- LONDON - In a column in last
week's Spectator, Petronella Wyatt noted that "since September 11,
anti-Semitism and its open expression has become respectable at London
dinner tables."
-
- This is an accurate observation and cannot be avoided
by simply staying at home.
-
- Recently, the ambassador of a major EU country (France
-ed) politely told a gathering at my home that the current troubles in
the world were all because of "that shitty little country
Israel."
-
- "Why," he asked, "should the world be
in danger of World War Three because of those people?"
-
- At a private lunch last month, the hostess--doyenne of
London's political salon scene--made a remark to the effect that she
couldn't
stand Jews, and everything happening to them was their own fault.
-
- When this was greeted with a shocked silence, she chided
her guests on what she assumed was their hypocrisy. "Oh, come
on,"
she said, "you all feel like that."
-
- Once, that remark would have cost her license as a
serious
political hostess, but clearly she believes the zeitgeist is blowing her
way.
-
- The editor of a major British newspaper came to our home,
and I can tell Petronella Wyatt that it can be just as awkward with good
friends at lunch as it is with strangers at dinner.
-
- The editor is a decent man, but his paper habitually
blames Israel's "opposition to peace" for the problems in the
Middle East and lectures them to negotiate. "But, look," he was
asked, "Arafat does not believe in the right of the Jewish people
to a state. How can the Israelis negotiate in that situation?"
-
- The editor replied with disarming honesty: "You
have put your finger on the weak point in our argument."
-
- All this is not as bad as it seems. True, these remarks
are exceptionally painful for some British Jews who feel beleaguered aliens
in their own land. For myself, it merits only a shrug.
-
- One is irritated when, as last October, the community
hall of a north London synagogue burnt down in what police labelled a
racist
arson attack, and the matter barely rated a mention except in the Jewish
press.
-
- The Monday after the triple suicide bombings in Israel
that killed 26 and injured around 200, the Evening Standard turned to
Charles
Glass, an old anti-Israel hand. Glass wrote: "Palestinians kill
Israelis.
Israelis kill Palestinians. Who killed first? No one remembers, and it
does not matter."
-
- For the past 25 years, I've watched sad-faced Israeli
activists trudge around Western capitals with heavy hearts beating under
ill-fitting suits. They carry folders of transcripts and videotapes to
document the misrepresentations in the press and the moral hypocrisy of
the world towards Israel.
-
- They want to win the war of ideas on its merits. Their
attention to detail in translating the hate literature of the Middle East
and the hate-filled speeches of its leaders is commendable.
-
- It's enlightening to read, for example, their studies
of Syrian and Palestinian Authority school textbooks that explain to young
schoolchildren that the Jews are a people made up of rapists, murderers
and thieves.
-
- It is sad to learn that such PA textbooks are used by
the UN in its schools for Palestinian refugees. But something new is
"blowin'
in the wind."
-
- Today, after years in the media desert, Israel's experts
and front-line activists are slowly finding some media doors opening to
them. T hey may think it is their own perseverance. But I think it is the
daisy cutter effect.
-
- For years, I said that Jews were out of fashion. and
I understood why. The world was sick of the Middle East problem: why should
it be inconvenienced by the cost and the ripple effect of terrorism?
-
- The West defeated the Third Reich, and we Jews were no
longer in need of a lifeboat: indeed, today we would probably be safer
just about anywhere rather than the Middle East. But events in the past
year or so changed the equation, and our rehabilitation has begun. The
Arab/Muslim world overplayed its hand.
-
- Their first wrong move was the rejection of prime
minister
Ehud Barak's offer in 2000. Even if you looked at that proposal from an
Arab point of view and believed that a Palestinian state comprising 95
per cent of the West Bank and a shared Jerusalem was not sufficient, you
couldn't possibly argue that such a deal should be rejected out of
hand.
-
- The second mistake was launching the Aksa intifada after
rejecting that deal. Eventually, the world saw that it was not Ariel
Sharon's
walk on the Temple Mount that caused the new intifada (a walk pre-cleared
with the Muslim authorities) but Arafat's decision to escalate violence
for tactical reasons.
-
- The greatest error of all was when bin Laden, acting
in the name of the Arab/Muslim world, decided - with a total
incomprehension
of what this would entail--to blow up Lower Manhattan, and blow it up at
a time when the American administration was in the hands of Bush, Cheney
and Rumsfeld and not Clinton and Gore.
-
- The Arab street remained silent at best or cheered the
WTC bombing even as some of their leaders made ritual condemnations of
it. Almost overnight, a blindfold fell off America's eyes. Appeasement
didn't work.
-
- The problem was not Israel's intransigence, nor even
the conflict that comes from Israel's existence: the problem is
Islamism.
-
- Islam itself is split between Islam as a religion that
can be essentially peaceful-- endorsing the qualities of charity and mercy
- and militant Islam (Islamism), which is intolerant and expansionist.
Islam periodically goes into this expansionary phase and is now in
one.
-
- That is why in the past few years some mosques in the
West have seen violent incidents, including murders, as radical mullahs
fight moderates for supremacy. Militant Islam wants to be the dominant
force in the world.
-
- Its crusade has Muslims fighting Christians in Indonesia,
Sudan and Pakistan. Christians in Lebanon have largely fled. Muslim fights
Muslim in Algeria. Islamism has been on the move all right, but it hasn't
a chance now, because it finally woke up America.
-
- It took the blowing up of three planes on an airstrip
outside Jordan by Palestinian terrorists in 1970 to turn the world's
attention
to the Palestinian question. One regrets to say that it has taken a lot
more violence to get the world to focus on the true nature of
Islamism.
-
- Powerful as the truth may be, it needs a nudge from
16,000-pound
daisy-cutter bombs once in a while. The Arab/Muslim world's intransigence
comes into sharper focus when we see the Americans liberate Afghanistan
from the Taliban in six weeks and a cornered Arafat unable to go to the
bathroom without the risk of being blown into the next world.
-
- Nothing succeeds like powerful bombs, as bin Laden
explained
in his latest video release. "When people see a strong horse and a
weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse," he
said.
-
- "Some of the media said that in Holland, in one
of the centers, the number of people who accepted Islam during the days
that followed the operations [attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon] were
more than the people who accepted Islam in the past 11 years."
-
- Bin Laden understands the power of a successful show
of force all right, though he seems slow to grasp that America's horses
are stronger than his.
-
- Don't worry, Petronella. It is both sad and true that
the consequences of super-liberalism led to suicide bombers and intifadas
in Israel and to the attacks in America. But the US has shown it is no
paper tiger.
-
- All those people bad-mouthing the Jews and Israel will
quieten down. You are looking at the tail end of the train, but the engine
has already turned a corner and is going in the opposite direction.
-
- Nothing succeeds like success. America is driving this
train, and the world will get on board--though the last carriage may be
those London dinner parties.
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- http://www.jpost.com
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