In response to the Charleston church massacre, Obama declared that “racism is in our DNA,” a rather sweeping indictment of the country that he leads. If it is true, it is no less true that anti-Semitism can be found in the DNA of Islam and Christianity, each of which defined itself in contradistinction to Judaism. Moreover, the world’s great sensitivity to racism is a post–World War Two development stemming from Hitler’s genocide of the Jews that the Nazis justified, indeed celebrated, in terms of “race.” How ironic, then, that today’s culture registers less alarm at threats or derision aimed at Jews than at other groups.
The rubber of Obama’s insouciance meets the road of Jewish endangerment at the point of Iran’s quest for a nuclear bomb. Trying to blunt the opposition by supporters of Israel, Obama gave an interview to Jeffrey Goldberg that stoked the very anxieties it was intended to allay. About the thinking of Iran’s rulers, he said:
The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival. It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power . . . . They may make irrational decisions with respect to discrimination, with respect to trying to use anti-Semitic rhetoric as an organizing tool. At the margins, where the costs are low, they may pursue policies based on hatred as opposed to self-interest. But the costs here are not low. . . . There are deep strains of anti-Semitism in the core regime, but . . . they also are interested in maintaining power, having some semblance of legitimacy inside their own country, which requires that they get themselves out of what is a deep economic rut that we’ve put them in.
Apart from the fact that there are no signs that the Iranian regime’s grip on power is weakening, a calculus that Obama himself seemed to make in 2009 when he conspicuously failed to speak in favor of the post-election uprising; and apart from the fact that long before nuclear sanctions, the Islamic Republic of Iran was one of numerous twentieth-century governments that made decisions driven by ideology that defied economic rationality, sometimes with catastrophic effects (for example China’s “Great Leap Forward” that generated a famine claiming an estimated twenty to fifty million lives)—apart from all that, no argument could be less reassuring to Jews than the premise that economic self-interest will trump Jew hatred. Considering the role Jews have played in commerce, the persecutions Jews suffered throughout their history were almost always economically counterproductive for their persecutors. Above all, there is the Holocaust, most of which was carried out after the tide of battle had already begun to turn against the Nazi regime. Despite its needing all possible resources for the war effort, men and materiel were diverted from military uses to the industrial-scale killing of noncombatant Jews. Contrary to Obama’s thought that policies based on hatred only hold “when the costs are low,” Hitler sacrificed his country, his regime, and his own life to the single-minded pursuit of his hatred. Is Obama innocent of all this history, or is he simply unable or unwilling to take it on board?
Jews face mounting peril. It makes little difference which comes first, hatred of Jews or hatred of Israel. The peril does not arise because the hatred is spreading: indeed it may not be spreading. The peril arises because the hatred is growing more lethal as radical Islam becomes ever more extreme. The Islamic republic of Iran once shocked the world with its wanton use of terror, its abuse of diplomatic immunity, its vaunting ambitions, and its festivals of hate. Then Al-Qaeda, which seemed so much more outré, eclipsed this, and now the self-styled Islamic State has in its turn outdone Al-Qaeda. The Jews of course are far from being the only targets, but they are a vulnerable one, and the attacks grow more frequent and more violent, making it increasingly difficult or impossible for Jews to live in various parts of the Diaspora.
The question of the hour is whether it will also make it impossible for Jews to live in Israel—or for the Jews of Israel to live. A regime that never tires of announcing its genocidal intent stands on the threshold of possessing a nuclear bomb that would fulfill its aim of becoming the hegemon of the Muslim Middle East and would give it the power to perpetrate a second Holocaust. Despite Obama’s jejune theories, Iran will not abandon this quest in order to raise its GDP.
This points to the second source of the peril confronting the Jews in addition to the heightening violence of radical Islam. It is the lethargy, cowardice, and even indifference of Western leaders. Thus, as before, the Jews are left on their own to contend with a threat to their very existence even though, as before, what threatens them will also come to threaten others. The outcome is uncertain, but thank God they are far better prepared to defend themselves this time.
Notes
1. Jen Gerson, “Pro-Gaza protests worldwide tainted by anti-Semitism; Calgary organizer to apologize for violence,” National Post, July 21, 2014. http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/pro-gaza-rallies-worldwide-tainted-by-anti-semitism-calgary-organizer-to-apologize-for-violence.
2. Jeffrey Goldberg, “Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?,” Atlantic, April 2015.
3. “Omar Barghouti, 4 March 2009 University of Ottawa, Part 2 - Q&A.” https://vimeo.com/9605827.
4. “Turkey’s PM Says AKP Will not succumb to ‘Jewish Lobby,’” Hurriyet Daily News, February 8, 2015. http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/turkeys-pm-says-akp-will-not-succumb-to-jewish-lobby-.aspx?pageID=238&nID=78079&NewsCatID=338.
5. “Turkey’s Erdogan: ‘Jewish Capital’ Is Behind New York Times,” Haaretz, June 7, 2015. http://www.haaretz.com/news/middle-east/1.659931.
6. Article 28, Article 7, translation by the Avalon Project, Yale Law School. http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.
7. Stuart Winer, “Palestinian envoy says Jews plotting world domination,” Times of Israel, July 8, 2015. http://www.timesofisrael.com/palestinian-envoy-says-jews-plotting-world-domination/?utm_source=The+Times+of+Israel+Daily+Edition&utm_campaign=744ab22984-2015_07_08&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_adb46cec92-744ab22984-54382445.
8. Samuel Tadros, “The Sources of Egyptian Anti-Semitism,” American Interest, April 21, 2014. http://www.the-american-interest.com/2014/04/21/the-sources-of-egyptian-anti-semitism/.
9. Gardiner Harris, “Fulfilling a Promise, Jewish Center in India Reopens After Terror Attack in 2008,” New York Times, August 26, 2014. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/27/world/asia/mumbai-jewish-center-reopens-after-08-terror-attack.html.
10. “ADL Poll of Over 100 Countries Finds More Than One-Quarter of Those Surveyed Infected With Anti-Semitic Attitudes,” Press Release, Anti-Defamation League, New York, New York, May 13, 2014. http://www.adl.org/press-center/press-releases/anti-semitism-international/adl-global-100-poll.html#.VZGMRRtVhHw?referrer=http://global100.adl.org/.