A Jewish conspiracy lurks behind the cat-and-mouse cartoon Tom and Jerry,
according to an adviser to Iran's culture minister.
"If you study European history," Professor Hasan Bolkhari told an Iranian
television audience in February, "you will see who was the main power to hoard
money and wealth, in the 19th century. In most cases, it is the Jews. Perhaps
that was one of the reasons which caused Hitler to begin the anti-Semitic
trend, and then the extensive propaganda about the crematoria began ... The
Jews were degraded and termed 'dirty mice'. Tom and Jerry was made
in order to change the Europeans' perception of mice. One of terms used was
'dirty mice'.
"The mouse is very clever and smart," Bolkhari went on. "Everything he does is
so cute. He kicks the poor cat's ass. Yet this cruelty does not make you
despise the mouse. He looks so nice, and he is so clever ... This is exactly
why some say it was meant to erase this image of mice from the minds of
European children, and to show that the mouse is not dirty and has these
traits."
As a matter of fact, I also like Tom better than Jerry, and recently stopped
watching the cartoon when at length it became clear to me that the cat never
would be allowed to win. My sympathy for Bolkhari's position, though, does not
prevent me from pointing out some facts: (1) the Disney company did not make
the Tom and Jerry cartoons, (2) Walt Disney was not Jewish, (3) the
Hanna-Barbera company that did make the cartoons is not Jewish either, (4) the
cartoon (dating from 1942) has nothing to do with the Jewish image, and (5)
Bolkhari is barking mad.
Western analysts seeking to make sense of the regime of Iranian President
Mahmud Ahmadinejad are beginning to understand that the other side looks at the
world in a radically different way, such that discussions go to cross-purposes.
In every statement and
gesture of the West, Tehran perceives a conspiracy to deny justice to Allah's
chosen.
In fact, paranoid delusions abound in the Muslim world, as the casual observer
can verify by viewing video clips from Muslim media on the Middle East Media
Research Institute website (www.memri.org), where Bolkhari's televised seminar
is available. MEMRI executive director Steven Salinsky publishes a running
tally of Muslim conspiracy theories, including "blaming the US for [the events
of September 11, 2001]; accusing 'Zionists' of spreading AIDS; claiming that
Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is an American propaganda invention; saying that the CIA
[US Central Intelligence Agency] is writing sermons for Egyptian imams and that
the Jews are rewriting the Koran; and more recently, accusing Israel of killing
Yasser Arafat". The search term "conspiracy against Islam" elicits 20,000
Google hits, many referring to the recent uproar over the Mohammed cartoons in
a Danish newspaper.
Paranoia stems from powerlessness. Muslims display a special propensity for
paranoia, but they hardly are alone. Black Americans widely believed that evil
white doctors concocted the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) to kill them off
with AIDS, according to opinion surveys. What common opinion calls femininity
in fact amounts to a form of paranoia, I argued elsewhere (Women
as priests? Women never forgive anything!, April 27, 2005):
The
man on the street mutters to himself, "I will never understand women!" That
only goes to show how thick men can be. There is no mystery in the feminine
mystique. The feminine point of view amounts to what we otherwise call
paranoia. No one displays more sensitivity or depends more on intuition than
paranoids, who construct a world view in the absence of or despite the relevant
facts. Paranoia, to be precise, assigns meaning to utterly random events. Why
did that fellow on the far side of the restaurant fold his newspaper? Was that
a signal? Why is the newscaster wearing a green tie? Does he know something?
Why are you reading this essay? Are you out to get me?
Tehran
has shown itself capable of tactical brilliance, especially in its incubation
of the Shi'ite militias who now control the balance of power in Iraq. But the
magical world of Ahmadinejad sets no limits on aggrandizement. My colleague
Pepe Escobar
recently filed a series of reports from Iran making clear that it is not
within the realm of Iranian imagination that Washington might call a halt to
their game.
Something more profound is at work in the psyche of radical Islam than the
ordinary paranoia of the oppressed. It has deep roots in mainstream Islamic
theology, starting with the definitive work of the 11th-century Islamic sage
Abu Hamid al-Ghazali. Absolute omnipotence characterizes Allah, who may place
any obligation he wishes upon humans and suffers no grief if they are not
fulfilled. The Judeo-Christian god is not quite omnipotent, for he only can do
what is good and best for humans, and suffers along with his creatures when
they err. The Mu'tazilite school of Muslim held a similar view.
Allah has absolute freedom, and therefore no obligation to men, Ghazali
countered. Because good and evil only can be defined with respect to a purpose,
he said, nothing Allah might do might be considered good or evil, for he has no
purpose. Allah simply is. That has been the unchallenged doctrine of mainstream
Islam since the 13th century, when the last remnants of opposition to Ghazali
died out.
Franz Rosenzweig, the great German-Jewish scholar of comparative religion,
summarized the problem this way:
The God of Mohammed is a creator who
well might not have bothered to create. He displays his power like an Oriental
potentate who rules by violence, not by acting according to necessity, not by
authorizing the enactment of the law, but rather in his freedom to act
arbitrarily. [Muslim theology] presumes that Allah creates every isolated thing
at every moment. Providence thus is shattered into infinitely many individual
acts of creation, with no connection to each other, each of which has the
importance of the entire creation. That has been the doctrine of the ruling
orthodox philosophy in Islam. Every individual thing is created from scratch at
every moment.
Islam cannot be salvaged from this frightful providence of Allah ... despite
its vehement, haughty insistence upon the idea of the God's unity, Islam slips
back into a kind of monistic paganism, if you will permit the expression. God
competes with God at every moment, as if it were the colorfully contending
heavenful of gods of polytheism.
Paranoia, I argued earlier,
consists of assigning meaning to random events. But an omnipotent god
exercising absolute freedom can only create a world of utter randomness. Human
perception of such a universe too easily becomes what we otherwise call
paranoia. No orthodox Muslim could say with Albert Einstein, "God does not play
dice with the universe," for Allah, if he so wishes, can play not only dice,
but Texas Hold 'Em or any other game he might fancy.
All of modern science, from Copernicus through to Johannes Kepler, Gottfried
Leibniz, Isaac Newton and Einstein, presumes that God is limited by a purpose.
The great physicists assumed that God, creating the universe, would limit
himself according to what Leibniz called the Law of Sufficient Reason. Kepler
summed it up: "Nature uses as little as possible of anything." Or as Einstein
said, "Our experience up to date justifies us in feeling sure that in nature is
actualized the idea of mathematical simplicity."
Western science presumes God's self-limitation. Kepler discovered the laws of
planetary motion by presuming that God would choose the simplest and most
beautiful solution, and thus encountered the elliptical orbit of Mars. This of
course is blasphemous in terms of the mainstream Islam of the 11th century
onward, which helps explain the impoverishment of Muslim science during the
past millennium.
But we are getting far afield from our concern, which is not science, but
rather Tom and Jerry. Allah and the self-revealed god of Judeo-Christian
scripture are different entities, contrary to the pulp theology of Karen
Armstrong. The Judeo-Christian god is a loving parent who grieves with the
weakest of his creatures; Allah is an absolute sovereign who rewards those who
execute his orders. YHWH and Jesus offer consolation. Allah can offer nothing
but success. That is why many Muslims become secular, but few become Christian.
For Muslims, Christianity is not a different expression of the same desires
that motivate Islam, but an incompatible set of motivations. Before they can
consider an entirely different religion, first they must leave their own.
Only two things can explain the absence of success in Islamic terms. One is
unfaithfulness, and the other is the action of a supernatural entity opposed to
Allah, namely Satan. Just how Satan got into a universe whose every molecular
jiggle comes under Allah's purview is another question, but we will leave that
aside. Sayyid Qutb (1906-66), the founder of modern radical Islam, proceeded
from the accusation that "Islamic society today is not Islamic in any sense of
the word".
It is one thing to blame Nasserite secularism for Egypt's failure in the 1967
war, and quite another to blame the Islamic Republic of Iran for not being
quite Islamic enough. In any case, it is extremely unlikely that a clerical
regime would take such a position. The new generation of Iranian leaders whose
entire life has been the revolution know their purity of heart, and their
proven capacity to sacrifice in the terrible war with Iraq.
To Ahmadinejad and his contemporaries, the entire world appears as a vast
conspiracy to prevent them from having what rightfully is theirs: dominance of
the Middle East from the Mediterranean to the Caspian, and eventually, much
more. They know with absolutely certainty that they cannot fail, that the
United States will withdraw from the region in confusion, and that they shall
triumph.
There is no way to communicate reality to Ahmadinejad and his generation of
militant theocrats except to demonstrate that can fail, by making them fail in
the most visible and obvious fashion. Tom, in other words, finally has to eat
Jerry.
Washington's best course of action would be to launch an aerial attack on
Iran's nuclear capacities as quickly as possible, making clear that Iran simply
will not be allowed to realize its imperial ambitions in the region. Even
better would be the combination of an aerial attack and a blockade of Iranian
oil exports as well as Iranian gasoline imports.
The West could withstand a 5% reduction in global oil supplies, and preempting
the oil weapon would eliminate a great many illusions in the Islamic world.
gesture of the West, Tehran perceives a conspiracy to deny justice to Allah's
chosen.
