"We Are All Jews in Our Enemy's Eyes."

We Are All Jews in Our Enemy's Eyes,
by Richard Brookhiser,
New York Observer, May 4, 2002


"The defense of Zacarias Moussaoui, the Frenchman of Moroccan origin who allegedly was meant to be the 20th hijacker, got off to a bad start in a Virginia courtroom last week ... For the first time, it struck me that Mr. Moussaoui might conceivably be innocent of the charges against him, for the rhetoric he employed is not a precise field marking. It is not a peculiarity only of Al Qaeda, or of other terrorists, but the common property of Middle Eastern newspapers and mobs. Their heroes may change—Osama bin Laden himself experienced at least a momentary loss of credibility when his Afghan allies went down to destruction—but the Jewish villain remains the same. We are now one with that villain. Only a minority of paranoids can believe in an omnipotent enemy who has, in raw numbers, but a marginal existence worldwide. So the typical Jew-basher has always looked for the powerful patrons, or agents, of his foe. In the 19th century, he saw them in the world capitals of finance—London and Paris. Henry Adams, as crazy as he was brilliant, remarked as the Spanish-American War approached that it would deal a stinging blow to French Jews. (Did he tell his friend Teddy Roosevelt to look out for them on San Juan Hill?) In the 20th century, Nazis and fascists saw the Jews pulling the strings in Moscow and on Wall Street, as well as in their older haunts. Now the aegis of Jewry is the United States. You may never have had a bris but, willy-nilly, you have been circumcised. Bards of American-Jewish friendship look for deep resemblances between the new nation and the old religion, and there are some. Jews live worldwide, and people from all over the world live here. America tolerates a variety of ideologies and creeds, and Judaism has shivered into many beliefs and unbeliefs. But it’s easy to push such abstractions too hard. The key point of our present ad hoc alliance is that the United States does not wish for the destruction of the Jews; therefore their enemies wish ours."

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