THE NOXIOUS NEXUS - @MidEastTruth

THE NOXIOUS NEXUS

Iran’s Rants Spice a Deadly Brew that Threatens More than Just Israel

By Gil Troy
B'nai Brith Magazine
Spring 2006

“If combating anti-Semitism becomes only a Jewish issue, we all lose, including Muslims trying to liberalize their own societies.”

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's threats to destroy Israel have provoked justifiable outrage worldwide. And yet his threats against the United States have gone almost unnoticed.

Ahmadinejad’s harangue during Iran’s “World-Without-Zionism” conference this fall included this statement: “And God willing, with the force of God behind it, we shall soon experience a world without the United States and Zionism.” Yet one month later, his call to “wipe out” Israel yielded more than 200,000 Google hits, while the quotation targeting Israel and America yielded only 339.

True, a nuclear Iran would endanger Israel before America, just as Hamas’ anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric has led to killings of more Israelis than Americans. And in their September military parades the slogans on Iran’s nuclear-ready Shahab-3 ballistic missiles cried “Israel should be wiped off the map.”

Still, especially after 9/11 we cannot ignore the anti-American threats. We cannot become inured, despite over two decades’ worth of Islamicist invective. Just as Israelis dismissed Yasir Arafat’s jihadist rhetoric during the Oslo era—then learned painfully how serious he was—America cannot pooh-pooh Ahmadinejad's annihilationist rants as he rushes to go nuclear.

Here, conservative policy makers should learn from liberal activists combating sexism, racism, and homophobia. There must be zero tolerance for intolerance. While people can criticize American or Israeli policies, those who jump from particular objections to essentialist assaults on “the Americans” or “the Jews” should be confronted, shamed, and shunned.

The Iranian president's two linked targets again prove that the upsurges in anti-Zionism and antisemitism reflect a broader hostility against the West in general and America in particular. In fact, a slogan found at another Iranian missile parade vowed “we will trample American under our feet.”

We do not need more zones of political correctness to sanitize speech and smother free thought. But all good people throughout the world should unite and fight effectively, be they liberal or conservative, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, or atheist. Characteristically, the Iranian bigot’s speech also threatened Muslims who recognize Israel.

This fight for freedom and against hatred should not be partisan or particularistic. If combating antisemitism becomes only a Jewish issue, we all lose, including Muslims trying to liberalize their own societies.

If the fight against anti-Americanism is considered only a Republican or neoconservative obsession, we also all lose, including liberals who would be the first to suffer under theocratic, sexist, homophobic, jihadist dictatorships. The new antisemitism and jihadist anti-Americanism fester in the same cesspools of modern and pre-modern thought that spawn Islamicist terrorism. Fed by a pathological combination of modern Islamicist throwbacks and cutting-edge, post-modernist apologists, the new antisemitism and anti-Americanism must be defeated along with a broader anti-Western bigotry.

The German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf judges how civilized a society is by how it treats its minority members; in our topsy turvy world, where trendy “sophisticates” rationalize the violence of the supposedly “marginalized,” we need a new axiom. You judge a society by how it treats its weakest members—and its opponents, real and imagined.

Just as historians have sought to explain “Why England” (and the rest of the West) “slept” as the Nazi threat grew in the 1930s, future historians will wonder why so many Westerners resist seeing the obvious today. Iran’s President is the latest ugly public face of the noxious nexus of jihadism and post-modernism that feeds hatred of Jews, Americans, Westerners, and others too numerous to mention. Our enemies have an integrated approach in their jihad against us. We need a similarly integrated approach, but one that is enlightened and humane, as well as effective, in helping us fight for freedom—and for our own safety.

Gil Troy is Professor of History at McGill University and the author most recently of a revised and expanded edition of “Why I Am A Zionist: Israel, Jewish Identity and the Challenges of Today.”