The Arabs have learned to speak the language of the modern international community and they are doing better at it than Israel.
Old style [which most Islamists still use, though even them not all the time]: The Jews are inferior. We will kill them all. We will never accept peace. We will wipe out Israel.
New style: The Israelis say that we are inferior. They want to kill us all. They don’t want peace. They violate our human rights. We are the victims. They want to wipe us out.
The Sad Fate of Arab Moderates and The Arab World’s Tragic Success in Not Needing Them Any More
By Barry Rubin
You have to feel sorry for those courageous enough to be Arab moderates. Most of your countrymen hate you, the government wants to crush you, the Islamists want to kill you, and the West doesn’t want to help you. I told this story in my book, The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East. (more information; order)
Despite all the endless talk of finding moderates in the Arab world, the real ones—few and far between—generally get ignored while preening, posturing extremists are treated as romantic figures.
So given all this pressure, the limited space permitted for free thought, the moderates have to talk like radicals to survive. In political terms, faced with the battle between the two giant movements of Islamism and Arab nationalism, they have to choose sides. Most liberals back their governments even though these are repressive dictatorships as a lesser of two evils to living under an Iran-, Gaza-, or Taliban-type state.
Except for some in Egypt, almost all the liberals pick the nationalists over the Islamists. I always think of the case of the Syrian dissident, who had spent some nasty time in prison, who in one interview referred to the Syrian government as “fascist” but then, a few minutes later, explained that he supported that government.
Hala Mustafa is a brave person. But when you see the stance she has to take—and I can give other examples of precisely the same exchanges by liberal intellectuals in other countries—the hopelessness of real reform or rethinking hits home very hard.
Mustafa, it may be recalled, is the editor of Egypt’s state-controlled democracy journal who got in trouble because she actually spoke a few minutes with Israel’s ambassador in her office.
The television interviewer asks her if that brief chat constituted “normalization” of relations with Israel. This is a real no-no, despite the fact that Egypt and Israel have been at peace for 30 years (happy anniversary!). The Palestinian Authority, by the way, followed the same view even during the height of the 1990s’ peace process. There was and is something pathetic and funny at watching well-intentioned Jewish peace activists running after Palestinians for dialogues in which the latter have no interest or are too fearful to do.
But the only line Mustafa can take—whether she believes it or not is another matter—is that the main reason Egypt must reform itself is to defeat Israel more effectively. She begins by saying:
“As long as we are part of the international community, and as long as we strive to belong to the developed countries, we need to speak their language.…Perhaps the reason that Israel was able to gain ground overseas, and that there is more recognition of Israel, its path, and its culture than of Arab culture, is that Israel speaks of the language of the international community….
“Interviewer: They are better integrated in the international system?”
“Dr. Hala Mustafa: Absolutely. They speak the same language, and know how to talk to them and convince them.”
“Interviewer: They are more skillful in obtaining their material, political, or moral support.”
“Dr. Hala Mustafa: Definitely. Their greatest success is in portraying the other side – the Arabs – as extremists, who carry weapons, shout, and make hysterical decisions. This image has become a stereotype, just like after 9/11, when the Muslims’ image became stereotypical and negative.”
Now I am definitely not attacking Mustafa here but merely pointing out the almost incredibly small maneuvering room such people have.
The usual response by mainstream Arab thinkers has been: You want us to talk or act like people in the West? That is a betrayal! We will not surrender an inch…. Etc., Etc. Read a speech, for example, by Syrian President Bashar al-Asad or by a lot of Arab nationalist intellectuals, as well as of course by Islamists, to hear this kind of thing.
And yet both they and Mustafa are missing a rather obvious and important point.
The Arabs have learned to speak the language of the modern international community and they are doing better at it than Israel.
Old style [which most Islamists still use, though even them not all the time]: The Jews are inferior. We will kill them all. We will never accept peace. We will wipe out Israel.
New style: The Israelis say that we are inferior. They want to kill us all. They don’t want peace. They violate our human rights. We are the victims. They want to wipe us out.
And by this brilliant inversion everything has changed. Leftist movements, humanitarian-oriented groups, huge sections of academia, large parts of the media, and various European governments bash Israel and extol the poor victims of the war criminal, racist, war-mongering, intransigent Israelis.
Of course, in fact, the positions of the Arab states and the Palestinian movement haven’t changed even in the tiniest iota. For example, in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, the “one-state” solution argument was something that isolated the Arabs and increased Western support for Israel. Then it was presented as: Throw Israel into the sea. Jewish-Zionist nationalism cannot be allowed to live. Palestine is Arab, Arab, Arab alone!
Today, exactly the same “one-state” concept is spun with the colored lights and tinkling bells of multiculturalism and political correctness into seeming like a utopia where nationalism is passé and everyone will just be nice to each other and get along just fine.
In short, Arab governments and societies don’t need Mustafa and the other liberals to bring a compromise triumph through real moderation. The extremists “know how to talk to them [the West and the world] and convince them.” And, to use the interviewers words: “They [the radicals, not the moderates] are more skillful in obtaining [the West’s] material, political, or moral support.”
Israel just gets slandered but is a free and democratic country whose people are able to move forward in developing its culture, raising living standards, and enjoying freedom. The Arabs are the ones who have to live with the consequences of their own disastrous “success” in gaining international sympathy by changing nothing.
What a remarkable but horrible irony. The “progressive” and “humanitarian” forces of the West have helped make real democratic and social reform unnecessary for the Arabic-speaking world and delivered it into decades more of violence, dictatorship, repression, stagnation, and failure.
Israel News:
Concerns are growing in Israel’s government over the possibility of a unilateral Palestinian declaration of independence within the 1967 borders, a move which could potentially be recognized by the United Nations Security Council. Kuruc News
Comment by Dr Aaron Lerner
Years ago Israeli withdrawal promoters argued that withdrawal would bring
peace.
Since Oslo there aren’t many customers for that line. So the argument was
made that we had to withdraw because of the “demographic time bomb”.
While that argument is still being made, it is wearing thin – both thanks to
declining Arab birth rates and the retreat from the Gaza Strip that, for the
average Israeli, takes Gazans out of the equation.
So the latest argument embraced by Israeli withdrawal advocates is that if
we don’t hurry up and cut a deal to withdraw the Palestinians will
unilaterally declare a sovereign state that includes the entire West Bank
and eastern Jerusalem and the world will recognize the state and we will
find ourselves forced to pull out under inferior circumstances.
Are the Palestinians actually serious about such a plan? The publicly
available details of the Fayyad plan indicate that they aren’t. Take for
example the absence of work to actually set up an airport in the West Bank
that could be used to break an Israeli blockade after the unilateral
declaration of a state (instead the two years are to be spent studying how
to make ports rather than building them).
So now we have word about the possibility of an additional “secret plan”.
It is hard to really know, at this stage, just how serious this whole plan
is, or what kind of support it might actually get overseas.
Keep this in mind: When you read any Israeli report on this challenge you
have to always ask yourself who the authors of the report are. Because
withdrawal advocates interested in pushing their agenda may very well
overstate the significance, scope, etc. of the Fayyad plan.
Even worse: Israeli withdrawal advocates may actually go so far as to lobby
overseas for support for the Fayyad plan in the hopes that this will help
push Israel to act.
Far fetched?
Let’s not forget the byword of the Left: “the ends justify the means”.
‘Crystal Night’ and beyond
West turns blind eye to genocidal consequences of Arab culture of hatred
Robert Wistrich/Ynet
On November 9, 1938, a massive nationwide anti-Jewish pogrom took place during peacetime across the entire territory of the Third Reich. The pretext for this orgy of violence against German Jews was the shooting in Paris two days earlier of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a 17-year-old Polish-Jewish refugee.
The state-organized pogrom, instigated by Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, resulted in the burning or damaging of more than 1,000 synagogues; the ransacking of about 7,500 businesses, the murder of at least 91 Jews, and the deportation of another 30,000 Jewish males to concentration camps in Dachau, Buchenwald, and Sachsenhausen.
This murderous onslaught against German Jewry, cynically described by the Nazis as the “Night of Broken Glass” (Kristallnacht), was a major turning point on the road to the “Final Solution” of the so-called “Jewish Question.” It signified that the Nazi regime had crossed a Rubicon and would no longer be deterred by Western public opinion in its “war against the Jews.”
The economic expropriation of German Jewry, its complete social ostracism and public humiliation swiftly followed. Jews were banned from public transport, from frequenting concerts, theaters, cinemas, commercial centers, beaches, or using public benches. Only a fortnight after “Crystal Night,” the SS journal, Das Schwarze Korps, chillingly prophesied the final end of German Jewry through “fire and sword” and its imminent complete annihilation.
Today, shocking to relate, the specter of such apocalyptic anti-Semitism has returned to haunt Europe and other continents, while often assuming radically new forms. In the Middle East, it has taken on a particularly dangerous, toxic and potentially genocidal aura of hatred, closely linked to the “mission” of holy war or jihad against the West and the Jews.
Identifying Israel with Nazism
Islamist anti-Semitism is thoroughly soaked in many of the most inflammatory themes that initially made possible the atrocities of “Crystal Night” and its horrific aftermath during the Holocaust. For example, the pervasive use of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion with its perennial theme of the “Jewish conspiracy for world domination;” or the medieval blood-libel imported to the Muslim world from Christian Europe; or the vile stereotypical image of the Jews as a treacherous, rapacious, and bloodthirsty people engaged in a ceaseless plotting to undermine the world of Islam. To these grotesque inventions one must add such more up-to-date libels like Holocaust denial which has become a state-sponsored project in Ahmadinejad’s Iran and is increasingly pervasive in the Arab world.
Equally fashionable (and increasingly popular in Europe) is the slanderous identification of Israel with Nazism or the “ethnic cleansing” of the Palestinians. This modernized version of inverted anti-Semitism which sails under the mask of “anti-Zionism” and anti-Americanism is today a global phenomenon, but it has special resonance in the Middle East as a result of the unresolved “Palestinian question.”
The scale and extremism of the literature and commentary available in Arab or Muslim newspapers, journals, magazines, caricatures, on Islamist websites, on the Middle Eastern radio and TV news, in documentaries, films, and educational materials, is comparable only to that of Nazi Germany at its worst. Yet the Western world largely turns a blind eye to the likely genocidal consequences of such a culture of hatred, much as it did 70 years ago.
My own extensive research into this phenomenon has, unfortunately, convinced me that the Holocaust did not truly succeed in neutralizing the scourge of anti-Semitism. In a sinister and sometimes devious manner, the widespread defamation and demonization of Israel has in effect revived fantasies of completing the murderous work of the Third Reich. This is especially palpable in the case of Iran.
Hence, the anniversary of “Crystal Night” raises two fundamental moral questions for the future of human civilization. Are we at all capable of learning from history, and will the Jewish people once again have to stand alone in the face of concrete threats to annihilate it? On the answer to these questions much may depend.
