Edward Alexander

Twice in the month of October the Islamic Republic of Iran laid claim to being the world's chief continuator of Nazi policy with respect to the Jews. First, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, it displayed (in violation of German law) the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, the satanic forgery concocted by the Czarist secret police in 1903 to "prove" that a cabal of Jewish capitalists, communists, and rabbis had been conspiring (at the Zionist Congress of 1897) to bring the world under Jewish domination. It became Hitler's holy book long before there was a Jewish state, but the Islamic Propagation Organization explains that Israel is the main target of its new Iranian edition. That is to say, the pariah people is now the pariah state.

Then, in a speech to a Teheran conference delicately entitled "The World without Zionism," Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared that Israel should be "wiped off the map," and expressed confidence that the latest wave of Palestinian butchery of Israeli civilians would remove "this disgraceful blot from the face of the new Islamic world."

The Iranian peddling of the Protocols elicited little criticism outside of Germany itself, where its ultimate results (for Germans as well as Jews) are only too well-known. Among Iran's co-religionists in the Arab world, the Protocols is on sale everywhere, a mainstay of Arab culture and raw material for popular television programs. The work has also been enjoying a revival among numerous American liberals and leftists for whom the existence of Israel is the sole impediment to a peaceful world. Writers in the liberal journal Tikkun warn of Jewish "conspirators" who run the U.S. government and praise "the industrial-sized grain of truth" in the Protocols. Noam Chomsky, speechifying in 2002 in the wake of anti-Semitic violence all across Europe, declared that "Anti-Semitism is no longer a problem...It is raised, but it's raised because privileged people want to make sure that they have total control, not just 98% control."

Ahmadinejad's call for genocide, on the other hand, elicited a good deal of tongue-clucking. There was outright condemnation from America, Russia, Australia, Canada, even the European Union. A few barely audible squeaks of criticism came from Arab countries like Egypt, which was warned by the Iranian president that it would "burn in the fire of the Islamic nation's fury" because it had established diplomatic relations with Israel. Egypt replied that "We are beyond this type of political rhetoric..."

Indeed they are. In the good old days Egypt's own leaders, like Gamal Nasser, constantly declared that "Israel's existence is itself an aggression" and that they intended to "turn the Mediterranean red with Jewish blood." When Egypt and its allies suffered a catastrophic defeat in their 1967 aggression, they (and the Arab world generally) ceased speaking of their desire to reduce Israel to sandy wastes and instead redefined their struggle as the search for a haven for homeless Palestinian Arabs; this was a calculated (and hugely successful) appeal to liberals, who now habitually blame the Jews themselves for Arab rejection of Israel.

Nobody has mastered these rhetorical arts better than the Palestinian Arab leadership. The chief Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat, for example, responded to the Iranian's genocidal ravings by saying that "Palestinians recognize the right of Israel to exist, and I reject his comments. What we need to be talking about is adding the state of Palestine to the map and not wiping Israel from the map." The only problem with this admirable sentiment is that the Palestinian leadership has already (as has often been noted) cartographically wiped Israel from the map: in its schoolbooks, in its maps of the Middle East, in the insignia that pictorially define the would-be Palestinian state as encompassing the whole of Israel.

Nor is it only the Palestinian Arabs who must now be lamenting Ahmadinejad's grossly undiplomatic speech. Iran is hardly the only country comfortably seated at the UN despite being in permanent violation of the UN's founding principle of mutual respect for the sovereignty of other member nations. Neither are Islamic and Arab UN members the only force in the world working to make Israel a pariah nation. We have had the British Association of University Teachers imposing a boycott of Israeli academics and researchers; we have seen countless American professors taking to the pages of The Nation and The New York Review of Books to call for an "alternative" to Israel; we daily witness the "progressive" churches (Episcopal, United Methodist, Presbyterian Church USA, United Church of Christ) promoting "divestment" campaigns (in gross violation of American laws that make compliance with the Arab boycott of Israel a criminal act). I suspect that all of these utopians must now be lamenting the way in which the Iranian president has given extreme and radical expression to their very own sentiments about "a world without Zionism," and thinking: "Good causes attract bad advocates."

A frequent contributor to Outpost, Edward Alexander is University of Washington professor emeritus of English.