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Barbara Amiel then chipped in with the news that it's spread to lunch and afternoon tea, too. This is the mood music of the new war, and more mellifluous in Britain than in the Arab world, with its amusing pop songs (I Hate Israel') and droll sitcoms (Plots of Terror, featuring an Ariel Sharon who drinks the blood of Arab babies and then tosses them on the bonfire). It would be frightfully tedious if Jews were thin-skinned enough to make a fuss about this sort of thing when there are so many more important things to worry about -- such as, for example, the potential backlash against Muslims that Western leaders are always fretting about in-between photo-ops at the mosque. This doesn't seem to be getting a lot of press coverage. Americans are resigned to Britain's and Europe's need to damn' Israel, if only because they're used to being on the receiving end themselves. This is perfectly understandable: a certain type of Englishman looks at an Arab and sees a desert version of his most cherished self-delusions. Where Jews are modern, urban and scientific, Arabs are feudal, rural and romantic. Arabs are just as famously hopeless at economic creativity: they have oil, but require foreigners to extract it and refine it. A backward culture that loves dressing up and places no value on professional activity will always appeal to a segment of the English elite. Look at the Prince of Wales in that wannabe Bedouin get-up he wore to meet Brother bin Laden the other week. Scarcely had he tossed the Highgrove hejab in the washer than he went out and gave a speech denouncing the arrogance' of skyscrapers. Over on the other side, meanwhile, whether or not Jews are still regarded in Europe as grasping, taloned, sallow, hook-nosed usurers with eyes like rattlesnakes, the traditional defects pale in comparison with a more recently acquired trait: their Americanism. Americans and Jews are not entirely synonymous, but, to elderly European Jews of a certain age, criticism of the Yanks has a familiar ring to it. In 1937, Sacheverell Sitwell visited the Bukovina, formerly the easternmost province of the Habsburg empire, then part of Romania and now in Ukraine. Its capital city Czernowitz was a multicultural mlange of Romanians, Ruthenians, Poles, Germans, Armenians and Swabians, but, as Sitwell noted, you'd never know that from a stroll down Main Street: There is not a shop that has not a Jewish name painted above its windows. The entire commerce of the place is in the hands of the Jews. Indeed, the savvier Aryans can claim to have seen it coming. As Werner Sombat wrote in The Jews and Economic Life (1911): One can rightly say that the United States owes what it is entirely to the Jews: that is, its American nature. America supports Israel not because it's Jewish but because it's democratic. American Jews are urban liberals and one of the Democratic party's most reliable core demographics. There is no political benefit whatsoever to Bush in taking a hard pro-Israel line'. Au contraire, Arab-Americans are just about the only immigrant group other than the Cubans that votes Republican. Yet that will never translate into GOP support for Arab states as presently constituted. My northern, rural, conservative neighbours are, when you prod 'em a little, mildly xenophobic and share a reflexive distaste for overt Jewishness. But they'll always back Israel over Syria or Egypt because to them liberty trumps everything else. They are also under no illusions as to the kind of state an Arafat-led Palestine would be: if you gave him Switzerland to run, he'd turn it into a sewer. So Republicans look at Israel and see not Jews but a liberal democracy. If you get out a map of the world and look at the vastness of the Arab lands from North Africa to the Gulf with a tiny Israeli sliver in the middle (if you accept the 1967 borders, it's only 11 miles wide at one point), it's simply not possible for any rational human being to blame the tiny sliver for all the woes of the surrounding vastness. At least in the old days Muslim victim culture sought out more plausible oppressors. Writing after the Great War, in which the Ottoman empire picked the wrong side through bad luck as much as anything else, Albert Kinross recounted his discussions with an educated Turk: The bey's politics amounted to this: why did British diplomacy allow German diplomacy to lead poor Turkey by the nose? He presupposed, firstly, that the Turk could do no wrong, and, secondly, that the Turk was an irresponsible and charming child whom it was the duty of the Great Powers to pet and spoil. To my unregenerate mind, a good hiding would have been more salutary. But even if you accept that Jews are slavering money-lenders no London hostess can stand and that Israel is a shitty little country, so what? If Israel was imposed' on the region in the Forties, the other nations date only from the Twenties. Both Israel and Egypt get massive subventions from Washington: Egypt, an economic basket-case, pisses it away; If America recognises a kindred spirit in Israel, then so does Europe in the Arab autocracies. As we've seen yet again, the principle underpinning the new Europe is not We, the people' but We know better than the people' -- not just on capital punishment and the Treaty of Nice and the single currency, but on pretty much anything that comes up, including national elections. When 29 per cent of Austrian voters were impertinent enough to plump for Jrg Haider's Freedom party, the EU punished them with sanctions and boycotts. Understandably, to such an elite the Oslo peace process' ought to be as remorseless and undeviating as the path to European unity: how preposterous to let something as footling as the wishes of the Israeli electorate disrupt it. So each half of the West looks in the Middle East for what it values most in itself: for the Americans, liberty; The result is a mirror image: just as Israel is the odd man out in the Middle East, so increasingly America is in the West, wedded as it is to such bizarre concepts as capital punishment, gun rights, free speech, etc. As for Barbara Amiel's EU ambassador, fretting that shitty little Israel, those people', are plunging the world into war, let me propose an alternative theory: it's all his fault. The other day, Mickey Kaus, an iconoclastic neoliberal, noticed that Zacarias Moussaoui, the French national now charged with conspiracy in connection with 11 September, became an Islamic radical while living in London drawing welfare benefits'; In other words, life in the Middle East may have fired their Islamic fundamentalism, but benefit cheques from the soft West Euro-Canadian welfare states enabled them to pursue their obsession at the taxpayer's expense. If you're looking for root causes' for terrorism, European-sized welfare programmes are a good place to start. Maybe if they had to go out to work, they'd join the Daily Mirror and become the next John Pilger. Or maybe they'd open a drive-thru Halal Burger chain and make a fortune. Instead, Tony Blair pays Islamic fundamentalists in London to stay at home, fester and plot. Having grown up in Arab countries that place no value on work and provide little incentive to economic activity, your would-be suicide bomber fits easily into the welfare culture of the European Union or Canada. Say what you like about the Jews, but they don't sit around on welfare. In St Urbain's Horseman, Mordecai Richler recalled some of the routine slurs of the Quebec government during the second world war, including an official pamphlet showing a coarse old Jew, nose long and misshapen as a carrot, retreating into the night with bags of gold'. Anti-Semitism,' he told the press, is grossly exaggerated. In the Middle East, two cultures jostle side by side: one channels its citizens' energy into economic fulfilment, the other into pathetic victim fantasies. The sides the United States and the European Union have chosen to align themselves with say as much about themselves and their own psychological health as they do about Palestine.
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