The anti-Semitic poison that suppresses the wish for freedom
Il Giornale, March 6, 2011
There is something that will prevent us, consigning us blindly to the unknown, to understand where the waves of the greatest revolutions since the anti-communist ones that our world has seen will lead. It is a damn stupid bias that has different colors, incoherent and bombastic tones, which feeds on Nazi lies, refined pacifist ideologies or simply cliches, but that has a sole strategic focus: to bash Israel and to imagine that the conflict with the Palestinians is the real problem in the Middle East.
Not the freedom of peoples, or their well-being, or their progress toward modernity. No. Israel, which must be wiped off the map. This invention has always been the best weapon for various dictators, from Saddam to Qaddafi and from Assad to Ahmadinejad in Iran. And now, here we go again. Using Israel as an excuse is again the weapon of consensus that can disrupt any process of modernization. The Muslim Brotherhood, in fact, have presented again their official candidacy in Egypt when Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi suggested to a million people in Tahrir Square the conquest of Jerusalem. Shouts of joy, and no one in the West raised an eyebrow. Amr Mussa, the Arab League's historic Pharaoh and the main candidate for the country presidency, has immediately understood the lesson, which wasn't difficult for him given his record of anti-Israel hatred. He opened his campaign by saying that his relationship with Israel is not that of Mubarak, and that the Jewish lobby is conspiring to prevent him from entering his desired role.
From Yemen comes another typical conspiracy theory: President Ali Abdullah Saleh has accused Israel and the U.S. of fueling the revolt against his regime. Also, the crowds regurgitate all the anti-Semitic venom that has been inoculated in recent years: during the protests, leaders have all been violently accused of collusion with Israel, Mubarak has been portrayed several times with stars of David and American flags on his forehead, and in Bengasi and in Tripoli crowds have even shouted “Jew” at Qaddafi! The Libyan dictator who asked “all Arab warriors” to destroy Israel will be displeased…
Anti-Israelism, with lively anti-Semitic hues (please, take a look at MEMRI website, which translates documents from all the Arab world), was the main flag behind which Arab suffering has been hidden for decades, since Nasserism suggested to the crowds the path which has then been followed by all Middle East tyrants: worship me - was Nasser's indication - like a demigod, let me hear the scream of your undivided admiration. I will starve you, I will use you, I will support crowds of courtiers who will rob you of your money and police who will block your ideas... but in return I promise to restore the power of the Arab and Muslim world destroyed by Western conspiracy.
The first stage, the most important, is not one of freedom and justice... Is to expel from our Ummah, our community, our land, the Jews, sons of dogs and pigs, and restore justice for our Palestinian brothers. Many propagandist inventions were made to support this thesis: remote-controlled Zionist rats and vultures, children killed intentionally, organs of killed Palestinians explanted by Israeli soldiers... and a genuine cult of suicide bombers was born, the shahid. Each and every anti-Western terrorist has been raised and glorified, in Libya, as in Iraq and in Lebanon or in Syria. The criminalization has convinced the peoples in the Middle East that Israel is merely the result of an imperialist conspiracy, and that this 9 miles wide country is the biggest of problems in a huge world impoverished by its tyrants.
And we Europeans, here we are: we don't know any other song about freedom than that of the Palestinians, certainly not that which the Arab world sings to us now in the midst of our stunned amazement. Ah, really, the Arab world was oppressed? It was poor? It was also in great part politically extremist? And now? Help! What to do with all this freedom that looks inside our house, shouting? I would say, since I don't know what to stutter, that it is urgent that Israel return to its 1967 borders, whatever it takes… Mrs. Ashton, E.U. Foreign Minister, during her recent Middle East tour didn't realize that the people she visited suffered under the heel of their tyrants, and so she pronounced the word “freedom” only when speaking of the Palestinians. The Foreign Minister of Luxembourg on an official state visit to Jerusalem, repeated like a trained parrot that for him the most crucial problem of the Middle East is that of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and that only Israel is to blame for its failure to resolve it. Obama, in a meeting at the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, seems to continue to think that a few houses built in Jerusalem are the most crucial issue, while the Middle East burns.
Meanwhile, the E.U., instead of working on the wave of refugees who are approaching its costs, or on the possibility of military intervention in Libya, or rather on the problems of energy supply or on the mullah who are sharpening their weapons in preparation for a new conquest of power... instead of dealing with one of these issues, the E.U. plans for the mid of the month a meeting of the Quartet that should choke Israel and bypass the U.S. - the everlasting dream of Europe – which is now in a state of confusion. But does it make sense, a normal person would ask, to rekindle old obsessions while the world burns with a new fire?
Isn’t is suspected that a world indifferent to the suffering of hundreds of millions of people embraces as the image of oppression the only democracy in the Middle East? The leader of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan, since the USA and NATO has stated that they could opt for military measures against Qaddafi, has already said: “The Jews and the Zionist lobby, which dominate the U.S. government and banks, are pushing the U.S. towards a new war... my work is to discover the plots of Satan so they do not deceive you and people all over the world again.”
We will respond to the usual nonsense of Farrakhan with a yawn of boredom. But we cannot: his words find listeners, and they become politically acceptable not only by people in the Muslim world, but also by liberals in the West. So it was during the time of the war in Iraq, so it is with Afghanistan. If we let this great Middle East crisis to become tainted by the usual attacks on Israel, hard and soft, the first to be affected will be us: they allowed for decades the oppression of hundreds of millions of people, and today they can guide them to extremism and war.