Hey, take a number and get in line. Who won’t dare to damn Israel? And for whatever bugs you. In late 2010, there was a series of shark attacks in the Red Sea off the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.⁵ On an official Egyptian government news site, the governor of South Sinai, Mohamed Abdel Fadil Shousha, speculated that the fatal attacks in the hitherto peaceful waters were due to “the Mossad throwing in the deadly shark to hit tourism in Egypt.” Other sources wondered if the Mossad had gone further and equipped the aquatic predators with GPS. Could be. Governor Shousha has undoubtedly seen the famous Hollywood film about a killer shark terrorizing a beach resort—Jews. Oh, c’mon, you’re not gonna let a one-vowel typing error in the poster throw you off what it’s really about, are you?

Directed by the same infidel who made Schindler’s List, if you get my drift.

The Governor of South Sinai is not the only political colossus to take the view that the world’s troubles are due to a tiny strip of land that at its narrowest point is barely wider than my New Hampshire township. Only a few months before the shark attacks, Bill Clinton had been in Egypt and told an audience of local “businessmen” that solving the Israeli/Palestinian problem would “take away about half the impetus for terror in the whole world.”⁶

Only 50 percent of global terrorism is all down to Israel? Are you sure you’re not underestimating?

In rationalizing the irrational, you not only legitimize it but create a self-fulfilling prophecy. After the Bali nightclub bombings in 2002, Bruce Haigh, a retired Australia diplomat who’d served in Indonesia, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, went on TV and explained why hundreds of his compatriots had been blown up: “The root cause of this issue has been America’s backing of Israel on Palestine.”⁷

So we’re conceding that if a fellow in Indonesia is “frustrated” by Israeli “intransigence,” then blowing up Australian tourists, Scandinavian back-packers, and German stoners in Bali makes some kind of sense. For centuries, Jews were the handiest scapegoat in every two-bit duchy and principality across the map. In essence, the argument of Bill Clinton & Company simply affirms the ancient paranoia that the Jews are behind everything.

There is an element of humbug about all this. Just as Europe’s rulers, while happy to pander to anti-American sentiment among the citizenry, are well aware that the United States has been the guarantor of the Continent’s liberty since 1945, so Araby’s rulers, happy to pander to their subjects’ Judenhass in public, are privately rather appreciative of the Zionist Entity.

Diplomatic cables leaked in 2010 revealed that King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia was publicly urging the bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities, and had even indicated to the Israelis that come the big night he’d make sure his kingdom’s radar facilities were switched off so nobody could tip off Teheran.⁸ Were Israel to take up his offer, His Majesty would be the first in a long parade of Arab potentates and European foreign ministers lining up to denounce Zionist “disproportion.” But it’s heartening to know that, whatever lunacies they subscribe to in public, both Arabs and Europeans retain a few residual marbles in private.

Not all the scapegoaters are nuts, maybe not even the governor of South Sinai. Maybe he’s just tossing a little red meat, a little shark bait to the Jew-hate crowd. But from Sharm al-Sheikh to the UN General Assembly, sane men find it politic to string along with the loons.

As the proverbial canary in the coal mine, Israel knows what America’s in for. Like the United States, it is militarily superior to its enemies. If it were merely a matter of weaponry, they would have won decades ago. But, if that’s all there is to it, where’s the U.S. victory parade in Afghanistan? The Palestinians were among the first to realize that, in a media age, you can win on other battlefields. Stone-throwing youths have won more victories for Palestine—at least in the European press and on North American campuses—than the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armies ever did.

THE NEW NORMALIUT