Gordon McLauchlan: Issues lurking behind the rhetoric

Claiming that the Government of Tonga, for example, is both absurd and sad does not lay one open to charges of racism against Tongans - although the dotty old king and his exploitative children might not eschew such a defence if they thought they could get away with it.

But what seems to be increasing is the inference that those who attack Israeli Government policies on Palestine are guilty of anti-Semitism; and those who criticise United States policy on Iraq are "un-American".

Okay, Tongans have never been subjected to anything like the horror of discrimination and then genocide inflicted for centuries on Jews, nor have Americans; so let's make some space for a special buffer zone to protect understandable Jewish sensibilities. But how much space?

The latest confusion has arisen at Harvard where a group of professors and students have demanded that the university remove all Israeli investments from its endowments.

As a result, Harvard's president, Lawrence H. Summers, has condemned what he described as growing anti-Semitism. He said: "Serious and thoughtful people are advocating and taking actions that are anti-Semitic in their effect, if not their intent."

The last four words seem to suggest that one should be careful of attacking Israel because of the effect it may have on Jews in general, regardless of the validity of the criticism. Which takes us into a very opaque discussion indeed.

I've never got the hang of anti-Semitism myself but it has proved such a persistent spiritual sickness I suppose some of the people attacking Israel may be pernicious victims of it.

But should that be allowed to stop rational argument against Israeli Government policies that for decades have seriously discriminated against the Palestinians?

Nothing new about principled people having strange bedfellows. I can recall a friend who took part in demonstrations against the Springbok tour in 1981 having a serious rethink when he realised that some of his fellow protesters were moronic thugs, relishing the violence. He decided, in the end, that he had to keep going for the cause itself, comfortable with the knowledge that the great majority of his fellows were genuine in their non-violent opposition to government policy.

Conscious of the malignance of anti-Semitism, many Americans discuss Israel issues much more delicately than they argue matters involving other countries.

They give them lots of buffer space. For example, the distinguished New York Times foreign affairs columnist, Thomas Friedman, speaking to promote his new book, Longitudes and Attitudes, listed a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian crisis as one of a number of imperatives needed to heal the rift between the West and the Muslim world; but went on to say emphatically that the issue had nothing whatsoever to do with the terrorist attack on New York.

His two statements throbbed with incompatibility to many more people in the audience than just me.

When President Bush was making much of the fact that the United Nations should be forced to follow up the resolutions against Iraq made over the years, I saw only one muted reference in the US to the fact that the UN has passed more than 60 resolutions over the years instructing Israel to pull back from Palestinian land, none of them enforced.

The same sort of thinking has emerged in the United States among some commentators over Germany.

By not supporting American policy which has seemed sometimes to be hell-bent on war against Iraq, Germany has become anti-American according to some commentators.

William Safire, a fine writer and widely admired columnist on language, has written a febrile attack on Germany which includes this:

"The dismaying fact is that poll-driven German politicians are certain that such thumbing noses at the US is the key to political victory.

"Schroeder is using it to distract voters from 10 per cent unemployment, 0.5 per cent growth and a dispute about his hair colour.

"Edmund Stoiber tut-tuts about anti-Americanism but is afraid to take a stand against the Hitler of the Persian Gulf."

Thumbing their noses at the US or at a particular US policy?

Also, the implication that politicians should ignore the tyranny of polls in the interests of some higher cause and that the current US Administration would not dream of distracting its voters from domestic problems is risible from any American, let alone a former Nixon speech-writer.

It is hugely disappointing for an admirer of Safire such as I have been to read his irrational attack on Germany, simply for what he considers is their unreliability as an ally.

It should be, he clearly insists, America right or wrong. He invokes as a favour to Germany every American move in Europe since World War II, including the Marshall Plan, as though no American interests were involved.

He starts with a hint that anti-Semitism is involved and then, in a rage, throws every stone he can find on the street, even that "every red-blooded American author" objects to "unilateral cultural imperialism by literary tycoons in the Fatherland" (note "the Fatherland"), alluding to German control of the American publishing industry.

In the end, it probably won't matter. Safire will regain his composure as so many Americans seem to be doing now that the anniversary of the dreadful terrorist attack is behind them, and public discourse on the issue of Iraq is deepening and coming to grips with what the real issues are, lurking there behind the rhetoric.

Further reading
Feature: Middle East

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