These examples are especially notable because they have nothing to do with Israel or Zionism. They expose the falsehood -- popular with prominent scholars like John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, authors of last year's best-selling book "The Israel Lobby" -- that hatred of Jews is not one of the great motivating factors in the Arab world's overall objections to Israel.Here we are talking about supposed liberal-minded adults--not children raised on the constant feed of blatant anti-Israel/anti-Semitic diatribes, yet the effect is as pernicious.
But these examples also raise a serious question about what passes for liberalism in the Arab world. Why bother listening to these voices on matters of economics -- much less politics, democracy or human rights -- if they also propagate hateful conspiracy theories?
There's another question: Over the past eight years, the United States has invested huge resources in attempting to bring democracy to the Middle East. But it's not clear whether that project will succeed as long as America's natural allies in the region remain themselves so profoundly irrational and illiberal.
I'd be curious to know how many of the moderate Muslims who are being offered as alternatives to the Islamists themselves harbor the kind anti-Semitic prejudices Bargisi writes about.
What to do? Bargisi has an idea where to start:
What can be done? Here's a modest suggestion. The Egyptian state and the country's newspapers go out of their way to make a leper of any author who expresses even remote sympathy with Israel. Perhaps Western institutions could adopt a similar practice, refusing to invite to their various functions any editors who allow their pages to become Jew-hatred platforms. The cold shoulder alone might get these lunch-eaters to change their tune.What? A boycott?!
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