The New Fellow-Traveling: In the present crisis, a sickening familiarity

National Review, June 30, 2003 by David Pryce-Jones

Islamist fellow-traveling today has a different focus from the Soviet fellow-traveling that preceded it, but the cast of mind is the same. The common premise that Western society is responsible for the world's ills generates in certain intellectual circles guilt for the present as well as fear for what is to come. The conviction then develops that whatever "we" do must be wrong, and whatever "they" do is justified. Fellow-travelers in both cases come to apologize for those hostile to Western society, even to identify with them.

The Soviet Union invariably proclaimed that the goal of Communism was peace and the perfectibility of mankind. Evidence to the contrary never dissuaded fellow-travelers from the belief that Communists must be admirable because they said they were. Islamist extremists likewise speak of jihad as the necessary prelude to peace and the perfectibility of mankind. In the eyes of the new fellow-travelers, these extremists may not yet be necessarily admirable, but they are Muslims, therefore victims of Western colonialism in the Third World, and deserving sympathy. So in the perspective of Islamist fellow-traveling September 11 becomes a day when America had it coming, and the exploding aircraft had the effect of "a work of art." In the aftermath of September 11 there was a record number of conversions to Islam in non-Islamic countries -- apparently some 30,000 in Holland alone. The Free Iraq campaign brought the new fellow-traveling to unprecedented heights, notably a speech by an academic at Columbia University appealing for "a million Mogadishus" to throw American forces out of Iraq. Here was a reprise in animus and tone of Cold War fellow-traveling.

The Soviet Union aimed to destroy bourgeois democracy. Only in their more extravagant moments do Islamists and their fellow-travelers promise to destroy the United States; their narrower but steadfast point of departure is the destruction of Israel. The Soviet Union was never able to reconcile Communist doctrine with the presence of Jews in its midst. In the closing years of his life, Stalin was contemplating mass extermination of Jews on lines similar to Hitler's. Islamists are working daily to wipe Israel off the map, and do not hesitate to call for the extermination of Jews, nothing less than genocide. The Muslim world, and with it a whole section of supportive public opinion elsewhere, has taken up this call.

A syllogism forms. Illegitimate from inception, Israel is dependent for its existence on the United States. The United States should be resisted on every front, political and cultural; therefore we support the Arabs unconditionally in whatever they may say or do. This syllogism provides the context in which to update ancient phobias about Jews and to justify the commitment of acts of violence against them. With one or two arguable exceptions, Arab and Muslim countries are in the hands of authoritarian and even totalitarian rulers unable to create the kind of society which would give them their due place in the modern world. Many people in these police states feel a searing sense of humiliation and defeat at their plight but are unable to do anything about it.

It is a great comfort for them to be able to reverse their powerlessness spontaneously into the fault of the Jews and the Americans. Complete though it is with inferiority complex, scapegoating, and conspiracy theory, this Muslim self-perception has been gradually convincing and captivating the Western Left.

The ramifications of the state of Israel testify to the cunning of history. Originally the Left approved of Zionism as a movement of national liberation, and socialist as well. Among the several hard realpolitik factors which contributed to the foundation of Israel in 1948, Stalin's support was crucial. But he and his successors soon realized that they had misjudged the balance of forces in the Middle East. The withdrawal of the British offered scope for Soviet penetration of the Arab world. One step led to the next in the gradual demonization of Israel.

Self-appointed president of Egypt, Gamal Abdul Nasser was the first Arab leader whose primary purpose was to "throw the Jews into the sea," in the language of his day. Secular and nationalist in outlook himself, he might perhaps have tolerated Jews in the old Muslim manner but he utterly rejected Israelis. The Soviet Union offered him financial support and arms. By means of first the Suez campaign of 1956 and then the Six Day War of 1967, Nasser committed the Middle East to become a primary and bloody battlefield in the Cold War. His policy tied the Arabs to the Soviet Union, and correspondingly drove Israel and the United States together.

One of George Orwell's many insights into totalitarianism is what he called a Two Minutes Hate, whereby totalitarian leaders manipulate an instant and complete reversal of opinion for their own unscrupulous purposes. The Soviet Union was in command of something like a thousand international media outlets. The Six Day War of 1967 was a significant defeat for the Soviet Union, and in its immediate aftermath these outlets vociferously relabeled Israel a settler state, or worse, a Nazi state, and its leaders Hitlerite. This insult, the most extreme in the Soviet vocabulary, was an outstanding example of a Two Minutes Hate, effectively switching the image of Israel from Nazi victim into Nazi victimizer. The Soviet Union is no more, but this anti-Israeli propaganda survives and prospers in the minds of people largely unaware of its source.