LITTLE ROCK — WHEN THE always piquant Mary McCarthy observed that anti-semitism was the one form of intellectuality that appealed to stupid people, she may have overlooked its appeal to ambitious politicians eager to use it for their own purposes. Whether to seize power at the beginning of their rise or to hold onto it at the end, after the people have caught on to them and grow restive.
How far and wide the tide of revolution may sweep in the Islamic world isn’t yet clear, but the most predictable development is that the Jews will be blamed for it. In a pinch, America will serve nicely as a whipping boy, too. The best strategy is to blame both. Just listen to some of the statements out of Yemen, where an autocrat struggling to hold on against his subjects’ long pent-up rage is much in need of a scapegoat, or two, to distract his people. Addressing gullible students in Sana, that country’s embattled ruler-one Ali Abdullah Saleh-shared a great discovery he’d made:
“I am going to reveal a secret. There is an operations room in Tel Aviv with the aim of destabilizing the Arab world. The operations room is in Tel Aviv and run by the White House.”
Call it a two-fer. It turns out that both the Americans and the Jews are responsible for his troubles. In that little room in Tel Aviv, the troublemakers rising up against their betters throughout the Arab world “are sitting day and night with the American ambassador . . . .” They “hand him reports and he gives them instructions.’’
It sounds like an Arab version of that old forgery, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a staple of European anti-semitism that Hosni Mubarak’s propaganda machine serialized on Egyptian television back in the day, when his hold on power seemed permanent.
Anti-semitism remains the last resort of Arab dictators desperate to survive, as it was their first resort on their way up. It’s a trajectory as old as Herr Hitler’s rise-and fall-in Germany, once the world’s most advanced nation. East or West, the virus is the same.
But anti-semitism is no longer the rage it once was in France, where the Nazis set up a puppet regime in Vichy and the French police obligingly rounded up Paris’ Jews for Resettlement in the East. But the times (and fashions) have a-changed. Last week the colorful, not to say bizarre, fashion designer John Galliano was dropped by Dior just three days before his fall-winter collection for 2011-12 was due to be unveiled at the Paris fashion show. It seems he’d made some unseemly remarks about Jews during a late-night blow-up at a trendy Paris bar. Naturally his performance was captured on video. Isn’t everything nowadays? The more things change, the more they’re videotaped.
Who knows, M. Galliano may be able to find a new career in Iran designing the latest in burqas. But something tells us he might not find the mullahs’ police state very welcoming. And even there, cries for democracy are heard again. And again the leaders of the opposition are jailed and demonstrators beaten.
It’s a hard thing to extinguish, the hope of freedom. Anywhere. There may come a time when even Jewbaiting won’t work any more. For now the oppressed live in hope, even expectation, as the freedom tide rolls on. Out of Tunisia into Egypt and even Libya.
The crumbling old pillars of tyranny are shaking throughout the region. Which country will be next? It’s a question that must keep various Middle Eastern potentates awake at night. Now it’s they who wait for the knock on the door. Or for it to be kicked in.
Editorial, Pages 16 on 03/04/2011