AMR BARGISI
Cairo, Egypt
"But we are Semites ourselves!" That is what an urbane Egyptian journalist will likely reply to the charge that the Egyptian media is rife with anti-Semitism. But there are few places where Jews are blamed for so many of the world's ills, from carcinogenic pesticides to the war in Iraq. More distressing is that much of the pointing is being done by Egypt's self-described liberals -- the pro-democratic and anti-Islamist crowd on which the country's hopes for a more tolerant future supposedly rest.
The most recent episode began on Oct. 2, when the Anti-Defamation League issued a press release reporting "Surge in Anti-Semitic Messages on Online Finance Sites." An Egyptian journalist read about it in the Israeli daily "Maariv," and here is how the new, "liberal" Egyptian weekly Al-Youm As-Sabi headlined its report the next day: "Jews are the principal suspect in the financial crisis." The article ran alongside a photo of stock market readouts, captioned "why are cries against Jews growing louder in the U.S.?"
This was not the only instance in which Egypt's "liberal" intelligentsia found ways to blame Jews for the financial crisis. On Oct. 11, Abbas at-Tarabili, the editor in chief of the Al-Wafd daily -- the house organ of Egypt's leading "liberal" political party of the same name -- wrote a column purporting to show that Jews were merely manipulating the stock market as they had the price of gold in the late 1970s.
"The Jews played a filthy game," he wrote. "It is true that the Western countries -- the United States on top -- have a lot to lose, but all pours into the pockets of Jewish businessmen who control the stock markets of the world."
Two weeks later, Al-Masry Al-Youm, Egypt's largest independent newspaper and widely regarded as the country's only serious tribune for liberalism, ran a column baldly titled "The Jewish Conspiracy." The columnist, Khairi Ramadan, who also co-hosts one of the country's most successful talk shows, asked his readers not to ignore what is being said on the Internet "about a Jewish conspiracy in the end of Bush's term, in preparation for controlling the next president."
"The available information," wrote Mr. Ramadan, shows that "the Jews withdrew 400 billion dollars from Lehman Brothers a couple of weeks before it collapsed," adding that the collapse of the brokerage house was of a piece with the events of September 11, "when thousands of Jews did not go to the WTC."
These examples are especially notable because they have nothing to do with Israel or Zionism. They expose the falsehood -- popular with prominent scholars like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of last year's best-selling book "The Israel Lobby" -- that hatred of Jews is not one of the great motivating factors in the Arab world's overall objections to Israel.
But these examples also raise a serious question about what passes for liberalism in the Arab world. Why bother listening to these voices on matters of economics -- much less politics, democracy or human rights -- if they also propagate hateful conspiracy theories?
There's another question: Over the past eight years, the United States has invested huge resources in attempting to bring democracy to the Middle East. But it's not clear whether that project will succeed as long as America's natural allies in the region remain themselves so profoundly irrational and illiberal.
What can be done? Here's a modest suggestion. The Egyptian state and the country's newspapers go out of their way to make a leper of any author who expresses even remote sympathy with Israel. Perhaps Western institutions could adopt a similar practice, refusing to invite to their various functions any editors who allow their pages to become Jew-hatred platforms. The cold shoulder alone might get these lunch-eaters to change their tune.
Mr. Bargisi is a Cairo-based writer and a former Bartley Fellow at the Journal
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THE JIHADI AS NAZI, FROM 9/11 TO MUMBAI
Bradley Burston
Ha'aretz, December 3, 2008
"…Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, [one doctor] said: 'It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood.'… The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: 'Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks.… It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,' he said." Krishnakumar P. and Vicky Nanjappa, reporting from Mumbai, cited by Andrew Sullivan and Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic Online
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For the whole of my adult life, it irked me when my fellow Jews…accuse anti-Zionists of being anti-Semitic, and conflate anti-Israeli sentiment with the Nazis. I felt that the latter eroded the memory and the magnitude of the Holocaust, and that the former was a slightly more elegant way of telling people with whom one took issue, to shut the hell up.
Only this week did I realize my error. It turns out, that when Jews suspected that the Jihadi hated the Jew the way the Nazi hated the Jew, they were right. After all this time, I am embarrassed to admit that only when the monsters entered Chabad House in Mumbai, did I understand.
Monsters, not solely for what they did there, but, if the reports are to be believed, for the fact that they were able to do what they did were Malaysian students eager to learn about Judaism after having actually gotten to know the young couple who founded the center, after asking them for shelter in Chabad House, after telling them that they. Monsters, for having befriended these sweet people in order to better learn how to execute them. Monsters, for having targeted a young couple who had devoted their lives to helping others better live theirs, despite having had a baby who died of a genetic disease and a second child ill and under treatment far away in Israel.…
The hatred of the Jihadi for the Jew is such that—as in the case of the Nazis—the killing of Jews—anywhere they may be found—is an obligation on par with whatever other enemy, target, cause, mission, goal or creed they may be pursuing at the moment. Their hatred of the Jew is such that—as in the case of the Nazis—all tragedy that befalls the Jews was brought on by the Jews themselves. Their hatred of the Jew is such that even if a Jew rejects the concept of a state of Israel and is wholeheartedly opposed to Zionism, if he wears the clothing of a believing Jew—as in the case of victim Aryeh Leibish Teitelboim—he will be bound and tortured and put to death.…
"The Jews are a virus resembling AIDS, from which the entire world suffers," Sheikh Ibrahim Mudeiris said in a sermon broadcast on Palestinian Authority television shortly before Israel pulled out of Gaza in 2005. "You will find that the Jews were behind all the civil strife in this world. It was the Jews who provoked Nazism to wage war against the entire world, when the Jews, using the Zionist movement, got other countries to wage an economic war on Germany and to boycott German merchandise.…"
While waiting, hours and then days, for word of the fate of Gabi and Rivki Holtzberg, I happened onto the memoirs of the handful of survivors of a now-extinct Jewish community near Bialystok, Poland, where my father's uncle, Herschel Cinowitz, had been born. In 1941, when he was a young man, he escaped the Nazis by making his way to refuge in Bombay, later Mumbai.
This is the first thing that I learned: You don't have to be German to be a Nazi. The SS ruled Yedwabne, Herschel Cinowitz' little town, but the locals were only too pleased to do their work for them.… Forty of the Jews of Yedwabne were forced to dig graves, then were buried alive. The remainder, 1,440 in all, were taken to a large barn, where they were burned alive.…
The world has seen that the jihadi, in hating the Jew, the Christian, the Hindu, the Muslim of another denomination, has become—like the Nazi—the enemy of all peoples everywhere. The jihadi shows his love of death in brutality, sadistic executions, the self-righteous calm of the premeditated mass murderer, the blaming of the victim for the crime. One lesson of the Holocaust is that one can't afford to miss the signs and the intentions. My father's uncle saw them in time. At the time, Mumbai was his salvation. I'm only seeing it now.
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