A few days after the 9/11 attacks, a friend of mine in London sat across from me at a dinner table. Sipping a bewitchingly good Chateauneuf du Pape, she volunteered the information that when she saw the twin towers burned to a shell, her first impulse was to rush to the Israeli Embassy and demonstrate. “Why?” I asked her, genuinely bemused. “To tell them that THEY are responsible for what’s happened,” she replied.
Ah, the dinner party set. They just get worse. Rhoda Koening, a New Yorker resident in London, writes:
My friend and I remained on good terms until last year, when he asked if I would join him on a trip he was very eager to take – to Syria. As my heart sank deeper and deeper, he enthusiastically described the archaeological treasures, the history, the romance.
“I know all about those,” I said sadly, “but do you know that Syria is a hotbed of anti-Semitic terrorism? Their newspapers and radio and TV are full of attacks on Jews, and some of them actually say it is part of our religion to kill babies.”
He was silent for a moment, and then sighed. “Oh, can’t you forget about that? Just for two weeks?” I said I couldn’t.
My friend departed alone for Syria – where, he told me, he had a marvellous time and didn’t hear a single anti-Semitic remark – and I was forced to conclude that, sadly, as we say in my native land, three strikes and you’re out.
I never thought I would end a friendship on political grounds and it distressed me greatly to end this one. Was I simply taking personal offence at my friend’s unwillingness to treat me with imagination and sympathy? In the end I decided that if the comments had insulted only me, I could have chosen to ignore them, but, as they did not, I could not.
Many non-Jews will probably think that I behaved in an intolerably pompous way towards someone who has no political influence whatsoever, and that I am elevating a personal slight to an absurd degree. But, as the last sentence of my favourite novel, Middlemarch, says, “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts”.
Read it all. Oh yes, in case you were wondering - that friend of mine who wanted to demonstrate outside the Israeli Embassy? We kind of lost contact.
Speaking of salon antisemitism I believe that the article linked to by Engage also qualifies:
“Holocaust denial in the Belfast Telegraph: “There was no Holocaust””
http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2009/03/07/holocaust-denial-in-the-belfast-telegraph/#comment-1790
I certainly share Ben’s disgust with the idea that Israel was responsible for 9/11, but I cannot agree with Koenig that there is something inherently wrong with merely traveling to a country such as Syria. The question is whether such a visit will prompt the visitor into a whitewash of the regime. But there’s nothing wrong with the very notion of a visit. On the contrary, traveling to seldom-visited, secretive places can be intellectually invaluable.
David:
Given what is well and irrefutably known about the regime in Damascus, travelling there as a tourist (as opposed to a professional there conducting investigations) is wrong.
Syria is not a “secretive” place. It has long served as a despicable police state with close ties to another similarly repressive regime, Iran. It was a safe haven for Nazis and is the kind host to the leadership of Hezbollah and Hamas. It assassinates Lebanese politicians and jouralists who oppose Syria’s occupation of Lebanon, which is not done for “security”, but because Syria IS an expansionist state. It is also engaged in acquiring nuclear weapons capacity with the assistance of North Korea, a country that, supposedly, was disarming.