http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mesh/2008/08/can_antisemitism_be_amusing/
I guess this little absurdist clip would be funny if not for Captain Shahada’s comment about the Jews being “the most despicable sect in the world,” if not for the respect he has for Hitler for having “subdued the people who subdued the whole world,” and if not the fact that what Hitler did to “subdue” those Jews was to orchestrate the systematic murder of six million of them by having them gassed, shot in pits or starved to death.
When I first saw the clip on MEMRI a few days ago, my response was similar to the one Josef Joffe ultimately articulated so well. Can there be a more powerful confirmation of how ordinary, and therefore how basic and deep, antisemitism is in the Arab world? And how widespread? Joe is right that the stuff of jokes is the stuff of ordinary culture.
And that is the scariest dimension of this clip. Jokes aren’t funny in a society unless there’s a general recognition of, and usually an agreement with, their premises. Captain Shahada’s premises-that the Jews are “the most despicable sect in the world,” that before Hitler they’d “subdued the whole world,” and that Hitler is to be praised for having had the guts to kill them-are considered quite ordinary by more than a few people in the Arab world. If they weren’t considered ordinary, they wouldn’t provoke laughter.
Which is, of course, not only scary but also sad.
That Captain Shahada notes that his father wore a Hitler mustache during the Hitler era, as did his father’s classmates, is an inconvenient reminder to those who would like to believe that Arabs had no bad feelings toward the Jews before the creation of Israel.
And the fact that antisemitism is so pervasive in the Arab world makes the possibility of a lasting peace with Israel, and a lasting acceptance of the Jewish state, all the more challenging. Diplomatic geniuses who think that a durable Arab-Israeli peace will be achieved simply by signing agreements on borders and on the status of Jerusalem and refugees are, to some extent, whistling into the winds of history, religion, culture and deep prejudice.
Walter Reich is a member of MESH.
