Jonah Goldberg: The swastika and the scimitar
Starting with an introduction to Haj Amin al-Husseini, Goldberg wraps-up the piece thus:
...The real answer isn't hate, but fear. Poring through miles of speeches, private comments, journal entries, party memoranda and all 24,000 pages of Goebbels' diaries, Herf concludes that the Nazis really believed that the Jews ran the world and wanted to destroy Germany. They believed that Jews controlled not only the Bolsheviks to the east but the capitalists to the west. President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a mere pawn of his Jewish friends and advisors. The British Parliament, Goebbels wrote in one diary entry, was "in reality a kind of Jewish stock exchange." The "Jewish-plutocratic enemy" was everywhere, benefiting from, and responsible for, every piece of bad news for Germany. In fact, the Nazis were sure that the Jews had declared war on Germany first, giving them no choice but to respond to the Jewish campaign to "exterminate the Germans." This paranoia led the Nazis to believe that rounding up millions of Jews and gassing them was an act of self-defense.
What is so frightening is how similar this is to the sounds from the Middle East today. Ahmadinejad — dismissed by "sophisticated" academics as a blowhard — calls the Holocaust a myth. Indeed, there is no Jewish conspiracy theory too outlandish in the Muslim world. Huge numbers of Muslims — even 45 percent of British Muslims — believe that the Jews were behind 9/11. Theories that the Mossad is behind every bad headline, from the Indonesian tsunami to bad soccer performances, are common on the Arab street. According to Herf, this is only the second time the world has seen this sort of radical anti-Semitic paranoia. And, again, too many in the unspotless West are saying, "they can't be serious."
But they are indeed. And there are fewer people now willing to speak out.
THe first paragraph appears like a close approximation of Western paranoia about Muslims, varying only in the amount of success that the feared group has: 'Muslims want a caliphate from here to Spain and on to Brooklyn etc etc.' Every attack, plot, and war involving an Arab name is part of a one world Jihad.
PS. How do you square the numbers of Muslims who believe in a Zionist 9-11 plot with those who "celebrated" the attacks????
Bernard, you seem to buy the theory that clear unequivocal opposition to Islamist hatred, repression, imperialism and fetishization of murder and death is merely a symptom of Western paranoia analogous to the paranoia that obsessed antisemites from the mid nineteenth to the mid twentieth century.
To my mind, this tendentious analogy places your thinking in line with the same kind of apologetic drivel espoused before 1942 by Charles Lindeburgh America Firsters.
Nevertheless you ask:
How do you square the numbers of Muslims who believe in a Zionist 9-11 plot with those who "celebrated" the attacks????
The same way Ahmadinejad squares his denial of the Shoah with claims that Zionists treat Palestinian Arabs worse than the Nazis treated Jews, Bernard.
Political Islam and Shariah jurisprudence aren't tolerable for anyone in the world except for conservative Islamists, Bernard.
Because their propaganda emphasizes hate for Jews and Israeli Jews more frequently and with more zeal than say their hate propaganda for other peoples and collectivities doesn't mean their declared jihad won't repress and murder people that might someday elicit some empathy from you.
You just don't think that racist propaganda against Jews deserves your condemnation because you don't feel inclined to empathize with Jews, or gasp, Zionist Jews, as you would for other collectives of humanity.
That's why you deflect rather than add your voice to those of us who know Jews and even gasp, Zionist and Israeli Jews as human beings and not as derogatory, dehumanized caricatures adhering to a Jewish national liberation movement which since the early fifties has been disingenuously and grossly misrepresented as a Nazi, Imperialist, Apartheid and racist nationalism, by Soviet, pro-Soviet and Arab ultranationalist propagandists and which is continuously espoused by hatemongering, authoritative Quran literalists and Islamist clerics who indoctrinate shahada instead of living as an obligatory means for accomplishing their theocratically rationalized, draconian and genocidal political aims.