I hesitate to call your attention to an article that got good play yesterday. But Suzanne Fields’ “Anti-Semitism for Dummies” is one you should read if, like me, you missed it yesterday morning:
Contempt for the Jews is nearly always self-destructive, not necessarily in the short run, but over time, not simply person-to-person, but for nations, too. Anti-Semitism is for dummies.
The impact of anti-Semitism on the Arabs in the Middle East is only now getting the attention it deserves. Jews under the Ottoman Turks in the 15th and 16th centuries were welcomed for their advanced knowledge of spinning, weaving and dying of textiles. Their knowledge of European languages enabled Muslims to employ them as diplomats. Modern Islam merely blames them for everything they imagine going wrong.
Paul Johnson notes that Arabs have not only wasted trillions of dollars of oil revenues, blowing much of the money on armaments, but they have neither consolidated nor modernized their law nor copied any of the techniques of land management the Jews have used to make the desert bloom. Playing the victim and blaming the Jews for everything that goes wrong galvanizes hatred, but it doesn’t do anything to make Arab life livable.
But that doesn’t mean that those who hate Jews won’t succeed. Richard Cohen, who is sometimes sensible, has a chilling take on the meaning of Hezbollah’s recent victory:
Democracies are in a fix. If your enemy will gladly die for his cause while you wouldn’t think of dying for yours (not that you even know what it is: freedom? liberty?) then clearly the fight is not to the swift but to the suicidal. The obvious short-term remedy is cold, lethal technology. But the reliance on high-tech stuff has not subdued Iraq, and it utterly failed in Lebanon as well. These are the realities of the new warfare, and if they are the ‘birth pangs of the new Middle East,’ then what is being produced is not some cute, babbling democracies but a hideous monster.
Just wait until he reaches for a nuclear weapon.
The democracies aren’t ready to fight yet. What will it take?