The May Issue of Commentary

The May issue of Commentary is out.  It includes a series of articles that are worth reading:

Victor Davis Hanson (“The Bush Doctrine’s Next Test”), argues that pro-democracy policies must be extended to Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia:

Each of these regimes has, nearby, a polity that offers an instructive contrast.  Democratic India, nuclear-armed, wary of China, increasingly tied to America, is a reminder to Pakistan . . .

In the Middle East, the new Iraq — with oil reserves comparable in size to Saudi Arabia’s, with a port on the Persian Gulf, and with its ongoing democratic transformation — is . . . already sending a strong message to Riyadh . . .

Hanson says that “Secretary Rice’s decision to avoid Egypt on her recent Middle East trip was what prompted Mubarak to pledge Egypt’s first multiparty presidential election later this year, and is a model of what can be done in the short term.”

David Pryce-Jones has a long special report on “Jews, Arabs, and French Diplomacy” that sets forth a “historical record [that] displays evidence of unremitting hostility to Jews, decade after decade.”

One example among the innumerable ones in this article occurred in May 1945 after the Allies prevailed in Europe:

Haj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious mufti of Jerusalem . . . left what had been German-occupied Silesia and fled to Switzerland. Denied asylum there, he and his entourage found themselves in the hands of the French authorities.

Haj Amin had been responsible for rejecting any notion of partitioning Palestine between Arabs and Jews, and for precipitating the Arab revolt of 1936 in which many British personnel as well as Jews and Arabs had been killed.

With French connivance, he had escaped in 1938 to Lebanon, going on to participate in the 1941 anti-British coup in Iraq before finally fleeing to Berlin.

Wartime photographs show him in his clerical robes and turban in the company of Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler, and Eichmann, both privately and at public occasions, including a tour of Auschwitz. After the Allies invaded North Africa in November 1942 and the Germans took over Vichy France, Haj Amin urged Hitler to exploit the local populations of both places in order to break “the Judeo-Anglo-Saxon stranglehold.”

He also recruited a Bosnian Muslim division for the SS, an act for which the Americans, the British, and the Yugoslavs wanted him extradited as a war criminal.

On May 11, 1945, the ministry of the interior briefed the Quai d’Orsay that Haj Amin was considered “the brains of German espionage in all Muslim countries.” The next day, the French embassy in Cairo confirmed what was to become policy. “The mufti has certainly betrayed the Allied cause,” the telegram ran. “But he has above all betrayed Britain without affecting us directly. Seemingly, therefore, nothing obliges us to undertake any action in his regard that could harm us in the Arab countries.”

The French then allowed Haj Amin to escape from their authority and return to the Middle East, with historic consequences:

Still in touch with French officials, he did his best to orchestrate his “negative” policy of violence against the emerging state of Israel, a policy that extended the ruin of the Palestinian Arabs and has bedeviled the Middle East ever since.

Daniel Johnson has a devastating summary of Laurel Leff’s new book:  “Buried by the Times:  The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper.”

This book tells the story of how the most powerful newspaper in the world failed to inform its readers that the most terrible crime in history was taking place in occupied Europe . . . .

The Times betrayed the Jews of Europe by abandoning them. It betrayed its American readers by misleading them. And it betrayed its own exalted self-image by failing utterly to discharge its public responsibility in reporting the Final Solution.

Laurel Leff’s dispassionate and impeccably fair account builds on Deborah Lipstadt’s more general survey of the American press in those years, Beyond Belief (1985) . . .

Is it unfair today to castigate the Times for its coverage of events, however traumatic, that occurred six decades ago?  Not only is it fair, the exercise is also highly relevant to the present situation. . . .  Now, as then, the Times sets the tone for much of the rest of the American press and other media.

Yet even now, when the editors of the Times are acutely aware of the paper’s failures in World War II, they have responded to a sustained campaign of incitement and indiscriminate mass murder against Jews with, at best, neutrality. This book helps to explain why.