It is rather uncontroversial to call Osama bin Laden an anti-Semite.
He is the easy case. But since many people in the West are queasy about
attaching the label of anti-Semitism to almost anybody, regarding the
charge of anti-Semitism as itself proof of prejudice, let me begin by
describing bin Laden's view of history less inflammatorily--not
as anti-Semitic, but as Judeocentric. He believes that Jews exercise
disproportionate control over world affairs, and that world affairs may
therefore be explained by reference to the Jews. A Judeocentric view of
history is one that regards the Jews as the center of the story, and
therefore the key to it. Judeocentrism is a singlecause theory of
history, and as such it is, almost by definition, a conspiracy theory.
Moreover, Judeocentrism comes in positive forms and negative forms. The
positive form of Judeocentrism is philo-Semitism, the negative form is
antiSemitism. (There are philo-Semites who regard the Jews as the
inventors of modernity, and there are anti-Semites who do the same; but
the idea that Spinoza, Freud, and Einstein are responsible for us is as
foolish as the idea that their ideas are judische Wissenschaft.) In
both its positive and negative forms, Judeocentrism is always a
mistake. Human events are not so neatly explained.
In the inflamed universe of negative Judeocentrism, there is a
sliding scale of obsession. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran,
seems at times to view the world entirely through the prism of a Jewish
conspiracy, and he regularly breaks new ground in the field of
state-supported Holocaust denial. In Cairo, the activities of Jews,
Israeli and otherwise, are a continual source of worry. Many of the
monarchs in the Gulf countries, by contrast, will sometimes exploit
anti-Jewish feeling for political reasons, but they do not seem to be
personally obsessed by Jews. They are too worldly for that. In Europe,
too, one finds great variations in the expression of Judeocentrism.
There are still traces of Holocaust-induced philo-Semitism in places
like Germany; but there are also figures such as Clare Short, the
former British cabinet minister, who recently blamed Israel for global
warming.
America, too, has a history of Judeocentrism, and also of the
negative kind, the essence of which has been the belief that Jews, in
order to advance their own interests, are responsible for entangling
America in unnecessary wars--what
we now call "wars of choice," which the Jews, it is alleged, have
chosen for us. In the years leading up to World War II, the Jewish
desire for war against Hitler was a constant theme of Father Coughlin,
Charles Lindbergh, and Joseph P. Kennedy. "Instead of agitating for
war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in every way, for they
will be the first to feel its consequences," Lindbergh said in a speech
in Des Moines on September 11, 1941. In more recent times, figures such
as Patrick Buchanan, Louis Farrakhan, and David Duke have updated the
notion and explained America's woes--Buchanan cleverly, Duke crudely, Farrakhan insanely--as
the work of the Jews. (In 1990, as the first Bush administration was
building up to war against Iraq, in order to expel Saddam Hussein's
forces from Kuwait, Buchanan stated that "Capitol Hill is
Israeli-occupied territory.") Perhaps the best and most succinct
expression of this school of American Judeocentrism was offered by Mel
Gibson when he explained, upon his arrest for drunk driving, that "the
Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world."