Writing in Commentary about the recent racist hoopla at the Miss Universe Pageant, Jonathan Tobin tells us:
So Miss Israel took a "selfie" with Miss Lebanon thereby causing the Lebanese government, if not the Lebanese people, to go into an uproar."The problem is a spirit of intolerance and rejection for the idea of a Jewish state no matter where its borders might be drawn. That is a hatred so deep that it can’t be bridged by creative diplomacy or gestures of goodwill, such as those that infuse international events like the Miss Universe contest.
It is a cliché for contestants at such competitions to say they wish for world peace when asked for their opinions about the issues of the day. But what happened to Miss Lebanon illustrates that the divisions of the Middle East run so deep and are so primal that no amount of global hooey like a beauty contest is enough to make the Arab and Muslim world forget about their antipathy for Israelis."
Tobin reminds us, "This sort of thing had happened once before when the 1993 version of Miss Lebanon was pictured next to that year’s Miss Israel. She was subsequently stripped of her title and ostracized as a traitor."
Tobin is correct to see the Miss Universe hoo-ha as a pedagogic opportunity concerning traditional and long-standing Arab-Muslim contempt for the Jewish people and, thus, the true source of the conflict. Arabs and Muslims, particularly those in the Middle East and Europe, tend to despise Jews not because of Israel. Quite the contrary. Arabs and Muslims tend to despise Israel because of Jews. Were Israel not the Jewish state, but yet another Arab state, then there would be no problem despite any and all human rights violations.
If a non-Jewish Israel was the single most violent and unjust place on the entire planet, few would mind. Syria is right next door where the Islamic State is running entirely amuck chopping off heads and raping women, yet few in the west really care and certainly the Arab world seems perfectly content to go on Alahu Akbaring one another to death. In fact, many more people were killed in Syria within the last few years than have died in the Arab war against the Jews since '48.
Furthermore, Israel has far-and-away the best human rights record in that part of the world - it's not even close - yet this does not shield it, nor the Jewish people, from violent malice in both Europe and the Middle East.
Since the Israeli War for Independence about fifty thousand people have died in the conflict, around one-third Jewish and two-thirds Arab. In Syria, in just the last few years alone, around two hundred thousand people have lost their lives, the vast majority of whom are Arab-Muslims. When western anti-Israel activists fetishize Israel as a unique evil in the world, it tells us much more about them then they may realize. It certainly shows us the unique hypocrisy embedded directly into BDS, if not the progressive-left, more generally.
The foundation of the Arab war against the Jewish people of the Middle East was revealed - for those with eyes to see - in the reaction that Miss Lebanon took concerning this photograph with a Jew. She, herself, may be largely free of the kind of race-hatred that permeates Arab-Muslim society, but such fraternization with lower-life forms is intolerable in the Arab world, at least within a high-profile public format wherein diplomats are not involved. Individual Arabs may have friendships with individual Jews, in private, but Arab-Muslim culture generally despises not only the Jewish State of Israel, but the Jewish people as a whole for entirely irrational theocratic reasons.
We are the Allah-cursed children of wild boars and orangutans, after all.
If one wishes to understand the true nature of the conflict one need not look any further than this recent incident.
The basis of the conflict is Koranically-based Muslim majoritarian racism toward the Jewish minority in the Middle East and that is precisely why it is so intractable. Large swathes of the Arab-Muslim world see the Jewish people as a transcendental evil. It is not merely that we Jews are, ourselves, considered evil, but that evil, in and of itself, is considered Jewish.
If you do not understand that then you do not have even the beginnings of an understanding of the conflict.
However, if you do understand this, but refuse to speak the truth because you know that your social-political circle will not like it, then you are just a coward.
