RUTHFULLY YOURS

We live in times when Holocaust denial or diminution is openly pervasive , not only in the Muslim world, but also in the halls of the UN, and classrooms and auditoriums of some of America’s most prestigious academic institutions.  In New York,  the president of Columbia University and subsequently,  Columbia students have repeatedly  invited Ahmadinejad to address their groups.  We cringe as the frequent comparisons of Israel to Nazi Germany and South Africa receive thoughtful consideration instead of ridicule and rebuke. Campuses across the U.S. and Canada have been flooded with events such as the BDS Conference (Boycott, Divest, Sanction Israel) which is scheduled at the University of Pennsylvania in early February.  This, along with Israel Apartheid Week and Palestine Awareness Week is the politically correct default position of academia , supported by students and faculty alike.  Too many Jews and even Israelis aid and abet in this travesty of history, railing at the sins of their own people and proscribing what further land Israel needs to cede, and what further concessions it must make to Palestinians while remaining silent about the murderous rampages committed by Muslims  across Africa, Asia and the Middle East.  While there are no student organized marches urging western intervention to save the Christian and non-Islamic populations of these countries,  vocal threats and placards are commonly seen at anti-Israel and Occupy Wall Street events urging another Holocaust to finally eliminate the Jews.   At the London School of Economics last week, students played a Nazi drinking game and broke the nose of the Jewish student who refused to participate in saluting Hitler with Sieg Heil!

Notwithstanding the reality of this inflamed atmosphere, the latest version of Shoah parody is the new novel  by Shalom Auslander entitled “Hope: A Tragedy.” Well reviewed by the Times and the Wall Street Journal, the book presents Anne Frank as a potty-mouthed survivor who can’t fess up to the truth of her existence without jeopardizing her book sales and exalted reputation. “I’m Miss Holocaust, 1945,” Anne explains, “The prize is a crown of thorns and eternal victimhood. …I’m the Jewish Jesus.” The author mocks Shoah business and the abuse of it by those who are not even bona fide survivors. Auslander explains in an interview that he’s been trying to divest himself of his own preoccupation with the Holocaust and one of his techniques is to make fun of it. “If you laugh, you win. Life, or God, or whatever, is just one banana peel after the next.”

 How easy it is to satirize what has sadly become an acceptable subject of derision –  and how safe.   Mr. Auslander should  ask Salman Rushdie what it’s like to offend Muslims  in the west. Still living under the fatwa issued for his sin of writing “The Satanic Verses” in 1988, Mr. Rushdie has just been forced to withdraw from a literary festival in Jaipur because the democratic government of India cannot protect him against his possible assassination.   Or perhaps Auslander might ask Kurt Westergaard, the artist who drew some of the famous cartoons satirizing Mohammed, what it was like to have an axe-wielding Muslim try to enter his home to kill him for his attempt at humor in his  native, western country of Denmark. On our own shores, the same newspapers which found Auslander’s novel chuckle-worthy, found nothing funny in the Danish cartoons and  were too cowardly to publish those very newsworthy subjects  for their own fears of repercussion. It’s too late to ask Theo Van Gogh, the  Dutchman who was stabbed to death on the street in Holland for having produced a film called “ Submission” that was critical of Islamic  circumcision and enslavement of women.

The woman who collaborated with Van Gogh is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the subject of another new book reviewed in the Times this week. “Wanted Women – Faith, Lies & The War On Terror: The Lives of Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Aafia Siddiqui” is a dual biography of Ms. Hirsi Ali and a woman who came to the U.S. as a student, completing her undergraduate degree at MIT  and getting a Ph.D. in neuroscience at Brandeis.   Deborah Scroggins, the author, attempts to show the parallels between  the two western educated Muslim women, one who renounced her religion and has tried to alert the west to the inherent dangers of Islamic jihad while the other became increasingly radicalized, marrying the nephew of Khalid Sheik Mohammed and working with Al Qaeda to promote terrorism against the United States. Siddiqui, who returned to her native Pakistan and then vanished along with her children, was eventually apprehended by the FBI in Afghanistan. In her handbag was a computer drive with instructions for making bombs and weapons of mass destruction, lists of New York landmarks suitable for attack and two pounds of cyanide. After shooting at her interrogators, she was convicted of attempted murder in the U.S. and sentenced to a term of 86 years. Though there is nothing humorous about this book, it illustrates which subjects are sacred cows for American journalists. Scroggins reserves her rage not for the woman who parasitically benefited from her time in our country and then attempted to destroy it, but for Hirsi Ali, the Member of Parliament who “made it possible to appeal to the Dutch xenophobic vote in a socially acceptable way.”    Dwight Garner in reviewing this book in the Times, agreed with the author that “East and West need voices of reconciliation, not merely stern condemnation.” How ironic that his newspaper which respectfully declined to offend Islam by publishing the Danish cartoons or the pictures of what Muslims had done to journalist Daniel Pearl, reveled in the photo- reportage of four U.S. marines urinating on dead Taliban militants – hardly equivalent to decapitation or sexual mutilation.

Railing at the west, calling Jews Nazis, turning the genocide of six million people into a burlesque are all acts of perversion of conscience. While liberal western writers and media are afraid to point fingers at the enemy threatening freedom throughout the world, while liberal politicians are more concerned with American Islamophobia than with the murderous Islamic violence that precipitates our very rational fears, our western world has once again become tolerant of fanning the familiar flames of anti-semitism. Perpetuating this twisted double standard can only enable the further tolerance of abhorrent views and practices. The long-term consequences of our politically correct short-sightedness will surely be no laughing matter.