Daniel Jonah Goldhagen
The Devil That Never Dies
Norton Pub
In attesa che esca la traduzione italiana segnaliamo il nuovo libro di Daniel Jonah Goldhagen e vi proponiamo l’ottima recensione di Jeffrey Goldberg tratta dal The New York Times.
In “The Devil That Never Dies,” Daniel Jonah Goldhagen reports that there has been a worldwide rise in lethal anti-¬Semitism. If he had to pick a role model for the new generation of Jew-haters, he might settle on an elderly Sunni cleric named Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Qaradawi, who is based in Qatar, is an important spiritual adviser to the Muslim Brotherhood, but his fame and influence derive in large part from his popular show on Al Jazeera, the satellite television channel owned by the ruling family of Qatar. Al Jazeera has global reach: bureaus in many world capitals and an American cable news network. Qaradawi, the host of “Islamic Law and Life,” has been the network’s most famous on-air personality.
He is anti-American, sometimes bitterly so, but his anti-Israelism takes on extreme coloration. In 2009, in a sermon broadcast by Al Jazeera, he expressed an opinion of breathtaking vituperation. “Throughout history,” he said, “Allah has imposed upon the Jews people who would punish them for their corruption. The last punishment was carried out by Hitler. By means of all the things he did to them — even though they exaggerated this issue — he managed to put them in their place. This was divine punishment for them. Allah willing, the next time will be at the hand of the believers,” which is to say, Muslims.
For the past several years, we have been witness to the antics of the recently retired Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who made himself into the world’s most famous Holocaust revisionist. Ahmadinejad denied the historical truth of the Holocaust while creating conditions for another, an egregious thing to do. But one thing he did not do was praise Hitler.
Qaradawi, in his sermon, pays lip service to the ideology of denial, but his pathological hatred of Jews moves into territory well past the borders of ¬Ahmadinejad-style anti-Semitism. Endorsing the Holocaust puts a person in a whole different moral category.
Three aspects of Qaradawi’s pro-Hitler commentary are noteworthy. The first is that he is Muslim, and from the Middle East. Christian Europe, and not the Middle East, has been the historic breeding ground for what Goldhagen, in his earlier, landmark book, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners,” labeled “eliminationist anti-Semitism.” The second is that Qaradawi — whose vile opinions would have been heard, in the pre-Internet, pre-satellite-television age, by pockets of extremist followers in marginal places — now has a worldwide audience.
The third troubling aspect of Qaradawi’s comment is that it did not result in his removal from Al Jazeera. Nor did it seem to diminish his influence. The most effective and disturbing argument Goldhagen musters in this new book is that the resurgence of rhetorically and sometimes physically violent anti-¬Semitism over the past dozen years or so is shocking in part because it does not seem to shock. Horrific accusations leveled against Jews across the Middle East and in Europe fail to excite the anger or disbelief of the non-¬Jewish masses and non-Jewish elites alike.
This is a fine point to make. Unfortunately, Goldhagen undermines himself by, among other things, allowing his anger to get the best of him. “The Devil That Never Dies” is written in a hyperventilating style, starting with its title. “The devil, after a period of relative quiescence, has reappeared, flexes his muscles again, and stalks the world, with ever more confidence, power and followers,” Goldhagen writes. “The devil is not a he but an it. The devil is anti-Semitism.”
Yes, we got that. As a general rule, heavy breathing is unnecessary, and even counterproductive, when a writer’s subject is atrocity, and much of Goldhagen’s book is a compilation of atrociousness: seemingly endless passages recount the awful things said about Jews over the past several years. Most of these statements are easily found on the Internet, where Goldhagen appears to have done much of his research, but there is real utility to his efforts — comprehensive catalogs of hate possess a kind of depressing power. I did not recall, for instance, that the Hamas leader Khaled Mashal said: “Before Israel dies, it must be humiliated and degraded. Allah willing, . . . we will make them lose their eyesight, we will make them lose their brains.”
Goldhagen does other useful things. He makes a strong case that anti-Semitism is a unique prejudice, in its staying power, in its ability to shape-shift, in the unlikely coalitions that spring up to advance its message (left-leaning Western gay activists aligning with gay-persecuting Muslim fundamentalists, say). Anti-Semitism is also rare in its ability to make otherwise smart people believe fantastical and idiotic things. No other religious or ethnic group has ever been blamed for both capitalism and Communism simultaneously, for example.
The calumnies against Jews have been the most damaging kind,” Gold¬hagen writes. “Jews have killed God’s son. All Jews, and their descendants for all time, . . . are guilty. . . . Jews desecrate God’s body, the host. Jews parented the Antichrist. . . . Jews sought to slay God’s prophet Muhammad. Jews are the enemies of Allah. Jews kill Christian children and use their blood for their rituals. Jews kill Muslim children. Jews wreak financial havoc in the countries in which they live. Jews have started all wars.” And so on.
That last item is aimed not only at Mel Gibson, but at Stephen Walt and John J. Mearsheimer, authors of “The Israel Lobby,” which Goldhagen describes as the “best cloaked major anti-Semitic tract in English of the last several decades.”
One of Goldhagen’s strongest arguments has to do with selective outrage as a leading indicator of anti-Semitism. He does not try to argue that criticism of Israeli government policies is necessarily anti-Semitic. But he has appropriate contempt for those who argue that Israel is a reincarnation of Nazi Germany, and he is appalled by the hypocrisy of the inter¬national community, which judges Israel by a separate, and higher, standard than it does other countries.
He cites Turkey as a telling example: “In a rational world, the Turks’ systemic and large-scale violence against and suppression of Kurds’ legitimate rights and national aspirations, not to mention the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians, and mass killings of Greeks and others, not to mention their invasion, dismembering and occupation of half a sovereign country, Cyprus, in 1974, . . . might have brought upon Turkey the world’s condemnation and generated in international organizations, including the United Nations, a preoccupation with its predations and the production of intensively negative beliefs and passions, including prejudice . . . similar to and perhaps far exceeding that against Jews. But it has not — not even 1 percent as much.”
Goldhagen’s strengths and weaknesses are on display in this previous (typically dense and over-intricate) paragraph. He makes a valid point, but the hectoring tone and the hyperbole — how did he reach the conclusion that Turkey is criticized 1 percent, and not 2 percent, as much as Israel? — undermine the message. Hyperbole also leads to inaccuracy, which is particularly unfortunate in a book whose subject, at its essence, is lying. He writes at one point, “Consider the mass murder in 1999 at a Los Angeles Jewish Community Center, where a vicious anti-Semite opened fire with an automatic weapon, injuring five people.” It was not, of course, “mass murder” at that Los Angeles J.C.C., because no one at the site was murdered.
But the shooting attack in Los Angeles was bad enough. So too is the excoriation of Israel by countries with terrible human rights records. And so too are efforts, by Muslim fundamentalists and far-right politicians, to make Europe uninhabitable for its last Jew, and to blame certain American Jews for bringing war upon their country. Goldhagen’s book has its uses, but today we need something decidedly better: a book on anti-Semitism that combines original reporting, accessible writing and a sense of restraint.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG
The New York Times
