Core element of their mental architecture

The Tehran Twist, 1960s, via Dr. Kaveh Farrokh.

Brooks asserts today that there are "three major strains of anti-Semitism circulating, different in kind and virulence, and requiring different responses," but seems to have lost track and made his 800 words with only two strains, strangely, and it's pretty clear there's only one he really cares about:

Verbatim David Brooks, "How to Fight Anti-Semitism", New York Times, March 24 2015:

In the Middle East, anti-Semitism has the feel of a deranged theoretical system for making sense of a world gone astray....

This form of anti-Semitism cannot be reasoned away because it doesn’t exist on the level of reason. It can only be confronted with deterrence and force, at the level of fear....

the Iranians are anti-Semitic, but [people in the Obama administration] don’t know what to do with that fact and put this mental derangement on a distant shelf. They negotiate with the Iranian leaders, as if anti-Semitism was some odd quirk, instead of what it is, a core element of their mental architecture....

Exterminate the brutes!

You see what he did there, right? Assigned a kind of generic, bred-in-the-bone "derangement" to an entire nationality, "the Iranians", with a single and unvarying "mental architecture" and no individual distinctions, so that it's no more possible to negotiate with them than with animals, just the way, I don't know, but if Ayatollah Khamenei, as quoted by Brooks, referred to Israel in November 2013 as a

“sinister, unclean rabid dog of the region,” [whose] leaders “look like beasts and cannot be called human”

so does David Brooks refer, speaking of Iran, to

The enemy’s rabidity

("Oh, thanks, Ayatollah, that's a great slur!"). I'm not saying there's no racism in Iran, but we have some talented guys over here too.

Brooks's second type of anti-Semitism, on the other hand, the subject of Jeffrey Goldberg's famous Atlantic piece from this month, the European variety, is not as serious in Brooks's opinion, merely

a response to alienation. It’s particularly high where unemployment is rampant.... But the best response is quarantine and confrontation. European governments can demonstrate solidarity with their Jewish citizens by providing security, cracking down — broken-windows style — on even the smallest assaults. Meanwhile, brave and decent people can take a page from Gandhi and stage campaigns of confrontational nonviolence: marches, sit-ins and protests in the very neighborhoods where anti-Semitism breeds.

Glad we don't have to confront France with "force at the level of fear"! The anti-Semitism there only encourages people to shoot up Jewish épiceries alongside the cartoonists, whereas in Iran they have the chutzpah to enrich uranium (e.g., for generating electricity or for cancer treatments, while suggesting to some, though not to the US or Israeli intelligence agencies, that they might be planning to build a nuclear weapon sometime when nobody's looking, as nobody will be looking if we don't do a deal pretty soon).

If you accept Brooks's qualitative distinction between the two kinds of anti-Semitism, I think you have to drop his geographical distinction. Disaffected jobless youth blaming Zionists and/or Jews (without clearly recognizing the difference) for their crappy lives are all over the Middle East as well as Europe, and I think the European ones tend to be mostly of Arab origin, at least in France and Spain. While the Nazioid crazies who believe in an international Jewish communist bankers' conspiracy to enslave the world are of European origin and still most fully represented in the nationalist-to-fascist parties of the European right such as France's Front National (though Marine Le Pen has attempted to distance herself personally from her father's Nazi affinities, I doubt the party has); Mahmoud Ahmadinejad got all his ideas about the Holocaust from them, they're not Persian ideas at all but as European as Father Tomás de Torquemada and Dr. Martin Luther of Wittenberg.

Brooks's evidence for the uniquely anti-Semitic character of the Iranian people consists of two pieces. One is that nasty tweet by Khamenei, which is about Israelis, not Jews, a distinction the Supreme One is always very careful to maintain (he'd offend Iran's Jewish population if he didn't!), and the other is last October's New Horizon "conference" of everyone from peaceful anti-Zionist activists like Medea Benjamin to 9/11 truthers and really bad anti-Semites, staged in Tehran, which sounds like a pretty awful affair, to be sure (I think Brooks's source is an article by David Frum in the Atlantic; a more positive view of New Horizon, which strikes me as a little Chomskyan-delusional, comes from Eric Walberg).

Although Brooks is certainly wrong to say that President Rouhani "reinstated" it as an annual affair after canceling the 2013 edition—it is, rather, clearly the case that Rouhani failed to persuade Khamenei to let him cancel it in 2014; he showed it no face, though, declining invitations to speak for himself, Foreign Minister Zarif, and former chief arms negotiator Ali Akbar Salehi, as you can tell from the not at all pro-Iranian coverage in BuzzFeed.

BuzzFeed also quotes an email from foreign ministry official Reza Montazami promising an American journalist, Gareth Porter, that no vile anti-Semites like Mark Glenn would be present at the conference:

We don’t invite him whether you come or not. It means that is vrery [sic] critical point for us. if not, what is the different between us and Takfirist. You know what means takfir. May you look at dicionary [sic], and you will find that it makes no differnt[sic] whether you are an American scholar or Libian [sic] primitive, While you hate other, you are takfirist just like Daesh.”

My sentiments exactly, I must say.

Brooks cites similar evidence for anti-Semitism in Egypt, by the way, according to which Egyptian high-ranking military were forced to attend a talk on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. I can't find a direct reference to that, but it is apparently true that President Sisi has been involved in accusing the Muslim Brothers of being Jewish and plotting on precise Elders of Zion lines (the Brothers accuse Sisi of the same in a back-and-forth of mutual takfir that Iranians would never put up with). But Brooks doesn't think Egypt can't be negotiated with or must be confronted with "deterrence and force". Indeed, it's Israel's ally, as is Saudi Arabia (which Brooks doesn't mention as suffering from anti-Semitism, Brooks is always particularly tender toward Saudi Arabia, but anti-Semitism in Saudi Arabia is deep and pretty well known, as noted in Haaretz. Jews weren't allowed in KSA until last October, while Iran is the only Muslim country in the Middle East that maintains its own ancient Jewish community, who have more rights, as I'm always saying, and responsibilities, than Palestinians in Israel.)

The unmentioned third type of anti-Semitism looks like it was going to be that of American college students, raised to be "moral relativists" which is like totally more or less the same thing:

They sometimes assume that if Israel is hated, then it must be because of its cruel and colonial policies in the West Bank.

Anybody who would believe that would obviously believe that Jews slaughter Christian babies for the blood with which they bake their matzoh, amirite Brooksy? But he pulled back on calling it anti-Semitic just in time. Failing, however, to fix the "three" mentioned up at the top of the post here, which would have required him to reread the piece once before posting it (or maybe he really did just lose count; we've seen him having trouble numerating his points before).

The column is really not about anti-Semitism at all, though, as you can see by that curious failure to talk about how we fight anti-Semitism in Egypt and KSA (who cares, they do what Netanyahu wants). Which is what makes it so disgusting to me that I just can't stop. It's exploiting our completely understandable dread and hatred of anti-Semitism for a raw political end (and not even an American one but Netanyahu's), as part of the wider Republican/Likudnik press to torpedo the Iran nuclear negotiations, lined up with Senator Lindsey Graham's statements at the Council on Foreign Relations this morning:

So the credible military component would be to put a large set of targets on the table, not just a few, to make the regime believe that their very survivability is at stake. That means their navy, their army, their air force, their offensive capability.

DAVIDSON: Does that include civilian targets, like industrial capability?

GRAHAM: I've asked my military commanders what would put the regime's offensive capability at the lowest (inaudible). Because if you're going to do it, do it, OK? Don't play around with it. Don't say you're going to do it, and not do it.

Really, old Lindsey-Woolsey has his own military commanders? Everybody thought it was a joke when he said he might run for president, and here he is president already!

Update: Steve M thinks Brooks and Graham work together dumbing each other down on all sorts of issues, on the basis of the climate change discussion in Graham's CFR talk yesterday.