Free Those Who Forget the Past by Ron Rosenbaum

sworn enemies for your security. That for true hope, one has to draw faith from the continued survival of the Jewish people for three millennia despite anti-Semitism. From their continuing determination to fight for their survival, and not hide their faces from the truth.
    I do not suggest that the truth will set us free from antiSemitism; perhaps nothing will. But there are a couple of glimmers of hope, even to this pessimist. First is the fact that people are no longer denying there’s cause for concern. In addition to Leon Wieseltier’s YIVO conference, there was the turnabout of
New York
magazine, which, in that spring of 2002, when some people were speaking out, published a piece by Amy Wilentz that looked down its nose at those who did. A year and a half later, the same magazine published a cover story, “The New Face of Anti-Semitism,” which was subtitled “In much of the world, hating the Jews has become politically correct. How did this happen?” In addition, there were books by Phyllis Chesler, Alan Dershowitz, Abraham Foxman, Kenneth Timmerman, and Gabriel Schoenfeld which sounded an alarm. (Readers are entitled to ask why is this book different from all those other books, and I’d suggest that, while I certainly have a point of view, I wanted to include a multiplicity of perspectives, some of them clashing, on the questions within the question of antiSemitism. That and also the presence of Cynthia Ozick, who writes on this subject with the incandescent clarity of a biblical prophet.)
    But perhaps the most surprising suggestion of an optimistic development in the situation itself (as opposed to the kind of attention paid to it) could be found in a May 7, 2003, article by Yigal Carmon, the founder of MEMRI, the Middle East Media Research Institute, in Washington. It’s a report entitled “Harbingers of Change in the Anti-Semitic Discourse of the Arab World.”
    It’s a startling document 21 because it suggests that the light MEMRI has thrown on the dark utterances of the most extreme Islamist anti-Semites is actually having some effect: causing
some
of the more responsible intellectuals, commentators, and political figures in the Arab Middle East to condemn the worst excrescences of such rhetoric as embarrassments to the image of Islam in the civilized world.
    Carmon cites the following four developments:
    â€œCalls to Cancel the Beirut Holocaust Deniers’ Conference”: The conference “is, in effect, a conference against the truth,” a columnist in
Al-Hayat,
a London-based Arabic language paper, said scornfully. “This is a conference against consciousness.”
    â€œSaudi Editor Apologizes for Publishing Blood Libel”: The editor of the Saudi government paper
Al-Riyadh
apologized for publishing “an idiotic and false news item regarding the use of human blood” in Jewish religious rituals, a practice that “does not exist in the world at all.”
    â€œCriticism of Anti-Semitic Series [on
The Protocols of
the Elders of Zion
] on Egyptian Television”: The secretary-general of the Palestinian Ministry called the
Protocols
“a stupid pamphlet full of nonsense,” and important Egyptian government officials called the
Protocols
“a fabrication,” “an example of racist literature and hate literature.”
    â€œA New Recommendation by Al-Azhar [University Institute for Islamic Research]: Stop Calling Jews ‘Apes and Pigs.’ ”
    â€œIt appears,” Carmon writes, “that the increase in anti-Semitic propaganda in the Arab media since the beginning of the al-Aqsa Intifada . . . has led some Arab intellectuals to rethink the matter and reject anti-Semitic statements.”
    While some of this may stem from opportunistic concerns about image, even such concern is a cause for some tempered optimism. 22 Calling attention to this kind of incitement—facing rather than denying it—might