Why Arab/Muslim Anti-Semites are worse than the Nazis
22/01/2002
Why Arab/Muslim anti-Semites are worse than the Nazis
By Dennis Prager
WITH all the attention paid to how Muslims and Arabs in America feel
about the Islamic terrorists' attacks on America, it may come as
somewhat of surprise to learn about another anxious group of Americans -
Jews.
All Americans are worried about the America hatred among groups who
do not value human life. But Jews who know their history have
additional fears. We Jews have reasons to worry because a significant part of
humanity has a hatred of us indistinguishable in kind and intensity
from that of the Nazis.
The most cursory acquaintance with the Arab press and fundamentalist
mosque discourse around the world makes it clear that millions of Arabs
and Muslims loathe Jews and many want Jews dead. Not to mention the
hundreds of millions of Muslims and Arabs who want the one tiny
country Jews have ever called their own eliminated from the map. Protests
that the Arab/Muslim hostility is directed only at Israeli occupation of
that even tinier area known as the West Bank have no basis in reality.
The Arab/Muslim world sought Israel's destruction before Israel
occupied an inch of the West Bank.
We Jews have reasons to worry because the last time a civilisation
declared such hatred against Jews, what ensued was the most
organised and monumental evil in history, the Holocaust. We hoped that
Nazi-type hatred would never reappear. But it has. In fact, in two ways,
Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism is more frightening.
First, while both Nazi and the Arab/Muslim anti-Semites have used
closed societies with their controlled press to promote horrific lies
about Jews, the Nazis hid their murder of Jews from the German public.
They did not have confidence that enough Germans would support the
murder of Jewish men, women and children. The Arab/Muslim anti-Semites,
however, have no such problem. Those who kill Jews in Israel are public
celebrities.
On the West Bank, a Palestinian university in Nablus has been
putting on an exhibition celebrating the Palestinian suicide bombing of a
family pizza restaurant in Israel. The exhibition consisted of a replica
of the Sbarro's restaurant complete with Hebrew inscriptions. Inside the
exhibit, replicas of human body parts and pizza slices were strewn.
Pictures published on the Internet showed Palestinians waiting in
line to see the exhibit. In Nazi Germany, there were no public exhibits of
Einsatzgruppen (Nazi mobile Jew-killing units) or gas chambers.
The second more frightening aspect of Arab/Muslim Jew-hatred is
that many of these haters do not value their own lives. Nazis did.
We Jews have reasons to worry because no libels against Jews are too
awful or too incredible in much of the Arab/Muslim world. That is why
the father of Mohammed Atta, suspected ringleader of the Sept. 11th
attacks, could tell Newsweek that his son was kidnapped by Israelis
and that it was Israelis posing as Arab Muslims who actually attacked
America. He could say this because he and millions of other Muslims
(not only in the Arab world) believe it, as well as the notion that no
Jews died in the World Trade Center because they were alerted in
advance.
Americans may recall the flap over then-First Lady Hillary Clinton
listening to the wife of Yasir Arafat state that Israel was
poisoning Palestinian water supplies. Like the Nazis, many Arab/Muslim
societies attribute to Jews virtually all evils, including, for example,
deliberately spreading AIDS in the Arab world.
We Jews have reasons to worry because the West ignores this
Jew-hatred. One reason is that Third World evil is rarely taken seriously among
Western elites. A second reason is the psychological and political
need of Westerners to believe that Islamic societies are, with the
exception of "a few extremists," tolerant societies. And the third reason is
that Arab/Muslim anti-Semitism is dismissed as a temporary phenomenon
that will disappear when Israelis and Palestinians make peace. But this
belief inverts reality. The lack of peace between the Jewish state
and its neighbours is not the cause of Arab anti-Semitism, it is the
result of that anti-Semitism. Since 1948, there has been one reason for
the Arab-Israeli conflict - the Arab/Muslim world rejects the concept
of a Jewish (or any non-Muslim) state in its midst.
We Jews have reasons to worry because while much of the Muslim
world - a billion strong stretching from the Atlantic through Asia to the
Pacific - hates us, Europe and Japan do not defend us. Instead they defend
their business deals with Saddam Hussein and with Iran's medieval
theocracy. We Jews have reasons to worry because the Islamic terrorists who
blow up Jews are not on the list of terrorist organisations our government
is fighting. There are political reasons that account for omitting
terror groups that target Jews, but whatever those reasons, how can a Jew
not worry about this omission?
If America, the most philo-Semitic country in the world, will not regard terrorists
who murder Jews as worthy of fighting - even though these terrorists share sponsors and philosophy with anti-American terror groups - no nation will.
As I write this article, my 8-year-old son is playing next to me
with his Nintendo. While he is painfully aware of the attacks on
America, he remains blissfully unaware that a substantial percentage of
humanity would like to see him dead. One day, unfortunately, he will know
this. Unless the good people of the world finally learn the great lesson
of anti-Semitism - that Jew-haters hate all that is good, that they
target Jews first but never Jews alone, and that Jew-haters must therefore
be fought - one day he may in fact be hurt. That is why at least one
Jewish father worries today.
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