lie?”
And so at the dawn of the twenty-first century, one head of government holds up the documents for the “Final Solution” to “the Jewish problem” because another head of government insists, repeatedly, that no such event ever took place. This is the state to which the United Nations has fallen after six decades posing as Lord Tennyson’s Parliament of Man: a sane man is obliged to prove to lunatics that the Holocaust actually happened.
One sympathizes with the Israeli Prime Minister, reduced, seventy years after Neville Chamberlain, to standing before the world waving pieces of paper from Herr Hitler. But he’s missing the point. Ahmadinejad & Company aren’t Holocaust deniers because of the dearth of historical documentation. They deny it because they can, and because it suits their own interests to do so, and because, in the regimes they represent, the state lies to its people as a matter of course and to such a degree that there is no longer an objective reality, only a self- constructed one.
And once you’re in the business of constructing your own reality, even internal logic is not required. In Iran, many of the same people who deny the first Holocaust are planning the second one. Elsewhere in the Muslim world, I’ve run into folks who simultaneously believe (a) that there was no Muslim involvement in the attacks of September 11, and (b) it was a tremendous victory for the Muslim people. Incidentally, by “the Muslim world,” I don’t just mean the Middle East: according to one poll, only 17 percent of British Muslims believe there was any Arab involvement in 9/11, and a majority of British Muslims—56 percent—believe there was no Arab involvement.2 And yet many British Muslims have marched in the streets under posters hailing the “Magnificent Nineteen” who carried out the attacks.
So we already live in a world in which there is insufficient agreed reality.
After America, there will be even less. To be sure, whatever the president of Iran might believe, there are plenty of fellows, even at the UN General Assembly, who understand that, yes, Auschwitz was built and, yes, many Jews died there. EU prime ministers ostentatiously participating in the annual Holocaust Memorial Day observances are certainly aware. Yet even they felt it was not, in diplomatic-speak, helpful for Mr. Netanyahu to belabor the point with President Ahmadinejad. The
Ah, so that’s why he did it. The whole heads-of-state-who-deny-the-Holocaust thing was a cunning distraction by the Zionist Entity.
During Israel’s famously “disproportionate” 2006 incursion into Lebanon, a reader reminded me of an old gag:
One day the UN Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world’s soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.
“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”
“Israel, of course.”
Ha-ha. It always had a grain of truth, now it’s the whole loaf.
Think of how the Prime Minister of Israel feels at the UN. And then picture what’s left of the United States after global eclipse. Obama and the leftists notwithstanding, the effect of American retreat from superpower status will not be a quiet life but a future as the Zionist Entity writ large—no longer the Great Satan, but forever the Great Scapegoat. As Richard Ingrams wrote in Britain’s
Hey, take a number and get in line. Who won’t dare to damn Israel? And for whatever bugs you. In late 2010, there was a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea off the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.5 On an official Egyptian government news site, the governor of South Sinai, Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, speculated that the fatal attacks in the hitherto peaceful waters were due to “the Mossad throwing in the deadly shark to hit tourism in Egypt.” Other sources wondered if the Mossad had gone further and equipped the aquatic predators with GPS. Could be. Governor Shousha has undoubtedly seen the famous Hollywood film about a killer shark terrorizing a beach resort—
Directed by the same infidel who made
The Governor of South Sinai is not the only political colossus to take the view that the world’s troubles are due to a tiny strip of land that at its narrowest point is barely wider than my New Hampshire township. Only a few months before the shark attacks, Bill Clinton had been in Egypt and told an audience of local “businessmen” that solving the Israeli/Palestinian problem would “take away about half the impetus for terror in the whole world.”6
Only 50 percent of global terrorism is all down to Israel? Are you sure you’re not underestimating?
In rationalizing the irrational, you not only legitimize it but create a self-fulfilling prophecy. After the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, Bruce Haigh, a retired Australia diplomat who’d served in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, went on TV and explained why hundreds of his compatriots had been blown up: “The root cause of this issue has been America’s backing of Israel on Palestine.”7
So we’re conceding that if a fellow in Indonesia is “frustrated” by Israeli “intransigence,” then blowing up Australian tourists, Scandinavian back-packers, and German stoners in Bali makes some kind of sense. For centuries, Jews were the handiest scapegoat in every two-bit duchy and principality across the map. In essence, the argument of Bill Clinton & Company simply affirms the ancient paranoia that the Jews are behind everything.
There is an element of humbug about all this. Just as Europe’s rulers, while happy to pander to anti- American sentiment among the citizenry, are well aware that the United States has been the guarantor of the Continent’s liberty since 1945, so Araby’s rulers, happy to pander to their subjects’ Judenhass in public, are privately rather appreciative of the Zionist Entity.
Diplomatic cables leaked in 2010 revealed that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was publicly urging the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and had even indicated to the Israelis that come the big night he’d make sure his kingdom’s radar facilities were switched off so nobody could tip off Teheran.8 Were Israel to take up his offer, His Majesty would be the first in a long parade of Arab potentates and European foreign ministers lining up to denounce Zionist “disproportion.” But it’s heartening to know that, whatever lunacies they subscribe to in public, both Arabs and Europeans retain a few residual marbles in private.
Not all the scapegoaters are nuts, maybe not even the governor of South Sinai. Maybe he’s just tossing a little red meat, a little shark bait to the Jew-hate crowd. But from Sharm al-Sheikh to the UN General Assembly, sane men find it politic to string along with the loons.
As the proverbial canary in the coal mine, Israel knows what America’s in for. Like the United States, it is militarily superior to its enemies. If it were merely a matter of weaponry, they would have won decades ago. But, if that’s all there is to it, where’s the U.S. victory parade in Afghanistan? The Palestinians were among the first to realize that, in a media age, you can win on other battlefields. Stone-throwing youths have won more victories for Palestine—at least in the European press and on North American campuses—than the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies ever did.
THE NEW NORMALIUT
One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. You can understand why the entire left and much of the right would rather vote for a quiet life. The Jewish state felt the same way in the early Nineties. There’s an Israeli coinage that was popular back then: “normaliut”—the desire to wake up each morning and live a normal political life, as John Podhoretz described
