony of it is that this little bit of idiocy was penned by a former Hitchens acolyte, a sometime Nation writer now living in London who appended a cruel little addendum to what ostensibly was a review, in London’s Times Literary Supplement, of Tom Hanks’ Road to Perdition.

At the close of an uninspired review of an uninspired film (How many times must wannabe intellectuals quote Robert Warshow when speaking of gangster films? Shouldn’t there be some kind of statute of limitations?), the writer graces us with this final reflection:

"Still, if Road to Perdition ultimately fails as entertainment, it offers rich material for allegory. Maybe it was because I attended a screening on Sept. 11, but I couldn’t help seeing Hanks as an American everyman, a pure-hearted killer who will commit no end of mayhem to ensure a better life for his children. Imagine Willie Loman with a tommy gun, and you’ll see what I mean. ‘You dirty rats! Attention must be paid.’"

But of course! What a brilliant point he’s making in the course of preening his anti-Americanism before his audience of U.K. intellectuals. What does Sept. 11 remind him of? The way Americans are killers. Sept. 11 becomes, in his lovely leap of logic, really about Americans being pure-hearted killers capable of "no end of mayhem," infinite evil deeds. Doesn’t everybody think that way? (Everybody in his little circle, I imagine). Sept. 11 reminds them that Americans are first and foremost murderers, so let’s not spend a moment acknowledging that little matter of Sept. 11 being a day on which 3,000 Americans were murdered by the "pure-hearted killers" of Al Qaeda. Who, when not committing mass murder, stone women as punishment, torture gays, crush free thought by executing dissidents. No, they get a pass (and the 3,000 become non-persons). Because they hate America, they must be for liberation, and so we can’t blame them; we must accuse ourselves of being killers. In fact, we should thank them for providing our witty writer with an occasion for reminding the world that the "American everyman" is a killer.

That one paragraph is a useful compression of the entire post-9/11 idiocy of one wing of the Left. That’s what Sept. 11 has come to mean to much of the Left: a wake-up call for American self-hatred. Mr. Hitchens was one of the few who challenged that consensus.

But when I say goodbye-to-all-that, it’s a goodbye that’s been brewing ever since the Really Big Idiocy, the one I encountered barely a month after Sept. 11, from a more illustrious figure on the Left, an academic Left paragon.

It was a mixed gathering with a heavy representation of Left academics, and people were going around the room and speaking about the attacks and the response. Over and over, one heard variations on the theme of, "Gee, it’s terrible about all those people who died in the towers and all"—that had already become the pro forma disclaimer/preface for America-bashing—"but maybe it’s a wake-up call for us to recognize how bad we are, Why They Hate Us." The implication was evident: We deserved it. It would be a salutary lesson. It was the Pat Robertson wing of the Left in full flower: Sinful America deserved this Judgment from the sky. Crocodile tears could be shed for those people who died in the towers, but those buildings were so ugly, they were such eyesores, they were a symbol of globalist hubris—it was as if the terrorists who flew the planes into the towers were really architectural critics, flying Herbert Muschamps, not mass murderers.

No, we must search for the "root causes," the reasons to blame the victims for their unfortunate but symbolically appropriate deaths. And on and on, until I felt myself already beginning to say goodbye to the culture that produced this kind of cruel, lockstep thinking. Until finally, the coup de grâce—the Big Idiocy, the idiocy di tutti idiocies. It came from the very well-respected and influential academic, who said that there was at least one thing that was to be welcomed about 9/11: It might give Americans the impetus to do "what the Germans had done in the 60’s"—make an honest reassessment of their past and its origins, as a way to renewal.

Reassessment of our past: Clearly he was speaking admiringly of the 60’s generation in Germany coming to terms with its Nazi past, with Germany’s embrace of Hitler.

At that point, having sat silently through an accumulation of self-hating anti-Americanism, I couldn’t take it any more. I’m not a demonstrative patriot; I don’t believe in putting God in the Pledge of Allegiance, for instance. I don’t believe in making people pledge at all—there’s something collectivist about it. But this last was too much: We should be grateful for 9/11 because it would allow us to reassess our shameful, even Nazi-like, past?

"Isn’t there an implicit analogy you’re making between America and Nazi Germany?" I asked. "It’s just an analogy," he said. Well, goodbye to all that, goodbye to the entire mind-set behind it: the inability to distinguish America’s sporadic blundering depradations (dissent from which was sometimes successful) from "Germany’s past," Hitlerism. It was "just an analogy." O.K., then, let me make an analogy here, one that I believe goes to the "root cause" of Left idiocy of this sort.

The analogy that occurred to me grew out of a conversation I had several years ago with the philosopher Berel Lang, author of Act and Idea in the Nazi Genocide, a talk that took place in the course of researching my book, Explaining Hitler. Mr. Lang is an extremely thoughtful and meticulous thinker on the question of degrees of evil, and the role of intentionality in determining them. He was speaking about the question of whether one could say there was "a history of evil"—whether Hitler represented a new fact, a new landmark in that history, and if so, what the next step might be.

I suggested the "next step" might be Holocaust denial, because the deniers had found a diabolical way to twist the knife, compounding the pain of the survivors by negating and slandering the memory of the murdered.

Mr. Lang demurred, because he had his own notion of what the next step in the history of evil might be. The paradigm for it, he told me, was the postwar career of Martin Heidegger, the Nazi-friendly philosopher beloved to distraction by postmodernists (and Hannah Arendt).

All of whom apologized for him, despite an increasingly damning series of revelations that disclosed his toadying to Hitler’s thugs in order to attain professional advancement, hailing Hitler’s Reich as the ultimate synthesis of politics and his philosophy.

But that wasn’t what made Heidegger a new chapter, Mr. Lang said; it was his astonishing postwar behavior. After everything came out, after it was no longer possible to deny at least post facto knowledge of the Holocaust, nothing changed for Heidegger. He felt no need to incorporate what happened into his philosophy. "His silence," Mr. Lang said, "it wasn’t even denial. For him, it wasn’t important! It wasn’t important …. Now if you ask which of them is worse … the Revisionists [Holocaust deniers] deny it occurred, but their official position, at least, is that if it occurred, it would have been wrong. But Heidegger knows it occurred, but it’s just not important—it’s not something to distort history to deny. For Heidegger, this is not history to concern oneself with."

Not history to concern oneself with ….

Here’s the analogy: Heidegger’s peculiar neutrality-slash-denial about Nazism and the Holocaust after the facts had come out, and the contemporary Left’s curious neutrality-slash-denial after the facts had come out about Marxist genocides—in Russia, in China, in Cambodia, after 20 million, 50 million, who knows how many millions had been slaughtered. Not all of the Left; many were honorable opponents. But for many others, it just hasn’t registered, it just hasn’t been incorporated into their "analysis" of history and human nature; it just hasn’t been factored in. America is still the one and only evil empire. The silence of the Left, or the exclusive focus of the Left, on America’s alleged crimes over the past half-century, the disdainful sneering at America’s deplorable "Cold War mentality"—none of this has to be reassessed in light of the evidence of genocides that surpassed Hitler’s, all in the name of a Marxist ideology. An ideology that doesn’t need to be reassessed. As if it was maybe just an accident that Marxist-Leninist regimes turned totalitarian and genocidal. No connection there. The judgment that McCarthyism was the chief crime of the Cold War era doesn’t need a bit of a rethink, even when put up against the mass murder of dissidents by Marxist states.

The point is, all empires commit crimes; in the past century, ours were by far the lesser of evils. But this sedulous denial of even the possibility of misjudgment in the hierarchy of evils protects and insulates this wing of the Left from an inconvenient reconsideration of whether America actually is the worst force on the planet. This blind spot, this stunning lack of historical perspective, robs much of the American Left of intellectual credibility. And makes it easy for idiocies large and small to be uttered reflexively. (Perhaps the suggestion I recently saw on the Instapundit.com Web site calling for an "Anti-Idiotarian" party might be appropriate.)

Recently I saw the strangest documentary, a film with a title that sounds like a Woody Allen joke: Blind Spot: Hitler’s Secretary. It’s a New York Film Festival pick and well worth seeing, just for the example of willed, obtuse blindness on the part of the secretary when she claims that she was insulated from all the terrible things happening during the war. But even Hitler’s secretary—unlike Heidegger, unlike the knee-jerk anti-American Left—feels the need to make some gesture of dismay at her "blind spot" in retrospect. But not the know-it-alls of the Left, who have never been wrong about anything since they adopted Marxism as their cult in college. What would the harm be in admitting that one didn’t know as much at in college as history has taught us now?

But noooo … (as John Belushi liked to say). Instead, we get evasions and tortuous rationalizations like the Slavoj Ziz^ek zigzag: This extremely fashionable postmodern Marxist academic will concede the tens of millions murdered by Stalin, etc., but it’s "different" from the millions murdered by Hitler, because the Soviet project was built on good intentions, on utopian aspirations; the tens of millions dead were an unfortunate side effect, a kind of unfortunate, accidental departure from the noble Leninist path that still must be pursued.

It’s sad, though, because one senses that Mr. Hitchens forced a lot of people on the Left to confront their blind spot, their on-bended-knee obeisance to anyone in the Third World who posed as a "liberator," from Mao to Castro to Arafat and the Taliban. This was why Mr. Hitchens was so valuable and hopeful in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, hammering away at the point that the Islamo-fascists weren’t friends of the oppressed, they were oppressors—of women, gays, poets and all dissenters.

But now, a year later, it seems that despite Mr. Hitchens and a few other voices, such as Todd Gitlin’s, the blind-spot types have won out on the Left—the blind spot to Marxist genocide obscuring any evil but America’s. You could see it at the Sheeps Meadow. You can see it in the hysterical seizure on Enron and other corporate scandals: See, we were right all along—corporations and businessmen are (surprise!) greedheads. This excuses averting their eyes from anti-American terrorism—from people and regimes preparing to kill Americans rather than merely diminish their 401(k)’s. Enron was the fig leaf many on the American Left needed to return to their customary hatred of America. Because America isn’t perfect, it must be evil. Because Marxist regimes make claims of perfection, they must be good.

So, for my part, goodbye to all that. Goodbye to a culture of blindness that tolerates, as part of "peace marches," women wearing suicide-bomber belts as bikinis. (See the accompanying photo of the "peace" march in Madrid. "Peace" somehow doesn’t exclude blowing up Jewish children.)

Goodbye to the brilliant thinkers of the Left who believe it’s the very height of wit to make fun of George W. Bush’s intelligence—thereby establishing, of course, how very, very smart they are. Mr. Bush may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer (I think he’s more ill-informed and lazy than dumb). But they are guilty of a historical stupidity on a far greater scale, in their blind spot about Marxist genocides. It’s a failure of self-knowledge and intellectual responsibility that far outweighs Bush’s, because they’re supposed to be so very smart.

Goodbye to paralysis by moral equivalence: Remind me again, was it John Ashcroft or Fidel Castro who put H.I.V. sufferers in concentration camps?

Goodbye to the deluded and pathetic sophistry of postmodernists of the Left, who believe their unreadable, jargon-clotted theory-sophistry somehow helps liberate the wretched of the earth. If they really believe in serving the cause of liberation, why don’t they quit their evil-capitalist-subsidized jobs and go teach literacy in a Third World starved for the insights of Foucault?

Goodbye to people who have demonstrated that what terror means to them is the terror of ever having to admit they were wrong, the terror of allowing the hideous facts of history to impinge upon their insulated ideology.

Goodbye to all those who have evidently adopted as their own, a version of the simpering motto of the movie Love Story. Remember "Love means never having to say you’re sorry"?

I guess today, Left means never having to say you’re sorry.

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The New Anti-Semitism

Melanie Phillips - March 22, 2003

Want to make yourself really, really unpopular if you’re a Jew? Try saying that the world is witnessing a terrifying firestorm of hatred directed at Israel and the Jewish people, in which the British and Europeans are deeply implicated. Since it is now a given in many circles that Israel is a threat to the world equal to North Korea, and that Ariel Sharon is a cross between Martin Bormann and Hendrik Verwoerd, you will find yourself accused of using the Holocaust to avoid any criticism of Israel’s behaviour. Because, well, you know, you Jews always stick together and are mighty quick to deal that persecution card.

Anyone who holds that view may as well skip what follows. More objective and fair-minded souls, however, might be deeply alarmed to learn of the evidence provided at a recent conference on anti-Semitism and the media at the Vidal Sassoon Centre for the Study of Anti-Semitism in Jerusalem.

This was scarcely a gathering of the Ariel Sharon fan club. Among academics and journalists from Israel, Europe, Britain and America were several left-wingers and liberals who were deeply hostile to Israel’s Likud government, believed that the settlements should be dismantled, and were troubled by the behaviour of some of Israel’s military. ‘There’s no doubt that Israel is committing human-rights violations on the West Bank,’ said Professor Yehuda Bauer, the distinguished Holocaust expert.

But there was equally no doubt, from what he and others said, that anti-Zionism is now being used to cloak a terrifying nexus between genocidal Arab and Islamist hatred of the Jews and deep-seated European prejudices.

Anti-Semitism is protean, mutating over the centuries into new forms. Now it has changed again, into a shape which requires a new way of thinking and a new vocabulary. The new anti-Semitism does not discriminate against Jews as individuals on account of their race. Instead, it is centred on Israel, and the denial to the Jewish people alone of the right of self-determination.

This is nothing to do with the settlements or the West Bank. Indeed, the language being used exposes as a cruel delusion the common belief that the Middle East crisis would be solved by the creation of a Palestinian state.

The key motif is a kind of Holocaust inversion, with the Israelis being demonised as Nazis and the Palestinians being regarded as the new Jews. Israel and the Jews are being systematically delegitimised and dehumanised — a necessary prelude to their destruction — with both Islamists and the Western media using anti-Zionism as a fig-leaf for prejudices rooted in both mediaeval Christian and Nazi demonology.

This has produced an Orwellian situation in which hatred of the Jews now marches behind the Left’s banner of anti-racism and human rights, giving rise not merely to distortions, fabrications and slander about Israel in the media but also to mainstream articles discussing the malign power of the Jews over American and world policy.

The Jerusalem conference heard chilling presentations about a phenomenon barely discussed in Britain: the virulent Arab and Muslim hatred of the Jews. This goes far beyond even the desire to finish off Israel as a Jewish state. Anti-Jewish hatred plays a crucial role in the fanatical jihadism that now threatens all of us in the West, pouring out in television programmes, newspapers and religious sermons throughout the Arab and Muslim world, and amounting to a new warrant for genocide.

The dominant message is that Jewish power amounts to a conspiracy to destroy Islam and take over the whole world. Truly mad theories circulate on Islamist Internet sites which have now convinced untold numbers of Arabs and Muslims that the Jews were behind both 9/11 and the Columbia space-shuttle disaster. Egyptian television transmitted a 41-part series which presented the notorious Tsarist forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion — which purported to be a Jewish plot to control the world — as the truth. (This has prompted some Arab intellectuals to condemn such propaganda as both untrue and a tactical error, but these dissidents remain a small minority.) Meanwhile, Saudi media and religious sermons incite the murder of Jews.

According to the Arabic scholar Professor Menachem Milsom, this Arab and Islamist propaganda persistently dehumanised Jews by representing them as apes and pigs. A preacher at the totemic Haram mosque in Mecca said the Jews were ‘evil offspring’, the ‘destroyers of God’s word’, ‘priest murderers’ and the ‘scum of the human race’. The mediaeval Christian blood libel — the claim that the Jews kill children and drink their blood — has surfaced time and again in prestigious Arab newspapers.

And Zionism was equated with Nazism; just as the Nazis believed in the superiority of the ‘Aryan’ race, so Zionists (sic) believed they were the chosen people, which justified their own military expansion. This equation was not confined to a marginal few. Abu Mazen, said Milsom, the Palestinian Authority intellectual who is being talked about as Yasser Arafat’s prime minister in a ‘reformed’ administration, wrote as much in his doctoral thesis — in which he also said that the Zionists gave the Nazis permission to treat the Jews as they wished so long as this guaranteed their immigration to Palestine.

These sick outpourings are not so much religious or even fundamentalist doctrines as rooted in a fanatical totalitarian ideology. As Professor Bauer observed, the driving aim is the Islamic dictatorship of the world. Realisation of this utopia necessitates the destruction of the foundation creeds of Western culture, Judaism and Christianity — and especially Israel, the supposed personification of Western global power-lust, which was planted as an incubus on Arab soil as a result of the Holocaust.

Holocaust denial is therefore central to Arab anti-Semitism, the prejudice which such historical falsehood has helped to forge a strategic alliance with Europe. For it absolves Europe of its guilt over the Jews, and replaces it with European guilt towards Arabs displaced as a result of the Holocaust.

Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, Europeans have eagerly embraced the Nazification of the Jews, a process which really got under way with Israel’s disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This marked the beginning of the media’s systematic inversion of Israeli self-defence as aggression, along with double-standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to do with delegitimising the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its dismantling.

So the conference heard about German accusations that Israel was using Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of the Nazification of Israel in Sweden, where there were charges that the Israelis were exterminating the Palestinians, that the media were controlled by Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel, and that influential Jewish lobby groups were ‘spraying journalists with poison’.

It heard that in France Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate if they challenged the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) — which has been playing to packed houses in Paris — about the obsessive malevolence towards Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British media described Israel’s ‘death squads’, ‘killing fields’ and ‘executioners’ while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as ‘gentle’, ‘religious’ and ‘kind’. It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who is saying, ‘Surely they are not going to kill me again.’

And of course there was Jenin, the so-called ‘massacre’ or ‘genocide’ reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians died, of whom more than half were terrorists, while Israel sustained (for it) the huge loss of 45 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught Palestinian public was — on this and other occasions — whipped up by biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact, contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.

Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly genocidal programme. But an even more striking feature is that, while the old anti-Semitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political Left. So, as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more counterintuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the Left also subscribe to this analysis — and even to the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid — handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new anti-Semitism as Jewish paranoia or Islamophobia.

So what is the explanation for the Left’s position? Partly, it’s the old anti-imperialist and anti-West prejudice. Partly, it’s the view that only the powerless can be victims; so Third World people can never be murderers, and any self-defence by Western societies such as Israel must instead be aggression. Partly, it’s the post-modern destruction of objectivity and truth, which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the Left takes an axe to morality and self-restraint, it’s a golden opportunity to pulverise the very people who invented the damn rules in the first place.

A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the real point. The Left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the Left as a protection against the implosion of its whole ideological position.

So the evidence is being denied, and truth is being stood on its head. The result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction, and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face.

Hyperlinks and emphasis added by PAC

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An Old Evil Raises Its Weary Head

JOSEF JOFFE , Time, Europe,  November 17, 2003 | Vol. 162 No. 19

General Reinhard Gunzel was the commander of Germany's fabled Special Ops force, the KSK. No more. Last Tuesday, he was sacked for writing a letter to an obscure backbencher named Martin Hohmann. Normally, penning a letter to a parliamentarian hardly qualifies as high crime and misdemeanor. Germany is different, and for good reason.

In his missive, the general praised the deputy for an "excellent speech" and assured him that "the majority of our people shares your thoughts." What had Herr Hohmann said? He'd called the Jews not a nation of victims but a "nation of perpetrators," responsible for millionfold murder in the name of socialism and bolshevism. As "proof" he adduced Karl Marx, the son of converted Jewish parents, who had invented it all; Henry Ford, who detected the bloody Jewish hand behind Soviet communism in his infamous 1920s tract, The International Jew, which reads like an American version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; and finally, those Jews who were prominent leaders of the Bolshevik takeover: Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev. Never mind that Lenin, the real Mr. Big, was no more Jewish than Hohmann. Never mind that thousands of Jewish communists were purged and murdered by Stalin. The Jews had done it, and now to Hohmann's dialectical somersault: Of course, this verdict "may sound horrible," he mused, but after all, isn't this precisely the "same logic" that led to the stigmatization of Germany as a "nation of perpetrators?"

For non-Germans, this screed cries out for decoding. The unspoken logic is this: if the Jews were as bad, or worse, than our forefathers, then they have no special moral claim on us. The original Holocaust was invented not by us, but by them; so let them stop pointing their fingers at us. If we are criminals, so are they. But if they aren't, how can we be? Thus, the score is evened, and we are (almost) out of the moral doghouse.

Is this anti-Semitism? The denigration and demonization, the attribution of boundless power and evil, clearly are classic signs of Jew hatred. But the more interesting question is this: Is anti-Semitism on a roll in Germany, 60 years after Auschwitz? The answer is no.

Hence Günzel's immediate dismissal by Defense Minister Peter Struck, who called him "a confused and lonely general who agreed with an even more confused statement by a conservative member of parliament." Hence the uniform condemnation of both men in the opinion pages of the German press. But there is more significant evidence still.

Last year, the American Jewish Committee surveyed the opinions of 1,250 Germans. The news is pretty good: only 17% said they would rather not have a Jew as neighbor; far less welcome were Arabs (43%) and Africans (26%). Do Jews have too much influence? No, said 52%, while 21% had no opinion.

Seven out of 10 thought it "exceedingly" or "very important" that Germans learn about the Holocaust. Three-quarters claimed never to have heard "anti-Semitic statements." Though there were no comparative data, my bet is that in Germany the "AQ" (or "anti-Semitism quotient") is no higher — and perhaps even lower — than in neighboring West European countries.

So, can we sleep sound and tight? No. The problem with such data is that post-Holocaust anti-Semitism is enveloped in a most powerful taboo — people hide it and surveys underreport it. But perhaps there's another way to measure it. Judging from the news out of Brussels last week, one might surmise that some anti-Israelism is a form of sublimated anti-Semitism. To hate Jews is not permissible in polite society, but to loathe Israel, and especially its Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, carries no such stigma. One can certainly oppose Israeli policy without being an anti-Semite. But something more than policy differences are behind the astounding poll released by the E.U. last week, which shows that six out of 10 Europeans regard Israel as the greatest threat to world peace, ahead of North Korea and Iran.

The results, said European Commission President Romano Prodi, "point to the continued existence of a bias that must be condemned out of hand." He might also have asked whether Israel has become the über-Jew, a legitimate target where individual Jews are not. There is a quip ascribed to the Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex: "The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz," meaning that Germans (and all of Europe that let it happen) do not want to live under the burden of the Holocaust forever. Hence the projection of a guilt — as most recently executed by Martin Hohmann — that evens the score and lightens the burden of moral responsibility.

If this is the bad news, what is the good news? It is obvious: the demise of "classical" anti-Semitism in Europe — of persecution, expulsion and murder. These fires have burned out. After a millennium of bloodshed, that is the best news of all.

Josef Joffe is editor of the German weekly newspaper Die Zeit

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