THE GLUE THAT BINDS ARAB SOCIETIES IS HATRED OF JEWS

Here are some excerpts from ‘Celebrate Arab Democracy?’ by Caroline B. Glick which was published in today's issue of Jewish World Review:

……… whether under authoritarian rule or democracy, anti-Semitism is the unifying sentiment of the Arab world. Fractured along socioeconomic, tribal, religious, political, ethnic and other lines, the glue that binds Arab societies is hatred of Jews.

A Pew opinion survey of Arab attitudes towards Jews from June 2009 makes this clear. 95 percent of Egyptians, 97 percent of Jordanians and Palestinians and 98 percent of Lebanese expressed unfavorable opinions of Jews. Three-quarters of Turks, Pakistanis and Indonesians also expressed hostile views of Jews.

Throughout the Arab and Muslim world, genocidal anti-Semitic propaganda is all-pervasive. And as Prof. Robert Wistrich has written, "The ubiquity of the hate and prejudice exemplified by this hard-core anti-Semitism undoubtedly exceeds the demonization of earlier historical periods — whether the Christian Middle Ages, the Spanish Inquisition, the Dreyfus Affair in France, or the Judeophobia of Tsarist Russia. The only comparable example would be that of Nazi Germany in which we can also speak of an'eliminationist anti-Semitism' of genocidal dimensions, which ultimately culminated in the Holocaust."

What these [Pew opinion survey] numbers, and the anti-Semitic behavior of Arabs show Israelis is that it makes no difference which regime rules where. As long as the Arab peoples hate Jews, there will be no peace between their countries and Israel.

If the media reported on the overwhelming Jew hatred in the Arab world generally and in Egypt specifically, it would ruin the narrative of the Arab conflict with Israel. That narrative explains the roots of the conflict as frustrated Arab-Palestinian nationalism. It steadfastly denies any more deeply-seated antipathy of Jews that is projected onto the Jewish state. The fact that the one Jewish state stands alone against 23 Arab states and 57 Muslim states whose populations are united in their hatred of Jews necessarily requires a revision of the narrative. And so their hatred is ignored.