Rael Jean Isaac

Since 9/11 Samuel Huntington’s thesis of a clash of civilizations has resonated with new force. Some – including Steven Plaut in last month’s Outpost -- have argued that what we experience is not a clash of civilizations but of barbarism against civilization. Yet it may well be the problem goes deeper still, with much of the civilized world itself sinking into what British journalist Melanie Phillips calls “terrifying moral darkness.”

Many have noted the role of the United Nations in fostering moral decline. In London’s Daily Mail of July 21, Phillips is particularly eloquent. She writes: “If the Jews have always been a society’s pit canaries whose fate is an early warning of that society’s wider collapse, Israel is surely the canary in the mine of the world. The way it is being treated bespeaks a mortal sickness. Israel is the victim of a continuing, half-century attempt to annihilate it. Yet its attempts to defend itself are denounced and vilified, its activities are misreported and distorted, it is judged by malign double standards to paint it falsely as a rogue state….This treatment of Israel goes far beyond the fate of that particular region. The obsessive malice with which it is vilified and libeled, and the tacit and even explicit encouragement of the war of mass murder against it, while atrocities in Africa are not only ignored but their perpetrators given a seat on the UN Human Rights Commission, for heaven’s sake, shows that not just the UN but the world order it represents are bust, broken, bankrupt.”

Phillips takes the democracies to task: “For faced with this obscene parody of a world body that is supposed to promote and uphold peace and justice but actually ignores, promotes and upholds genocide, mass murder, tyranny, terrorism and endemic corruption, the democracies of the west not only ignore such evidence but profess to believe that the UN is a moral exemplar without whose imprimatur wars are illegitimate and whose every utterance or action possesses unchallengeable moral authority.” (John Kerry, with his emphasis on winning UN approval for U.S. actions, is an unfortunate example of American elites endorsing this evil fiction.)

“While the world is run by tyrannies,” writes Phillips, “tyranny, terrorism and genocide will of course continued unabated, and the victims of these atrocities will be regarded at best with indifference and at worst demonized as villains in order to protect the guilty. That is the twisted and lethal phenomenon of which Israel is both victim and symbol….Israel is the defining moral issue of our time…because the way the world is treating it exemplifies a global moral sickness in which truth, goodness and the victims of an annihilatory madness are ignored, dehumanized or attacked, while lies, wickedness and their perpetrators are appeased, endorsed and supported.”
Phillips is of course not alone in recognizing that barbarism has become institutionalized and legitimized in the topsy turvy moral universe of the United Nations, where an Israeli fence designed to protect its citizens is treated with a moral ferocity appropriate to genocide (even as real genocide is ignored). Phillips says that the only moral response to the UN would be to shut it down. Others have suggested that the United States take the lead in establishing an alternative United Nations to engage the world’s problems. This body would be confined to democratic countries or “civilized nations” (though heaven forefend such a politically incorrect term be used).

But the problem goes deeper than tyrannies vs. democracies or the hypocrisy of democracies in paying obeisance to a tyranny-dominated United Nations. For we have to ask, suppose an alternative assembly of “civilized countries” were to be formed: would Israel be honored as a moral beacon in a neighborhood sunk in despotism and fanaticism? Or would the majority of the new body continue to curry favor with the barbarians by applying the familiar double standards that lead to Israel’s treatment as a pariah state. As we look at Europe today, the answer is obvious.

Historian of dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or claims that for three decades the European Union “has been completing a slow metamorphosis into the ‘Christian’ arm of the Pan-Arab world, different in religious observation (or lack of same) but united in its views of Israel and America.” In Bat Ye’or’s view this transformation is based on a deliberate policy going back to 1980 when, under French leadership, the European Community (later to become the EU) adopted the Venice Declaration which aligned Europe with the Arab position on Israel. The thinking was that by becoming the most powerful champion of the Islamic world’s great grievance – Israel’s existence -- the European Community would achieve a global weight that would permit it to challenge U.S. power and influence.

Whatever the motivations, it is clearly true that the European Union, in respect to Israel, has become a branch of the Arab League. And while France, like Saudi Arabia’s princes, may be belatedly waking up to the realization that the forces it nurtured may spell its own demise (hence, in France, the outlawing of the veil in schools, the expulsion of the most outspoken imams) this does not portend any change of policy regarding Israel.

From her vantage point as a member of the European Parliament a young Ilke Schroeder – its youngest member, she was elected in 1999 while still a college student – came to conclusions similar to Bat Yeor. “The Europeans” she says “supported the Palestinian Authority with the aim of becoming its main sponsor and through this, challenge the U.S. and present themselves as the future global power.” Schroeder notes: “You have only to see the exhibitions on Israel and Palestine in the European Parliament’s foyer – where Israel is accused of sociocide and branded as an apartheid state – to know which side the EU is on.”

In throwing its weight behind the “Road Map” the United States has made three deadly enemies of Israel arbiters of its fate: the EU, the Soviet Union and the UN. It’s as if the U.S. had joined with Syria, Egypt and Saudi Arabia to judge Israel.

Nor is the Atlantic an invincible barrier to the carriers of the anti-Semitic plague sweeping Europe – those whom Bat Ye’or calls “the spiritual heirs of 1930s Nazism and anti-Semitism, triumphally resurgent.” In this Outpost Edward Alexander chronicles the sources of infection here. Dennis Prager has responded to one source of infection, the Presbyterian Church USA, which voted to “divest” from companies doing business in Israel saying:

“One of the most decent societies, one of the most liberal democracies in the world, is fighting for its life against Islamic fascists who praise the Holocaust and publicly call for the annihilation of Israel – and the Presbyterian Church calls for strangling Israel!….This is one of the morality-clarifying issues of our time. To single out Israel for economic strangulation while that good nation fights for its life is an act of such immorality that holding that view precludes one from the title ‘good’ or ‘ God-fearing,’ for if they are true to God, I am false to Him...If their Bible teaches them to strangle Israel and support Yasser Arafat, I am guided by a different Bible. They have drawn a line.”

It would be comparatively comforting if the barbarians were merely at the gates; they could then be repelled. Alas, the barbarians are firmly established within the gates of the western democracies.

Rael Jean Isaac is Editor of Outpost