Via LGF


Europe's Monomania (washingtonpost.com)

In Europe, anti-Semitism has been called the socialism of fools, which is confusing, because socialism is the socialism of fools. Confusion has been compounded because Europe, nearly six decades after the continent was rendered largely Judenrein, has anti-Semitism without Jews, as when the ambassador to Britain from France -- yes, our moral tutor, France -- calls Israel a "s----y little country."


But some clarity can be achieved by understanding that America has become for many Europeans what Jews were for centuries. From medieval times until 1945, Jews often were considered the embodiment of sinister forces, the focus of discontents, the all-purpose explanation of disappointments. Now America is all those things.


"These were not only young, politicized people," said Romano Prodi, head of the European Commission, speaking of the European demonstrations protesting U.S. policy toward Iraq. "This was the whole society that took part in a spontaneous way."


America approached this endgame with Iraq worrying about the "Arab street" but finds more trouble in the "European street." However, if Prodi's assessment is essentially correct, the broad-based demonstrations could not have been essentially motivated by concern for Iraq's rights.[...]


Today's demonstrators against a war to disarm Iraq can hardly be explained by fear for their safety, or by sympathy for Saddam Hussein's fascism. The London demonstration -- 1 million strong, much the largest in British history -- was not as large as the death toll from the war Saddam Hussein launched against Iran. The demonstrators simultaneously express respect for the United Nations' resolutions and loathing for America, the only nation that can enforce the resolutions. This moral infantilism -- willing an end while opposing the only means to that end -- reveals that the demonstrators believe the means are more objectionable than the end is desirable.


The demonstrators must know that Slobodan Milosevic and the Taliban would still be tyrannizing Muslims were it not for U.S. power. But they do not care.[...]


There is not much to be gained just now from additional attempts to reason with a leader that tone-deaf, or from attempts to soften the monomania of those swarming in the "European street." Perhaps U.S. policy can change European minds by changing facts in Iraq.


Perhaps not. However, America's vital interests are more dependent on those facts than on those minds.