Guardian
There were few memorable moments in the election campaign of 2005, but there’s one I won’t forget. It came when I was interviewing a group of Muslim voters in Edinburgh, asking how the Iraq war had unsettled their political allegiances. One older man began telling me that he did not blame Tony Blair or even George Bush for the way things had turned out, because they were mere dupes of a more powerful force. The calamity of 9/11 was not all it seemed: the authors of that event were not the 19 hijackers, but more shadowy players, unknown even to Bush. Later, as he gave me a lift to the station, I asked who these secret powers might be. The answer was “rich Jewish people”.
I told him that just as there were plenty of lies told about Muslims, so there were lies told about Jews - and that neither of us should accept either. I put the comments to one side, dismissing them as the ramblings of one man.
Again and again in recent years, I’ve made the same move. I’ve read the reports of sermons in the Arab world, denouncing Judaism and Jews, and tried to see a wider context.
So I saw the vox pop on Saudi TV asking people on the street whether they would ever shake hands with a Jew - unanimous answer: no - and guessed that perhaps this was an exceptional item, hardly indicative. I read the transcript of an interview with Basmallah, a three-year-old girl, again aired on Saudi TV, who was introduced as a “Muslim girl, a true Muslim”. Here’s the exchange:
Host: Basmallah, do you know the Jews?
Basmallah: Yes.
Host: Do you like them?
Basmallah: No.
Host: Why don’t you like them?
Basmallah: Because they are apes and pigs.
I shuddered to read such a thing. But it was translated and distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute (
memri.org/), and, like others, I wondered about the group’s motives: Memri was founded by a veteran of Israeli military intelligence. (On the other hand, few challenge the accuracy of Memri’s translations: unpalatable though they are, the texts Memri finds are all too real.)
Such has been my standard operating procedure, constantly trying to see if there’s a way to contextualise these incidents, to see them in proportion. My motivation was not complicated: I prefer my Jewish identity to be positive, rather than defined by a perennial defence against anti-semitism.
But everyone has their limits and last week I reached mine. On Thursday the president of Iran chose to stand with the cranks, neo-fascists and racists who deny the factual truth of the Holocaust.
“Some European countries insist on saying that Hitler killed millions of innocent Jews in furnaces,” said Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. “Although we don’t accept this claim…”
Suddenly, the usual apologetics won’t work. No one can say Iran’s president was really complaining about Israel or Zionism, rather than Jews. No one can say he was talking about the west’s colonial crimes. He was peddling, instead, one of the defining tropes of the racist hard right: Holocaust denial. It is a stance that seeks to deny Jews their history, their suffering, almost their very being. Like denying that African-Americans were ever slaves, it is a move made by those who wish only harm.
In this light, Ahmadinejad’s previous musings look rather different. When, in October, he stood beneath a banner that promised “A world without Zionism” and called for Israel to be “wiped off the map”, many Jews felt a chill at what seemed an annihilationist fantasy. Cooler heads said no, this was merely the hyperbolic style of the region, deployed to press a robust anti-Zionist rather than anti-semitic case. What he wanted, they explained patiently, was a world without Zionism, not a world without Jews.
(cont.)
