And Zionism was equated with Nazism; just as the Nazis believed in the
superiority of the Aryan race, so Zionists (sic) believed they were the
chosen people, which justified their own military expansion. This equation
was not confined to a marginal few. Abu Mazen, said Milsom, the
Palestinian Authority intellectual who is being talked about as Yasser
Arafats prime minister in a reformed administration, wrote as much in
his doctoral thesis in which he also said that the Zionists gave the Nazis
permission to treat the Jews as they wished so long as this guaranteed their
immigration to Palestine.
These sick outpourings are not so much religious or even fundamentalist
doctrines as rooted in a fanatical totalitarian ideology. As Professor Bauer
observed, the driving aim is the Islamic dictatorship of the world.
Realisation of this utopia necessitates the destruction of the foundation
creeds of Western culture, Judaism and Christianity and especially
Israel, the supposed personification of Western global power-lust, which
was planted as an incubus on Arab soil as a result of the Holocaust.
Holocaust denial is therefore central to Arab anti-Semitism, the prejudice
which such historical falsehood has helped to forge a strategic alliance with
Europe. For it absolves Europe of its guilt over the Jews, and replaces it
with European guilt towards Arabs displaced as a result of the Holocaust.
Europe has waited for more than half a century for a way to blame the
Jews for their own destruction. So instead of sounding the alarm over
genocidal Islamist Jew-hatred, Europeans have eagerly embraced the
Nazification of the Jews, a process which really got under way with
Israels disastrous invasion of Lebanon in 1982. This marked the beginning
of the medias systematic inversion of Israeli self-defence as aggression,
along with double-standards and malicious fabrications, which have nothing
to do with legitimate (and necessary) criticism of Israel and everything to
do with delegitimising the Jewish state altogether in readiness for its
dismantling.
So the conference heard about German accusations that Israel was using
Nazi methods and (repeating a claim by Hamas) that the Monica Lewinsky
scandal was a Jewish conspiracy against Bill Clinton. It heard of the
Nazification of Israel in Sweden, where there were charges that the Israelis
were exterminating the Palestinians, that the media were controlled by
Jewish interests to suppress criticism of Israel, and that influential Jewish
lobby groups were spraying journalists with poison.
It heard that in France Jews were vilified and excluded from public debate
if they challenged the lies being told about Israel. It was shown a
devastating French film Décryptage (Decoding) which has been playing
to packed houses in Paris about the obsessive malevolence towards
Israel displayed by the French media. It was told about the way the British
media described Israels death squads, killing fields and executioners
while sanitising Palestinian human bombs as gentle, religious and kind.
It heard about the cartoon in the Italian newspaper La Stampa during the
siege of the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem, depicting an Israeli tank
pointing a gun at the baby Jesus who is saying, Surely they are not going
to kill me again.
And of course there was Jenin, the so-called massacre or genocide
reported as such by virtually the entire media, where in fact 52 Palestinians
died, of whom more than half were terrorists, while Israel sustained (for it)
the huge loss of 45 of its soldiers. This astonishing media distortion was
conceded at the conference by the (extraordinarily brave) Palestinian
politics professor Mohammad Dajani, who also observed that a distraught
Palestinian public was on this and other occasions whipped up by
biased and emotional Palestinian reporting which showed little concern for
the truth. But the big lie of the Jenin massacre is now believed as fact,
contributing to the belief that Israel is a criminal state.
Europeans have thus made themselves accomplices to an explicitly
genocidal programme. But an even more striking feature is that, while the
old anti-Semitism still festers away among neo-Nazis, the new
anti-Semitism is a phenomenon of their sworn enemies on the political Left.
So, as the Canadian law professor Irwin Cotler observed, we now have the
mind-twisting situation where anti-Jewish hatred is harnessed to the cause
of anti-racism and human rights, with Israel being compared to both
Nazism and apartheid by those who define themselves against these
ideologies. Such a travesty of the facts involves, of course, the implicit
denial of the truth of those terrible regimes, quite apart from the prelude to
annihilation created by such a lethal defamation of Israel. And even more
counterintuitively, many Jews and Israelis on the Left also subscribe to this
analysis and even to the demonology of Israeli Nazism and apartheid
handing an effective weapon to those who dismiss the claim of a new
anti-Semitism as Jewish paranoia or Islamophobia.
So what is the explanation for the Lefts position? Partly, its the old
anti-imperialist and anti-West prejudice. Partly, its the view that only the
powerless can be victims; so Third World people can never be murderers,
and any self-defence by Western societies such as Israel must instead be
aggression. Partly, its the post-modern destruction of objectivity and truth,
which has ushered in the hegemony of lies. And partly, as the Left takes an
axe to morality and self-restraint, its a golden opportunity to pulverise the
very people who invented the **** rules in the first place.
A left-wing Polish journalist at the conference, Konstanty Gebert, got the
real point. The Left, he said, could not face the fact that they had totally
misconstrued the Middle East because this would undermine their whole
philosophy. This was founded on the premise that reason could reconcile all
differences; all that was needed in Israel was an enlightened government for
reason to prevail. The evidence that we are facing a phenomenon which is
not susceptible to reason would destroy that world view. It would also give
credibility to the hated Sharon, whose demonisation is absolutely vital to the
Left as a protection against the implosion of its whole ideological position.
So the evidence is being denied, and truth is being stood on its head. The
result is the defamation of a people, the greater prospect of its destruction,
and the disastrous failure of the populations of Britain and Europe to
understand properly the threat that all free peoples now face.
Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist.
