Forward Forum

Fueling Rage Over Anti-Islam Film

Filmmaker Counted on Hatred of Jews to Build Anger

By Daniel Jonah Goldhagen

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The hoped-for end: Perhaps more than any other recent event, these days of rage could possibly undermine a consistent claim one hears from the blame-Israel-and-Jews-crowd. They say American support for Israel as engendering political Islamists’ enmity for the United States and, even more insidiously, that American Jews’ support for Israel — by allegedly distorting American foreign policy — betrays the United States and produces this hatred. These days of rage reveal unmistakably that the assault on the United States derives simply from the political Islamists’ view that those who blaspheme the prophet ought to be killed and that the world ought to be governed politically by a fundamentalist reading of what Allah presumably has decreed. Israel and Jews have nothing to do with this.

One Internet snippet among millions has enraged much of the Arab and Islamic world because it symbolizes and crystallizes for political Islamists their immense hatred for the United States as the ultimate bulwark against their imposition of a totalitarian theocracy that would prohibit freedom of expression, women’s rights, and religious and personal freedom. Why, we might pause and ask (instead of taking it for granted), would they attack the United States and chant “Death to America” because of an Internet video trailer? It makes no sense. The political Islamists’ rage and annihilative impulse — “Behead all those who insult the prophet” — have nothing to do with Israel per se and everything to do with the world’s opposition to their unbounded totalitarian aspirations.

The anti-Semitism that helped sparked this transcontinental violence against the United States should stop being treated as natural. Burning Israel’s flag when people are protesting against the United States should stop being taken as unremarkable. That political Islamists’ enmity for the “Great Satan” derives from the actions of the “Little Satan” or from those of its supporters should be dismissed as pernicious nonsense.

There is a lot of anti-Semitism in the world and political Islamists and their apologists readily express it and many cynically exploit it or are taken in by it. But let’s not be deceived that Israel and Jews are at the root of political Islamists’ enormous rage at the more successful and powerful and tolerant West. It is not because of Jews that in Egypt they chant, “Obama, there are a million Osamas.”

Daniel Jonah Goldhagen will publish a book on contemporary anti-Semitism next year. He is the author of “Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust”(Knopf, 1996).