June 17, 2010
Steyn: The Lesson of a Jewish Cemetery
Reflecting on an abandoned Jewish cemetery in Tangiers, Mark Steyn concludes Iran might well use the bomb once it gets it, and blames the dual psychoses of the Islamists and the European Jew haters for this development:
Islam is a one-way street. Once you're in the Dar al-Islam, that's it; there's no checkout desk. They take land, they hold it, forever.[Snip]If that's how you think, no wonder a tiny little sliver of a Jewish state smack dab in the heart of the Dar al-Islam drives you nuts: to accept Israel's "right to exist" would be as unthinkable as accepting a re-Christianized Constantinople.To this fierce Islamic imperialism, the new Europeans, post-Christian, post-nationalist and postmodern as they are, nevertheless bring one of their oldest prejudices-that in the modern world as much as in medieval Christendom Jews can never be accorded full property rights. On a patch of the Holy Land, they are certainly the current leaseholders, but they will never have recognized legal title. To be sure, there are a lot of them there right now. But then there were a lot of them in Tangiers and Baghdad and the Bukovina and Germany and Poland, for a while. Why shouldn't Tel Aviv one day be just another city with some crumbling cemeteries and a few elderly Jews?That's the reason the "Palestinian question" is never settled. Because, as long as it's unresolved, then Israel's legitimacy is unsettled, too.Still, the impatience of the new globalized Judenhass is now palpable. I used to think that, when Iran got the bomb, it wouldn't use it. I wouldn't take that bet now. The new anti-Semitism is a Euro-Islamic fusion so universal, so irrational and so fevered that it's foolish to assume any limits.