Conspiracy theories (Arab anti-semitism must read)

SHM ^ | 12 january 2002 | Linda Grant

[knighthawk]

Nazi-style propaganda at a UN conference? Conspiracy theories blaming Jews for September 11? Linda Grant finds evidence of a virulent new anti-Semitism whose roots this time around lie not in Europe, but the Arab world.

On September 18, Beirut-based Al-Manar television broadcast a news item that subsequently appeared on its English-language Web site: "With the announcement of the attacks at the World Trade Centre in New York, the international media, particularly the Israeli one, hurried to take advantage of the tragedy and started mourning 4000 Israelis who work at the two towers.

"Then suddenly, no-one ever mentioned anything about those Israelis and later it became clear that they remarkably did not show up for their jobs the day the incident took place ... Arab diplomatic sources revealed to the Jordanian Al Watan newspaper that those Israelis remained absent that day based on hints from the Israeli general security apparatus, the Shabak, the fact which evoked unannounced suspicions on American officials who wanted to know how the Israeli government learned about the incident before it occurred."

This is the first recorded account of an urban legend that has swept the Arab world. Not a single fact in it has ever been substantiated. It appears to be based on concern expressed by the Israeli government for the fate of 4000 Israelis resident in New York, a small number of whom worked at the World Trade Centre. Within a matter of days it was no longer 4000 Israelis but 4000 Jews; then reports appeared that "not a single Jew" died on September 11.

The story dug itself into the official version of events, appearing in the mainstream Arab press as well as on neo-Nazi and white supremacist Web sites based in America. An opinion poll conducted on October 1 by Paknews.com, a sophisticated English-language online news site, asked how readers regarded the story of the 4000 Jews not reporting to work. Fully 71 per cent thought it was a "possible fact".

Possible fact soon became established fact among government ministers in the Arab world. According to a report in The Jerusalem Post on October 19: "At a meeting in Damascus last week with a delegation from the British Royal College of Defence Studies, [Syrian defence minister Mustafa Tlass] said the Mossad planned the ramming of two hijacked airliners into the WTC's towers as part of a Jewish conspiracy. He also told the British visitors that the Mossad had given thousands of Jewish employees of the WTC advance warning not to go to work that day."

Does it matter to the West that absurd conspiracy theories like this one have taken hold, not just in the Middle East but throughout the Arab and Muslim world? Aren't they just the posturing of the powerless? Perhaps, but three months after September 11, some of its complex causes are starting to be revealed.

As we dig deeper we find that one root of the assault lay in the emergence of the doctrine of Islamism, a fusion of a narrow, intolerant fundamentalist reading of the Koran with a political movement opposed to all Western social, economic and cultural influence. One of its central beliefs is in the enduring evil of Judaism and the Jews, irrespective of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Why Jews? Because if America has been branded the enemy, the Great Satan, and Jews are widely believed to "control" America, in the gruesome logic that follows, it becomes "obvious" that Jews have a "secret plan" to destroy Islam and the Arab world.

These ideas are neither of recent origin, nor confined to the Middle East. But worryingly, alliances are being made between Muslims who buy into such theories, and the American neo-Nazi and white supremacist parties that have found in them a gullible new audience to advance (on Web sites and in magazines/newspapers) theories discredited in the West for more than 50 years.

In the week before September 11 there were already disturbing signs that anti-Semitism was reaching a new pitch. The attack on New York took place three days after the chaotic close of the Durban Anti-Racism Conference in which delegates from Arab governments and NGOs sought unsuccessfully to have Israel designated as a racist apartheid state, and called for the establishment of a UN committee to prosecute Israeli war crimes and to isolate totally the country.

The NGO resolution was not backed by major human rights groups such as Amnesty International or Human Rights Watch. The language was so intemperate that Mary Robinson, the UN human rights commissioner, refused to present it to the governmental conference.

The atmosphere at the conference has been described as saturated with anti-Semitism. In the exhibition area, a book of cartoons reminiscent of the Nazi era, depicting Jews with talons for hands and clutching blood-soaked money, was distributed by the Arab Lawyers Union. One of the union's leaflets, in which the Star of David (a religious symbol of Judaism, as well as an emblem of the Israeli flag) was superimposed on the Nazi swastika, so shocked Robinson that she declared at an official dinner: "When I see something like this, I am a Jew."

The director of the British Holocaust Education Trust reported back: "Session after session seemed to provide platforms for extreme anti-Jewish propaganda. A session on hate crime not only had a speaker whose thesis was that Israel's existence was a 'hate crime', but when one person asked a question, he was heckled with shouts of, 'Jew! Jew! Jew!'."

That the campaigners on behalf of Palestinian rights were surprised at the negative reaction to the blatantly anti-Semitic material they brought with them, indicates how commonplace such hate speech has become in the Arab world, the extent to which it now forms a normal part of political discourse.

I asked Rina Attar Goren, European director of the Middle East Media and Research Institute (an independent organisation that monitors and translates the Middle East press) if she could provide any recent examples of anti-Semitic, as opposed to anti-Zionist, material from the Arab and Palestinian media. A few hours later she emailed me 20 articles, dating from February 2000 to last month, revealing an anti-Semitic propaganda campaign that went far beyond the limits of the Palestinian cause.

Several were from the state-sponsored Egyptian press. They included a number of pieces on Holocaust denial and repeated reiterations of the "Protocols of the Elders of Zion", an anti-Semitic forgery originating in 19th-century tsarist Russia that invented a secret cabal of Jews plotting to take over the world.

The "Protocols" are enshrined in the charter of the Palestinian organisation Hamas: "After Palestine, the Zionists aspire to expand from the Nile to the Euphrates," it says. "When they will have digested the region they overtook, they will aspire to further expansion, and so on. Their plan is embodied in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying."

The Palestinian Authority (PA), with European Union funding, has been updating schoolbooks that had not been replaced since the time of Jordanian rule. Most of the anti-Semitic stereotyping and incitement against Israel has gone, but last year Israel and the PA met in Cyprus to discuss how the Holocaust against the Jews should be represented.

Dr Musa Al-Zu'but, chairman of the Palestinian Legislative Council education committee, writing in the PA newspaper Al-Risala on April 13, 2000, said: "There will be no such attempt to include the history of the Holocaust in the Palestinian curriculum ... The Holocaust has been exaggerated in order to present the Jews as victims of a great crime, to justify [the claim] that Palestine is necessary as a homeland for them, and to give them the right to demand compensation."

Much of this is no more than empty rhetoric; the only weapon of those who are helpless, dispossessed and preyed on by corrupt, undemocratic governments. It stems in part from rage at poverty and the lack of human rights (and for the Palestinians, experience of the humiliation and brutality of occupation), and partly from religious fundamentalism, which in all faiths tends to produce violent extremism, Judaism being no exception.

Late last year, two members of the Jewish Defence League (JDL), a far-Right racist organisation banned in Israel, were arrested by the FBI on charges of plotting to bomb the King Fahd mosque in Culver City, California, as well as the offices of Darrell Issa, an Arab-American congressman from southern California. The JDL was founded by the late Rabbi Meir Kahane, a racist demagogue whose follower Baruch Goldstein murdered 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994.

But the prevalence and intensity of anti-Semitism in the Arab world make it an altogether more chilling phenomenon. Hasem Saghiyeh, a columnist on Al Hayat, a London-based pan-Arab newspaper, who has written on and studied anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world, describes it as dangerous and increasing at an unprecedented speed. "There are no historic roots for anti-Semitism in Islam," he says. "It's a new-born phenomenon that began with contact between Arabs and European Christians in the late 19th century. It really emerges this century not out of myths about Jews, as it did in Europe, but in a real and concrete fight for land."

Until now, when Jews looked for support at a time of rising anti-Semitism, their natural allies were the anti-racist Left. But because anti-Semitism is now inextricably linked with the situation in Israel and Palestine, and because of the resurgence of the Zionism is Racism argument, which rejects a two-state solution, some critics of Israel no longer seem willing to make a distinction between those Jews who support and those Jews who oppose Israeli occupation.

Any support of Israel's right to exist as a sovereign state under any conditions at all is branded as Zionism, and hence collusion in racism and apartheid. Beyond the Left there is a widespread belief in Britain, reinforced by news reporting and comment pieces, that the attack on September 11 would never have happened if it had not been for Israeli brutality in Gaza and the West Bank.

Others go further and argue that the existence of Israel and its support by the US is a threat to world peace. Many Jews now feel that they are being made the scapegoats for a complex phenomenon combining globalisation, the rise of fundamentalism, oil interests, anti-Americanism and Middle East politics - that if the third world war begins it will, as usual, be blamed on "the Jews".

The anti-Semitism unleashed in the past three months poses complex questions for Jews, Muslims and those who campaign against injustices suffered by others. It will be interesting to see, in time to come, how well any of us does in addressing them.

As a British Jew I can offer some ways in which some of us can begin to construct a defence against anti-Semitism. It would involve the Left realigning itself: ceasing the demonisation of the Jewish majority who defend Israel's existence; making alliances with Jews, such as those who support Peace Now and Gush Shalom, which are actively seeking an end to the horrific violence of the past year, one which would provide a just solution to the long agony of the Palestinians.

Both the Left and Muslims (in Western countries) would have to begin to recognise the massive rise of anti-Semitism in the Arab and Muslim world for what it is: anti-Semitism rather than any cogent analysis of the problems of the Middle East. It would involve these Muslims announcing in their press, their mosques and their community centres that Muslims are being manipulated into believing myths, urban legends and racist slanders peddled by those with no interest in tolerance, human rights or justice; that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism fall under the same heading.

Jews (in Britain and elsewhere) have long been embroiled in an argument among themselves that mirrors the fierce debates inside Israel. It seems axiomatic to some of us who have maintained our faith with the Israeli peace activists that if justice were to be delivered to the Palestinians in the form of a state based on UN Resolution 242, and solutions found to the problems of the division of Jerusalem and the status of the refugees, most of the Arab anti-Semitism would wither away.

But not all Jews, particularly on the Right, are convinced that a two-state solution will fully satisfy the Palestinian demand for the return of their homeland, particularly when the maps in the new textbooks in Palestinian schools explicitly refer to the whole of Israel as Palestinian territory. Instead we think of the assault by the Holocaust deniers of the Arab and Palestinian world on our right to remember the dead of Shoah, and if we wish to speak now, it is to say, defiantly: the children of Israel live.

However, we cannot survive if we forget that justice and compassion apply not only to ourselves but to others. To all of us - Jews, Muslims, activists on behalf of Palestinian rights - Primo Levi's urgent message still applies: "Shutting his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of not knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking place in front of his very door.''

Linda Grant is a British journalist and author. This is an edited version of an article first published in The Guardian.

[The Raven]

Not just the Jews. They have blamed the world (France, England, US, USSR) for their problems. Everybody except themselves.

[knighthawk]

Thanks for the link.