This war tells us more about Europe than the Middle East

By Mark Steyn
Sunday Telegraph (London)
April 14, 2002

'The whole world is demanding that Israel withdraws," said Kofi 
Annan in Madrid last week, standing alongside various panjandrums 
from the EU, UN, US and Russia. "I don't think the whole world, 
including the friends of the Israeli people and government, 
can be wrong."

Oh, I don't know. The "whole world" has a pretty good track 
record of being wrong, especially where Jews are concerned. 
Fifty million Frenchmen can be wrong, and never more so than when 
they're teamed with Chris Patten, Mary Robinson, the European 
Parliament (which has demanded sanctions against Israel), 
the German government (which has announced an arms embargo 
against Israel), the brand-new International Criminal Court 
(which - in its very first 24 hours! - started mulling the 
question of "Israeli war crimes"), the Norwegian Parliament 
(which had a visitor thrown out of the building for wearing 
a provocative Star of David on his lapel), never mind the members
of Calgary's "Palestinian community" who marched through the 
streets carrying placards emblazoned "Death To The Jews", 
a timeless slogan but not hitherto a burning issue on the 
prairies.

The only question now is whether the US is a member of the 
Kofi set in good standing or whether it's a member mainly in 
the sense that Saudi Arabia is a member of the coalition 
against terror. A week ago, asked to define what Washington 
meant by Israeli withdrawal "without delay", Colin Powell
replied that the Administration "does expect something to 
happen soon with respect to bringing this operation to some 
culminating point where you can start to see a movement in 
the other direction". Somehow I don't think that's what
Kofi and Chris had in mind.

On the other hand, by midweek, with nothing happening to bring 
to culmination the point for starting to move in the other 
direction, it was General Powell who was in reverse: both 
terrorism and a "response to terrorism" (his phrase) had to 
stop, he said, as neither was getting us anywhere.

On the other other hand, by week's end, after Yasser had laid 
on the traditional incendiary Palestinian welcome, General 
Powell postponed his meeting with "Chairman" Arafat and gave 
him yet another "last chance" to denounce terrorism.

It was unclear at the time of writing whether this was his 
last "last chance". By the time you read this, he may have 
been given another "last chance", or, amazingly, it may turn 
out that that last "last chance" was, indeed, the final one.

Either way, the Chairman cannot denounce terrorism, not when 
Saudi television has just had a hugely successful charity 
telethon raising £37 million for the families of Palestinian 
"martyrs". King Fahd and Crown Prince Abdullah both chipped in. 
One Saudi Princess donated both her Rolls and her ox, a double 
jackpot sure to inspire any West Bank suicide bomber hoping 
to transform his relicts into a two-car family. Maybe they'll 
make it a weekly show: Who Wants To Be A Million Air Particles?

So General Powell will be flying home, his mission a failure 
in its stated goals and thus (say the Beltway Machiavels) 
a grand success in its unstated ones - to buy time, to allow 
Sharon to clean out the terrorist enclaves while stalling Syria 
from using Lebanon to broaden the war.

From Washington's point of view, the peace mission was necessary 
because of a scheduling conflict over scheduling conflicts: 
they'd booked the Middle East for a war with Iraq only to discover 
the joint being used for some other guys' war.

In an ideal world, the US would like to restore peace in the 
Middle East in order to launch a massive conflagration there.

Conversely, the Iraqis and Saudis need to keep this war going in 
order to postpone the next one - hence, their generous subvention 
of the extensive infrastructure required to keep Palestinian 
schoolgirls loaded up with Semtex. The Arabs, ever since King 
Hussein sacked Sir John Glubb (the only general who ever won 
anything for 'em), only lose conventional wars. They advance 
in unconventional ways, the suicide bomber being merely the latest
method. Araby has effectively designated the entire West Bank 
as one big suicide bomb to take out the Jews, and it's going so 
swimmingly that the last thing they want to do is go back to 
primitive weaponry like tanks.

Meanwhile, what have we learned from this last extraordinary month? 
Not much about the Middle East, but quite a lot about Europe. 
What happens when Palestinian civilians strap on plastic explosives 
and head for Israeli pizza parlours? Europe says Israeli checkpoints 
for Palestinians are "humiliating".

Palestinian Red Crescent ambulances permit themselves to be used as
transportation for bombs and explosives - and Europe attacks Israel 
for refusing them free movement.

Documents are found authorising Palestinian Authority funding for a
suicide bombing on a young girl's bar mitzvah, signed by Arafat 
himself - and members of the Nobel committee publicly call for 
taking back the 1994 Peace Prize, from Shimon Peres. Synagogues are 
firebombed in France, Belgium and Finland - and the EU deplores 
the wanton destruction of property, in Ramallah.

"Ah, those Jews," an attractive, intelligent, sophisticated Parisienne
sighed over dinner with me the other night. "They cause problems
everywhere they are."

Actually, they don't. Of the 30 ongoing conflicts in the world today,
the Muslims are involved in 28 of them. There are no Jews in Kashmir 
or the Sudan, so the Muslims make do with Hindus and Christians. 
What the Europeans call "Muslim-Jewish tensions" on the Continent 
do not involve Jewish gangs attacking mosques or beating up women in 
hejabs, only Muslim gangs attacking synagogues and stoning a bus of 
Jewish schoolchildren.

"No matter what is happening in the Middle East," said Lionel Jospin,
"anti-Semitic acts are totally unacceptable" - a formulation which, 
even as it condemns the assaults, somehow manages to validate their 
motivation. For, as Messieurs Jospin, Chirac and Vedrine have 
assured us, "what is happening in the Middle East" is the fault 
of the famously "shitty little country".

France's leaders and their excitable Arab youth are, to that extent, 
on the same song sheet. Perhaps that's why they don't feel the need 
to expend undue effort investigating these incidents. The reason 
why there has been no similar epidemic in the US is because the 
relevant jurisdictions don't appear, at least implicitly, to 
license it.

This is not virulently anti-Jew, just the familiar European urge 
to appease. France has nearly five million Muslims. If, from one 
million Palestinians, Hamas and co can recruit enough to blow up 
a couple of dozen Israelis every 48 hours, how many recruits 
could they find in France from an unassimilated population five 
times the size?

The Europeans are scared of their Muslim populations, scared of 
what perceived slight might turn them from shooting up kosher 
butchers to shooting up targets of more, shall we say, concern 
to the general population. When the war with Iraq starts, 
we'll find out. No wonder Paris and Brussels are as keen to 
postpone it as Baghdad and Riyadh. The "whole world" is agreed 
that if anybody has to be blown up it might as well be the
Israelis. Ah, those Jew troublemakers: why won't they just lie 
there and take it?