In an interview with Jeffrey Goldberg, Saudi Arabia's crown prince Mohammed bin Salman - currently in the US - compared Iran's supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, unfavourably to Hitler - "Hitler didn’t do what the supreme leader is trying to do. Hitler tried to conquer Europe. … The supreme leader is trying to conquer the world.”
Well, the enmity between Saudi Arabia and Iran - the leaders of the Sunni and the Shi'ite worlds - is nothing new, though it has been heating up recently. More significant, perhaps, was what Prince Mohammed had to say about Israel:
Another key—though sub rosa—member of Prince Mohammed’s alliance is Israel, a country about which Prince Mohammed did not have a bad word to say. In fact, when I asked him whether he believed the Jewish people have a right to a nation-state in at least part of their ancestral homeland, he said: “I believe that each people, anywhere, has a right to live in their peaceful nation. I believe the Palestinians and the Israelis have the right to have their own land.” According to the former U.S. peace negotiator Dennis Ross, moderate Arab leaders have spoken of the reality of Israel’s existence, but acknowledgement of any sort of “right” to Jewish ancestral land has been a red line no leader has crossed until now.
Lee Smith suggests that Mohammed bin Salman [MBS] would be wise to embrace Israel not just for reasons of realpolitik. The poison of antisemitism, which so profoundly colours Middle Eastern culture, renders those in its grip unable to function effectively since their view of the world is so fundamentally irrational:
While Hitler comparisons are rarely advisable, MBS’s analogy underscores the fact that he sees the nature of the Iranian region very differently than another world leader Jeffrey Goldberg interviewed, several times in fact—former President Barack Obama. Shortly after the Obama White House struck the nuclear agreement with Iran in July 2015, Goldberg pressed Obama on the Iranian regime’s anti-Semitism. Obama saw it as functional.
“The fact that you are anti-Semitic, or racist, doesn’t preclude you from being interested in survival,” said Obama. “It doesn’t preclude you from being rational about the need to keep your economy afloat; it doesn’t preclude you from making strategic decisions about how you stay in power; and so the fact that the supreme leader is anti-Semitic doesn’t mean that this overrides all of his other considerations.”
It didn’t take impoverished Iranians protesting against the economy their leaders had pillaged to show that Obama was fundamentally wrong about the nature of the regime — and about one of the chief ideological weapons that it cultivates. Anti-Semitism and reason cannot exist side by side because anti-Semitism is the precise form that unreason takes in modern politics.
The criticism of anti-Semitism typically focuses on the damage that it does to Jews, but that’s only one part of the equation. The other concern is what it does to those who are afflicted by anti-Semitism, non-Jews, by turning them into stark raving lunatics who are incapable of understanding the world and thus acting in it rationally. If you believe that one percent of the world’s population controls global wealth, communications, and even the weather, it becomes increasingly difficult to function. When an entire society adopts this as a worldview, it’s over. “The Jews control the weather” is not a starting point from which anyone makes progress....
Thus, the Iranian threat isn’t just military, but is also cultural. That’s why MBS is in a rush to undo the post-1979 regional order, represented now by the obscurantist regime in Tehran that courts war not simply with Israel, but with all of its neighbors, from the Persian Gulf to the eastern Mediterranean. To keep Saudi Arabia moving headlong in the other direction, the future, the logical move for a man who keeps shocking the system is to embrace Israel. By establishing normal relations with the Jewish state, MBS would be enshrining his vision for a normal Saudi Arabia.
It depends upon the kind of anti-Jewish prejudice one is dealing with and the hold it has upon the individual in question. An example of someone who was prejudiced and who successfully exploited anti-Semitism was Karl Lueger, a relatively successful mayor of late nineteenth century Vienna who famously said: Wer Jude ist, bestimme ich (I decide who is a Jew
Posted by: Paul | April 05, 2018 at 11:42 AM
Yes, there are genuine anti-Semites and others who, conscientiously,in pursuit of precise goals, use anti-Semitism as a tool.
Posted by: Mar Lizaro | April 06, 2018 at 08:32 PM