Mark Steyn - After America

Ah, so that’s why he did it. The whole heads-of-state-who-deny-the-Holocaust thing was a cunning distraction by the Zionist Entity.

During Israel’s famously “disproportionate” 2006 incursion into Lebanon, a reader reminded me of an old gag:

One day the UN Secretary General proposes that, in the interest of global peace and harmony, the world’s soccer players should come together and form one United Nations global soccer team.

“Great idea,” says his deputy. “Er, but who would we play?”

“Israel, of course.”

Ha-ha. It always had a grain of truth, now it’s the whole loaf.

Think of how the Prime Minister of Israel feels at the UN. And then picture what’s left of the United States after global eclipse. Obama and the leftists notwithstanding, the effect of American retreat from superpower status will not be a quiet life but a future as the Zionist Entity writ large—no longer the Great Satan, but forever the Great Scapegoat. As Richard Ingrams wrote in Britain’s Observer the weekend after 9/11: Who will dare to damn Israel? 4

Hey, take a number and get in line. Who won’t dare to damn Israel? And for whatever bugs you. In late 2010, there was a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea off the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh. 5On an official Egyptian government news site, the governor of South Sinai, Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, speculated that the fatal attacks in the hitherto peaceful waters were due to “the Mossad throwing in the deadly shark to hit tourism in Egypt.” Other sources wondered if the Mossad had gone further and equipped the aquatic predators with GPS. Could be. Governor Shousha has undoubtedly seen the famous Hollywood film about a killer shark terrorizing a beach resort— Jews . Oh, c’mon, you’re not gonna let a one-vowel typing error in the poster throw you off what it’s really about, are you?

Directed by the same infidel who made Schindler’s List , if you get my drift.

The Governor of South Sinai is not the only political colossus to take the view that the world’s troubles are due to a tiny strip of land that at its narrowest point is barely wider than my New Hampshire township. Only a few months before the shark attacks, Bill Clinton had been in Egypt and told an audience of local “businessmen” that solving the Israeli/Palestinian problem would “take away about half the impetus for terror in the whole world.” 6

Only 50 percent of global terrorism is all down to Israel? Are you sure you’re not underestimating?

In rationalizing the irrational, you not only legitimize it but create a self-fulfilling prophecy. After the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, Bruce Haigh, a retired Australia diplomat who’d served in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, went on TV and explained why hundreds of his compatriots had been blown up: “The root cause of this issue has been America’s backing of Israel on Palestine.” 7

So we’re conceding that if a fellow in Indonesia is “frustrated” by Israeli “intransigence,” then blowing up Australian tourists, Scandinavian back-packers, and German stoners in Bali makes some kind of sense. For centuries, Jews were the handiest scapegoat in every two-bit duchy and principality across the map. In essence, the argument of Bill Clinton & Company simply affirms the ancient paranoia that the Jews are behind everything.

There is an element of humbug about all this. Just as Europe’s rulers, while happy to pander to anti-American sentiment among the citizenry, are well aware that the United States has been the guarantor of the Continent’s liberty since 1945, so Araby’s rulers, happy to pander to their subjects’ Judenhass in public, are privately rather appreciative of the Zionist Entity.

Diplomatic cables leaked in 2010 revealed that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was publicly urging the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and had even indicated to the Israelis that come the big night he’d make sure his kingdom’s radar facilities were switched off so nobody could tip off Teheran. 8Were Israel to take up his offer, His Majesty would be the first in a long parade of Arab potentates and European foreign ministers lining up to denounce Zionist “disproportion.” But it’s heartening to know that, whatever lunacies they subscribe to in public, both Arabs and Europeans retain a few residual marbles in private.

Not all the scapegoaters are nuts, maybe not even the governor of South Sinai. Maybe he’s just tossing a little red meat, a little shark bait to the Jew-hate crowd. But from Sharm al-Sheikh to the UN General Assembly, sane men find it politic to string along with the loons.

As the proverbial canary in the coal mine, Israel knows what America’s in for. Like the United States, it is militarily superior to its enemies. If it were merely a matter of weaponry, they would have won decades ago. But, if that’s all there is to it, where’s the U.S. victory parade in Afghanistan? The Palestinians were among the first to realize that, in a media age, you can win on other battlefields. Stone-throwing youths have won more victories for Palestine—at least in the European press and on North American campuses—than the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies ever did.

One sympathizes with Americans weary of global responsibilities that they, unlike the European empires, never sought. You can understand why the entire left and much of the right would rather vote for a quiet life. The Jewish state felt the same way in the early Nineties. There’s an Israeli coinage that was popular back then: “normaliut”—the desire to wake up each morning and live a normal political life, as John Podhoretz described it. 9In the early Nineties, Israelis wanted normaliut, badly. They regarded themselves as a western democracy and wished to live like one. Instead of having to be on the military call-up list till you’re European retirement age (fifty-five), they wanted to be like other westerners and worry about their vacation destinations and the quality of their stereo systems. The Oslo Accords were a vote for normaliut—a vote to be like Oslo, for the chance to live as a Middle Eastern Norway. In return, they got an Arafatist squat and then exterminationist Iranian proxies on their borders, and suicide bombers on their buses, and in the wider world isolation, demonization, and delegitimization, accompanied by a resurgent and ever more respectable anti-Semitism.

In 2008, the U.S. electorate voted to repudiate the previous eight years and seemed genuinely under the delusion that wars end when one side decides it’s all a bit of a bore and they’d rather the government spend the next eight years doing to health care and the economy what they were previously doing to jihadist camps in Waziristan. In the old days, declining powers seeking to arrest either their own decline or another’s rise would turn to war—see the Franco–Prussian, the Austro–Prussian, the Napoleonic, and many others. But those were the days when traditional great-power rivalry was resolved on the battlefield. Today we have post-modern post-great-power rivalry, in which America envies the way the beneficiaries of its post-war largesse have been able to opt out of the great game entirely.

In reality-TV terms, the Great Satan would like to vote itself off the battlefield. It too yearns for normaliut.

So instead of unilateral Bush cowboyism, we elected President Outreach, a man happy to apologize for the entirety of American policy pre-January 2009.

How’s that working out?

In 2010, Zogby International and the University of Maryland conducted an “Arab Public Opinion Poll” for the Brookings Institution. 10They interviewed respondents in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates—the so-called “moderate” Arab Street. So how did President Obama do with the citizens of our allies after all the Islamoschmoozing and other outreach to the Muslim world?