Sinking Fast

Obama's multiplying Middle East failures.

Martin Peretz

The U.S. ship in the successor flotilla aiming to break the Israeli embargo of the Gaza Strip has been named The Audacity of Hope. It is a bad joke that Barack Obama deserves. His proven coldness toward Israel has emboldened these foolish and meretricious people (including the uproariously silly Alice Walker) to open yet another front against the Jewish state. Of course, their campaign is not really about the embargo. It is about the very existence of Israel. It is not genocide, but it is politicide, and this is also a crime against humanity. Is the president just a wee bit embarrassed by this unironic tribute to himself? I doubt it. If he is, he might consider taking the organizers to task for launching this campaign against a country whose bonds with the United States he has described as "unbreakable." Let us be clear. There is but one country in the world that many millions of people are encouraged to hate. Many of these people barely know the name "Israel." But they do know the word "Zionist," a more difficult concept, which nonetheless is for them a simple curse. And they also know the word "Jew." Still, given that there are only about 13 million Jews in the world, not many of these haters have ever seen a Jew, and many fewer have ever conversed with one. Once in Kashmir, almost five decades ago, I was happily sitting in a boat on serene Dal Lake, talking with its Muslim proprietor. He asked me what my nationality was, and I responded, "American, Jewish." "Oh, no!" he said. "And you are such a nice man." It was not my first word of self-definition that disgusted him. He quickly rowed me and my non-Jewish girlfriend back to shore. As if a Jew has anything at all to do with the life of an ordinary Kashmiri man. But he was riveted by his hatred.

Actually, I don’t fret that zillions of Muslims hate Jews and Israel. There is little we can do about it. There are almost no Jews in Muslim lands to suffer the effects of this hatred (they and their descendants are now mostly in Israel, where 800,000 of them arrived as refugees after 1948), and the Jews in Israel are incontrovertibly capable of defending themselves—ferociously. Roughly half of the planet’s Jews live in Israel. Much as the Jewish past is anchored in Zion, so much of the Jewish future will be charted in and from Zion.

One cannot deny that, generally, Muslims who hate Israel also hate America, Europe, and other Western societies. Multiculturalism has been a failure in Europe, while, here in the States, Obama has managed a dishonest public discourse with Muslims as if everything were hunky-dory, fabricating knowledge he did not have and which was false in the first place (like his Cairo narrative of the Barbary wars and the ensuing diplomacy), inventing wrongs against them to stir up progressive outrage (was the IRS really blocking contributions to legitimate Muslim charities?), taking sides in intra-civilizational disputes that put him on the side of religious orthodoxy and the narrow-souled of Islam. For a long time it was said that “homegrown” Islamic terrorism can’t happen here. But it has happened here, again and again. Are no conclusions to be drawn from this? Is alarm really just another form of Islamophobia?

An imperative that emerges from this reality is another one that the administration has ignored. That is immigration policy. Unless we formulate both a vision and a strategy for admitting people aspiring to be Americans that takes into account the country’s economic circumstances—i.e., its work-profile needs—and the dangers to our safety and security, we shall find in the end that we will flail around and simply discriminate against Muslims. This would be the worst consequence of sloughing off the matter. We cannot ignore that all the military conflicts in which our soldiers are engaged are struggles against Muslim regimes, Muslim movements, Muslim fanatics, and Muslim mythomaniacs. Still, there are millions of American citizens who are Muslims, loyal American citizens. And they, too, are endangered by the president’s pretense that tout va bien.