Free Those Who Forget the Past by Ron Rosenbaum Page B

I always felt about my life in America what Milton says of Adam and Eve entering exile—the world was all before me.
    Living in New York, pursuing my writing life, I had the world forever all before me. I chose within it—I married and had a child. For ten years I worked at a Jewish newspaper. But my sense of endless American possibility never left me—even working at a Jewish newspaper seemed a paradoxical assertion of American comfort. My father’s refugee sense of the world was something that both informed me and that I worked to define myself against. I felt it was an act of mental health to recognize that his world was not my world and that his fears were the product of an experience alien to me. I was critical of the Holocaust Museum in Washington. I didn’t want ancient European anti-Semitism enshrined on federal land. But now everything has come to American soil.
    Recently, I read an interview with Sheik Muhammad Gemeaha—who was not only the representative in the United States of the prominent Cairo Center of Islamic Learning, al-Azhar University, but also imam of the Islamic Cultural Center of New York City. The sheik, who until recently lived in Manhattan on the Upper West Side, explained that “only the Jews” were capable of destroying the World Trade Center and added that “if it became known to the American people, they would have done to Jews what Hitler did.” This sentiment will be familiar to anyone who has been watching the news or reading the papers. In Kuwait, there were reports that New York rabbis told their followers to take their money out of the stock market before September 11; in Egypt, the Mossad was blamed for the attack. It is easy talk to dismiss as madness, I suppose, but because so many millions of Muslims seem to believe it, and because airplanes actually did crash into the World Trade Center, words have a different weight and menace than they had before.
    So does history, or rather the forces that shape history— particularly the history of the Jews. It would be wrong to say that everything changed on the eleventh of September for me. Like the man in the Hemingway novel who went bankrupt two ways—gradually and then suddenly—my awareness of things had also been growing slowly. My father’s sister escaped in the 1930s from Vienna to Palestine—now, of course, called Israel— and I have a lot of family there. I grew up knowing that Israel, for all its vitality, was ringed with enemies; I knew how perilous and bleak life had become after the collapse of the Oslo peace process a year ago and how perilous and bleak it could be before that.
    I knew, too, that works like “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the Russian forgery about demonic Jewish power, have been imported into Arab society, like obsolete but deadly Soviet weapons. By grafting ancient Christian calumnies onto modern political grievances, Arab governments have transformed Israel into an outpost of malevolent world Jewry, viewing Israelis and Jews as interchangeable emblems of cosmic evil. So when the Syrian defense minister recently told a delegation from the British Royal College of Defense Studies that the destruction of the World Trade Center was part of a Jewish conspiracy, I wasn’t really surprised.
    I’d gotten a whiff of this back in early September, while following the United Nations conference on racism and discrimination in Durban, South Africa, where the Arab Lawyers Union distributed booklets at the conference containing anti-Semitic caricatures of Jews with fangs dripping blood—a mere sideshow to the isolation of Israel and the equating of Zionism with racism that ultimately led to the United States’ withdrawal. Singling out Israel made of a modern nation an archetypal villain—Jews were the problem and the countries of the world were figuring out the solution. This was hardly new in the history of the United Nations,