It was a stunning moment of moral clarity. As the South Vietnamese refugees clambered onto rickety boats in the South China Sea to escape the victorious Communists, the American Left that orchestrated the US defeat through a sustained campaign of propaganda and fake calls for peace stood silent.
As Pol Pot, the “progressive” dictator tortured and murdered a third of his people in Cambodia, the leftists “peace” activists in the US and Europe who never saw a US military operation that was justified, turned a blind eye.
The silence of the likes of Susan Sontag, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky and their fellow travelers came to mind last week when the Western media and intellectual elites averted their gaze as Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the long exiled spiritual guide of the Muslim Brotherhood spoke before a crowd of millions at Cairo’s Tahrir Square.
Qaradawi, who had been living in exile in Qatar during Hosni Mubarak’s reign, became an international jihadist superstar thanks to Qatar’s unelected potentate Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani who gave him his jihad indoctrination show on Al Jazeera. From his internationally televised soapbox, Qaradawi regularly preaches international jihad and genocide of Jewry to millions of fans worldwide.
Two important things happened during Qaradawi’s appearance in Cairo. First, his handlers refused to allow Google’s Egyptian Internet revolutionary Wael Ghonim to join the cleric on the dais. For anyone willing to notice, Qaradawi’s message in spurning Ghonim was indisputable. As far as the jihadists are concerned, Ghonim and his fellow Internet activists are the present day equivalent of Lenin’s useful idiots.
They did their job of convincing credulous Western liberals that the overthrow of Mubarak was all about sweetness and light.
And now they are no longer needed.
The second message was Qaradawi’s call to destroy Israel. With millions of adoring fans crying out “Amen,” and “Allahu Akhbar,” Qaradawi called for a Muslim conquest of Jerusalem – that is, for the destruction of Israel. As a first step, he demanded that the Egyptian military open the Egyptian border with Gaza.
In the dismal tradition of its Vietnam-era teachers, today’s international Left had nothing to say about Qaradawi’s genocidal speech. In the New York Times‘ write-up of Qaradawi’s triumphant return to Egypt for instance, the murder-inciting cleric was referred to as a champion of democracy and pluralism.
Leftist writers like Peter Beinart have spent the better part of the past month whitewashing and belittling the significance of the Muslim Brotherhood.
The same Muslim Brotherhood that was founded in 1928 and got its first boost from the Nazis who funded their anti-Jewish pogroms in Cairo and Alexandria in 1939 is seen as nothing to worry about. US President Barack Obama’s Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured Congress that the Muslim Brotherhood is largely secular. This is the same Muslim Brotherhood whose motto is, “Allah is our objective; the prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad is our way; Dying in the path of Allah is our goal.”
THE SAME Left who champions Qaradawi as a liberal is absolutely adamant that the revolutions now raging throughout the Muslim world are a mere sideshow to the region’s chief drama. The revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Yemen, Jordan, Oman, Morocco and Saudi Arabia are nothing. And the anti-regime protests in Iran have no strategic significance whatsoever to the West, which is mortally threatened by the mullocracy.
Who cares if the Arabs are ruled by tyrants, democrats, jihadists, or fascists? The only thing that matters is that “Palestine” is free of Israeli “occupation.”
How can anyone get excited about the future of the oil-dependent global economy when Jews still reside in Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria and Jewish neighborhoods in Jerusalem?
The Left’s essential indifference to the plight of hundreds of millions of Arabs and its significance for the West was exposed in a news analysis by Brendan O’Neill in The Australian on February 16. O’Neill noted that whereas the demonstrators in Cairo were fairly silent on the issue of the Palestinians, anti-Mubarak demonstrations throughout the West prominently featured anti-Israel slogans and chants of “Free, free Palestine!”
O’Neill concluded that the contrasting messages, “reveals something important about the Palestine issue…. [It] has become less important for Arabs and of the utmost symbolic importance for Western radicals at exactly the same time.”
Actually, it is important to Western leftists and jihadists, which is why the Palestinians only became a salient issue in Egypt after the Muslim Brotherhood began taking control over the opposition movement with Qaradawi’s sermon on February 18.
IN A groundbreaking study of the propaganda war against Israel entitled “The Big Lie and the Media War against Israel: From Inversion of Truth to Inversion of Reality,” published in Jewish Political Studies Review in March 2007, Joel Fishman showed that the Muslim Brotherhood’s propaganda war against Israel, like the Left’s propaganda war against Israel, relied heavily on Nazi propaganda against Jews.
The early partnership between the Brotherhood and the Nazis, brought together by Palestinian Arab leader and Nazi agent Haj Amin el Husseini imported European anti-Semitism to the Muslim world. Beginning in the early 1950s, Nazi war criminals immigrated to Egypt. There they recreated much of Josef Goebbels’ anti-Semitic propaganda operation for Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Fishman also documented how in the aftermath of World War II, and particularly after Israel’s victory in the Six Day War, the Soviets adapted Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda to demonize Israel as the new, collective Jew and in turn demonize the collective Jew as the new Nazi Germany.
Two sources fed the Soviet anti-Jewish/anti-Zionist propaganda machine: former Nazi propagandists in Egypt; and former Nazi propagandists employed by the East German Communist regime. According to Fishman, the messages developed by these ex-Nazi propagandists were the basis for the Soviet campaign to delegitimize Israel which began in earnest after 1967. The call to arms was published first in a Pravda editorial in October 1967. There, Zionism, the Jewish national liberation movement was reviled as dedicated to “genocide, racism, treachery, aggression, and annexation…all characteristic attributes of fascists.”
With both the Soviets and the Arabs spewing the same inverted message, it didn’t take long for it to become the rage in Europe. Europe’s adoption of the Nazi-inspired propaganda in which reality was inverted and Israel – the victim of Arab imperialist, genocidal aggression – became the imperialist, genocidal aggressor was facilitated by France’s embrace of the Arab camp after its withdrawal from Algeria and effective withdrawal from NATO.
By 1975, with the UN General Assembly’s adoption of the Soviet-Arab sponsored resolution 3379 defining Zionism as racism, most European governments had fallen in line with the Soviet-Arab propaganda war.
They in turn spent the next generation bringing their message to America.
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TODAY, THAT message has become the sum total of Europe’s Middle East policy. From their massive global funding of anti-Israel NGOs, to their financing of anti-Zionist films, plays, art exhibitions and educational curricula throughout the world and their bankrolling of the Palestinian Authority, the Europeans have put their money where their mouths and well-washed brains are.
As Norway’s plan to run the Israeli embassy out of Oslo because its security measures annoy its neighbors; to European authorities’ refusal to provide police protection for their threatened Jewish communities; to initiatives like the Dutch Parliament’s current bid to outlaw Jewish ritual slaughter all make clear, hatred of Israel runs seamlessly into outright governmental aggression against Jews.
So too, as The Guardian‘s recent onslaught against the PA for its leaders’ willingness to make minor compromises with Israel in the framework of a peace treaty demonstrates, mainstream forces in Britain and throughout Europe now side openly with Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood in their annihilationist war against the Jewish state.
It is this obsessive campaign against Israel that explains the so-called Middle East Quartet’s insistence that the most urgent item on the international agenda is coercing Israel to surrender land and rights to the PA.
Whereas the EU cannot figure out a coherent policy regarding Libya even as Muammar Gaddafi massacres his own citizens and sets fire to his oil fields, Europe’s leaders are unified in their firm conviction that the so-called “peace process” must be reinvigorated.
So too, the Obama administration remains incapable of lifting a finger to prevent an Iranian proxy from taking over Bahrain or a consortium of al-Qaida terrorists from taking over Yemen. Obama refuses to take any action to help the Libyan people overthrow Gaddafi. As for Iran, Obama maintains his steadfast refusal to take any action to help the Iranian people overthrow their nuclear-proliferating, terror-supporting regime.
But at the same time, the president and his advisors are absolutely committed to coercing Israel to block Jews from building homes in Judea, Samaria and Jerusalem and ensuring that everyone is clear that Jews have no legitimate right to our capital city and historic heartland.
As for the Left itself, as Ron Radosh reported in Pajamas Media this week, attendees at J Street’s annual post-Zionist confab could barely muster polite applause for the mildly Zionist MKs from Kadima that spoke at the conference. But they broke into raucous applause when Arab and Jewish anti-Zionist speakers proclaimed that all progress in the region is tied to Israel ending its so-called “occupation.”
AND THIS brings us back to 1975, to the boat people in the South China Sea, the killing fields in Cambodia, and the Left that couldn’t care less about them.
It could be argued that the Bill Ayres, Howard Zinns and Jean Paul Sartes of the world can be forgiven for their decision to side with the Soviets and their Third World proxies against the US and the Western alliance.
After all, they had nothing personal at stake. The Soviets were not threatening their freedom.
And what did they owe to “unprogressive,” “reactionary” people from Southeast Asia who agreed with America that Communism was evil and wished to be free?
But the situation is different today. By waging its war against Israel through Palestinian proxies, the West threatens itself. The Nazi propaganda recycled by the Soviets which has enslaved the peoples of Europe and much of America’s intellectual elite has not only turned them into willing participants in the new war against the Jews. It has turned them into instruments for their own destruction.
By focusing their attention entirely on Israel and its imaginary crimes, the Europeans and their American admirers ignore the fact that the Islamic war against Israel is itself a proxy war for global jihad.
That war, informed by the same Nazi propaganda, but refined through the prism of Islamic Jew hatred and totalitarian imperialism, does not see Israel’s destruction as its ultimate aim. The jihadists, whom the West so happily ignores and whitewashes, have made it absolutely clear that destroying Israel is but the first skirmish in their great war. Their ultimate aim is the conquest of what remains of Western civilization.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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