Britannia Radio

Springtime For Hitler In Arabia

By David Isaac

The “Arab Spring” looks more and more like “Springtime for Hitler”, the musical in Mel Brooks’ 1968 comedy “The Producers” in which Max Bialystock and Leo Bloom conspire to oversell interests in a Broadway flop. Things don’t go according to plan for Bialystock and Bloom and the same can be said of the protestors in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries.

It’s become commonplace to say that Jews are the canary in the coal mine. As Eric Hoffer put it, “I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel, so will it go with all of us.” But in today’s Middle East, one could make the argument that it’s not Jews, but Christians who are the real canary.

The most recent attack on Christians came Saturday. Two Coptic churches was burned in Egypt, “the latest incident in a worsening rash of sectarian violence between Egypt’s Muslims and its Christian minority since street protests ousted Egypt’s former president in February,” according to the Wall Street Journal. Egypt’s military government talked boldly of harsh retribution against the attackers but witnesses say that soldiers made no move during the five-hour skirmish between Muslims who initiated the assault on the churches and the Copts who gathered to protect them. Twelve were killed and 250 injured.

Egypt may well go the way of Iraq. John Eibner, CEO of Christian Solidarity International, wrote: “Since the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime, more than half the country's Christian population has been forced by targeted violence to seek refuge abroad or to live away from their homes as internally displaced people. … over 700 Christians, including bishops and priests, have been killed and 61 churches have been bombed.”

Ironically, the Christians of Iraq were better off under Saddam Hussein. As Raymond Ibrahim, associate director of the Middle East Forum, points out: “[B]y empowering ‘the people,’ the U.S. has unwittingly undone Iraq's Christian minority. Naively projecting Western values on Muslims, U.S. leadership continues to think that ‘people-power’ will naturally culminate into a liberal, egalitarian society – despite all the evidence otherwise. The fact is, in the Arab/Muslim world, ‘majority rule’ traditionally means domination by the largest tribe or sect; increasingly, it means Islamist domination.”

This is the same ‘people-power’ that the U.S. media, the Administration and even certain conservative voices have been projecting on Egyptians, even as their Arab Spring descends more and more into a Bialystock and Bloom production.

Given what populism has wrought on the Christians of Iraq, Israel’s supporters should shudder when Amr Moussa, the secularist front-runner in Egypt’s presidential race says that Egypt needs a new policy toward Israel, one that reflects “the consensus of the people”. Amr Moussa’s popularity springs largely from his anti-Israel stance. As the Wall Street Journal notes, “Mr. Moussa’s popularity skyrocketed in the 1990s, culminating in 2001 with the release of the unlikely pop hit “I hate Israel (I love Amr Moussa) by singer Shaaban Abdel Rahim.”

Mr. Moussa predicts – nor does he seem perturbed by the fact – that Egypt’s elections in the Fall will lead to a legislature dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. He will have common cause with them on Israel. If there is one thing secular and Islamist politicians can agree on, it’s that Egypt needs to dissolve the Israel-Egypt treaty. In one sense this is laughable, given that most provisions of the treaty were ignored by Egypt from the start. But what they probably seek is freedom of action to remilitarize the Sinai, which could be the prelude to future war.

The fact of the matter is that when it comes to Israel, Arabs are radical across the political spectrum. For decades Shmuel Katz emphasized this reality. He observed that Israelis who believed that peace between a sovereign Israel and the Arabs was a practical possibility assumed that there existed a solid body of “moderate” Arabs when in fact the difference between moderate and immoderate Arabs was only on the method or process by which the elimination of the Jewish state was to be accomplished. In 2005, in an essay entitled “The Phantom Arab Moderate” (The Jerusalem Post, November 29) Shmuel provided a survey of the long search for Arab moderates.

Shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Shmuel wrote:

[R]eports were circulating in the West that in Egypt (which had launched four wars against Israel since the Jewish state's birth in 1948) a new, moderate, more friendly wind was blowing toward Israel.

And so an American writer, Joan Peters, having been sent on a journalistic mission to Egypt, decided to test these reports on the spot.

Her findings were published in an article in Commentary magazine (May 1975) under the title 'In search of moderate Egyptians.' She started on her project in America by studying the literature attesting to a positive change in Egyptian attitudes toward Israel.

‘To my amazement,' she wrote, 'once in Egypt I found virtually no evidence of such a change.' She interviewed as representative a cross-section of Egyptians as she could find. She lists them: government officials, writers, academics, scientists, demographers, doctors, architects, engineers, housewives, shopkeepers, students, soldiers, salesmen, cab drivers, waiters, women's rights activists, secretaries, carpenters, travel agents, communists, leftists, nationalists and right-wing conservatives.

She recorded in detailed quotation a number of her interviews and learned that far from Egyptians being friendly to Israel, there existed a consensus not only of fierce hatred of Israel, but of virulent anti-Semitism – which in sum would deny the Jewish state's right even to exist.

In December 1980, shortly after Israel’s peace treaty with Egypt was signed, a former prime minister of Egypt, Mustafa Khalil, delivered a guest lecture at Tel Aviv University. There, speaking – as he said – ‘frankly and scientifically,’ he pointed out that the Arabs do not regard the Jews as a nation at all, but as a religion only. ‘When it comes to nationality,’ he declared, ‘a Jew can be an Egyptian Jew, a French Jew or a German Jew.’ Egyptians, he said, wanted to be good neighbors with Israel, but they expected the Jews ‘to change.’

Twenty-five, 30 years have passed, and one fine day in September we read the report of another search for moderate Arabs. This time it is in Israel itself, and the search is reported by an Israeli writer, Yossi Klein Halevi, who sought common ground – cultural, spiritual and hence, as a Jewish moderate, political – with Muslim Arab counterparts. He too, like Joan Peters three decades earlier, had 'numerous candid conversations with – in his case Palestinian Arabs – 'at all levels of society.' And he cites 'one telling example,' with Gen. Nasser Youssef, the Palestinian Authority's interior minister.

Halevi, as he related in The Jerusalem Post of September 28, asked Youssef hypothetically what would happen if Israel withdrew to the 1967 'borders,' uprooted the settlements and re-divided Jerusalem. Youssef replied that 'the refugees would be returning to the area' and then there would be no need for an artificial border between Israel and Palestine.'

'But,' said Halevi to Youssef, 'aren't we negotiating today over a two-state solution?'

'Yes,' Youssef replied, 'as an interim step. You aren't separate from us, you are part of us. Just as there are Muslim Arabs and Christian Arabs, you are Jewish Arabs.' He went on to speak of this unified Palestinian state joining with other Arab states.

General Youssef, adds Halevi, 'is widely known as a moderate, deeply opposed to terror - because it is counter-productive to the Palestinian cause.'

Youssef is thus fully representative of the supreme hutzpa, precisely of the moderate Arabs.

Emboldened by the great success worldwide in disseminating the grotesque claim to a 'Palestinian' history that never existed, mainstream Arabs teach their children and make it plain to the world that their intention is to destroy the Jewish state, directly if possible, or by phases, as so often described by their late leader, Yasser Arafat.

Here the moderate Arab steps in and proposes a moderate alternative - the same one suggested in 1980 by former Egyptian Prime Minister Mustafa Khalil: vaporization of the Jewish national identity.

The more things change, the more they stay the same. The Arab spring? Let Max Bialystock have the last word: “A flop, ha! That's putting it mildly. A disaster! A catastrophe! An outrage! A guaranteed-to-close-in-one-night beauty!”