October 28, 2004
Missing the Cutoff
In his column Sunday, Thomas wrote:
But such talk is also indicative of a trend in the Arab media, after a century of Arab-Jewish strife, where if you want to brand someone as illegitimate, just call him a "Jew." Indeed, this trend has widened since 9/11. Now you find a steadily rising perception across the Arab-Muslim world that the great enemy of Islam is JIA - "Jews, Israel and America," all lumped together in a single threat.
I thought that his claim that anti-Americanism and antisemitism were getting much worse in the Arab world since 9/11 was incorrect. I wasn't sure. I just found a letter I wrote (but never sent) about an opinion piece covering this topic from May, 2000. In other words, a few months before Camp David, when Ehud Barak was PM, the ugly antisemitic rhetoric of the Arab world was already quite prevelant. As David A Harris of the American Jewish Committee noted in "Peace and Poison in the Middle East.":
As Israeli and Palestinian negotiators move toward a much-awaited permanent settlement, there has been a shocking rise in vitriolic anti-Semitism across the Arab world.And that's just the start. It was nice to find a contemporaneous account with evidenc of the explosion in antisemtism prior to 9/11.This extraordinary paradox of Israeli and Arab political leaders attempting to build peace while official Arab media, schools, religious leaders, and intellectuals actively demonize the Jewish people is startling.
When the Islamic Mufti of Jerusalem made deeply painful comments repudiating the facts of the Holocaust, they received wide attention in the Western world because they came during the remarkable visit to Israel of Pope John Paul II.
Likewise, when the official Syrian government newspaper Tishreen recently asserted that “Zionists created the Holocaust myth to blackmail and terrorize the world’s intellectuals and politicians,” the editorial gained broad attention and condemnation because it appeared amid efforts to jump-start the stalled Israeli-Syrian peace talks.
Less noted was the fact that these two outrages are the rule, not the exception.
Across the Arab world the language of Holocaust denial has become common. Editorials and columns similar to the one in Tishreen can be found in Al-Ahram, Al-Akhbar, and Al-Gumhuriya, three of the official daily newspapers in Egypt.
I don't believe that Friedman did his homework on this one. He thought he had an argument and bothered to check to see if reality matched his (foregone) conclusion.
Crossposted on Israpundit and Doubting Thomas. Posted by SoccerDad at October 28, 2004 12:25 AM