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Our Absurd Obsession with Israel Is Laid Bare

(Observer-UK) Nick Cohen - The Arab revolution is consigning skip-loads of articles, books and speeches about the Middle East to the dustbin of history. To a generation of politically active if not morally consistent campaigners, the Middle East has meant Israel and only Israel. The lives of hundreds of millions of Arabs, Berbers and Kurds who were not involved in the conflict could be forgotten. Far from being a cause of the revolution, antagonism to Israel everywhere served the interests of oppressors. Europeans ought to know from our experience of Nazism that anti-Semitism is a conspiracy theory about power, rather than a standard racist hatred of poor immigrants. Fascistic regimes reached for it when they sought to deny their own people liberty. Syrian Ba'athists, Hamas, the Saudi monarchy and Gaddafi eagerly promoted the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forgery the far-right wing of the decaying tsarist regime issued in 1903 to convince Russians they should continue to obey the tsar's every command. The European Union has played a miserable role in the Middle East. It pours in aid but never demands democratization or restrictions on police powers in return. That will have to change if the promise of the past month is to be realized. If it is to help with democracy-building, Europe will need to remind itself as much as the recipients of its money that you can never build free societies on the racist conspiracy theories of the Nazis and the tsars.
2011-02-28 00:00:00
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