Aaron Brown of CNN’s Newsnight devoted an entire segment of yesterday’s show to growing anti-Semitism in one of the world’s hotspots. Was he worried about children being beaten in Belgium’s subways? Was he concerned about synagogues being burned in France’s heartland? Was he disturbed about newspapers being used for thinly-veiled anti-Semitism in Britain? Not so much.
You might need to be sitting down when you read this, but he was talking about anti-Semitism because he could frame it as a U.S. failure in Iraq:
BROWN: In Iraq today, more protests following the closing of an Iraqi newspaper by the U.S. civil administrator, Paul Bremer. He shut the paper down yesterday, saying it was inciting violence against U.S. forces. Winning the hearts and minds of Iraqis is far from a done deal. And the same goes for building a self-sustaining democracy there. Tolerance being a measure of any democracy, a wave of anti- Semitism in postwar Iraq speaks to the obstacles ahead.
Reporting for us tonight, CNN’s Walter Rodgers.
WALTER RODGERS, CNN SR. INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT (voice-over): A fire-breathing Muslim cleric leads believers in a chorus of “Down with Israel.” In Iraq, hatred of Israel, Zionists and Jews has become more, not less poisonous, since the American occupation. Many Iraqis now see last year’s war as an Israeli-American plot to keep Iraq weak and divide the nation into separate Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish enclaves. Even Iraqi intellectual believe it.
Then they roll some tape of Iraqis accusing Jews of the usual stuff – inciting wars in the Middle East, buying Arab land, controlling US foreign policy, etc. I say “usual,” because this stuff gets published all the time in Saudi, Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian (not to mention Palestinian) newspapers. Seriously – all the time. Where do you think the Iraqis got their ideas from? You think it’s just a coincidence that their anti-Semitism sounds exactly like the anti-Semitism everywhere else in the Arab and Muslim world? Of course, when the Palestinians run the exact the same lines about Jews in their newspapers, it’s because of their legitimate anger towards “the Occupation,” and if only Israel withdrew to the Green Line all that anti-Semitism would magically vanish.
I’m not sure what’s more frustrating: how CNN suddenly cares about anti-Semitism because they can, with a little imagination, frame it as proof that things are getting worse in Iraq; or how utterly bad their evidence is for the assertion that it actually is proof that things are getting worse in Iraq.
First, that assertion (which is made only in the relatively unimportant first and last sentences of the segment) is at best poorly justified. I know that we’re supposed to accept any assertion of failure on its face, and I tried – really I did – but nowhere in the segment is there a single piece of evidence that anti-Semitism has actually increased in post-Saddam Iraq. In fact, the only historical analysis about anti-Semitism in Iraq goes the other way:
ROBERT WISTRICH, HEBREW UNIVERSITY: In Iraq, you had an older tradition of anti-Semitism, going back to the Nazi influence in the 1930s and ’40s.
And of course he’s right – Ba’thist pan-Arabism has always trafficked in anti-Semitism. Paranoid conspiracy theories were part and parcel of official Arab (not to mention Soviet) rhetoric in the 1960s and 70s. And come on, Saddam was giving money to suicide bombers and regularly calling for the cleansing of Jews from Israel. For CNN to claim that it has suddenly discovered anti-Semitism in Iraq is a little disingenuous.
Second, even if anti-Semitism has increased in post-Saddam Iraq, they still couldn’t use it to say this at the end:
RODGERS: The American experiment in Iraq was not supposed to work like this.
(on camera): A year ago, the Bush administration openly envisioned a new, more liberal and tolerant Iraq. Instead, Iraqis seem more xenophobic now and there are growing fears one possible outcome here might just as easily be an Islamic state as a democracy.
Apparently in Rodgers’s mind, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria are all “Islamic states” because they’re home to rampant anti-Semitism. The press just can’t seem to confront the reality of secular anti-Semitism. The idea that anti-Semitism is still alive and well in secular Arab states would force them to confront the idea that it may still be alive and well in progressive European nations. And that might force them to look a little more closely at the vitriolic hatred for Israel in European capitals and on European streets. What if anti-Zionism really did turn out to be anti-Semitism?
I dunno – maybe I’m reading too much into that last line. In many ways, the narrative of “problem in Iraq = failure in Iraq = Islamic state in Iraq” is just a rhythm that reporters naturally fall into. So the reference to an Islamic state at the end may just have been the inevitable result of the “failure” frame that the whole segment was read through. That it’s nonsensical and betrays an almost dangerous misunderstanding of the tide of anti-Semitism sweeping the globe was probably not a consideration. Don’t get me wrong – I welcome any press attention to anti-Semitism. But I wish that I didn’t have to pay the price of automatic America-bashing to get it. Oh, and I guess I’d also like it if the analysis in the stories was actually accurate. That’s important too.
