Two Sides: Pick One, Folks

I heard a joke the other day that confirmed my suspicions about the insidious grip anti-Semitism is gaining, not just on the minds of voting French people but on the jocular mindlessness of dopey Americans.

What do you call six Jews in turbans? Pakistan.

Not funny, right? But it is indicative of a scary sentiment, one you may have thought was confined to the dankest corners of the Arab world. The meaning, as far as I can ferret it out, is this: Because it has collaborated with the United States in the war on terror and because President Pervez Musharraf, whose newly “reelected” military dictatorship stays in power by the strong arms of a few trusted advisors, Pakistan is clearly being run by a cabal of Jews.

How else to explain the defection of a Muslim state from the Arab world’s solidarity with Al Qaeda and the Palestinians? How else to explain Pakistan’s willingness to join forces with America, the great Satan, which, as Arab conspiracy theorists are always telling us, is itself run by powerful Jews and is thereby merely an extension of Israel?

The implication is clear. Anyone who opposes terrorism or the Islamist agenda is, by proxy, a Jew or a puppet of the Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency. As the conflict in Israel escalates, the world is separating quickly into two reductive and hostile camps: Jews and anti-Semites.

Because we support Israel, Americans increasingly are seen as surrogate Jews. We should accept our new moniker with pride, partly because being a Jew is nothing to be ashamed of, but mostly because our alliance with Israel is meritorious in principle.

We support Israel because it is a democracy and because Israelis share our belief in liberal politics. Its press is free, as are its elections and society. These are values worth fighting for; they are why we went to war in Afghanistan, after all. And defending Israel against Palestinian suicide bombing is nothing less than a defense of Enlightenment ideals against medieval tyranny.

The Palestinian cause (against oppression and for a state) is another matter, one that all fair-minded people recognize as legitimate. But the present Palestinian leadership and its loudest supporters in the Arab world are hopelessly tainted by their toleration and even covert fostering of appalling Jew-hating, jingoistic rants that appear regularly in the Arab press.

Take columnist Fatma Abdallah Mahmoud’s recent piece in the Egyptian government daily Al Akhbar complaining to Hitler about the “fabrication” of the Holocaust: “If only you had done it, brother, if only it had really happened, so that the world could sigh in relief [without] their evil and sin.”

The Middle East Media Research Institute documented that, along with this screed from a weekly column in the London-based Arabic newspaper Al Sharq al Awsat by Yasser Arafat aide Bassam Abu Sharif. Accusing Israel of shooting at the statue of the Virgin Mary in Bethlehem, he wrote: “This, of course, was a failed attempt to murder peace, love and tolerance, just as their forefathers tried to murder the prophetic message when they hammered their nails and iron stakes through the body of Jesus into the wooden cross.”

Even Christians gave that one up long ago when they remembered that Jesus was a Jew.

Supporters of this kind of filth are enemies of fairness, sanity and liberalism. So, pick a side, folks; there are only two.