Now 95, Lord George Weidenfeld has lived through tumultuous world events while building up a renowned London publishing house. In British cultural life he occupies the status of venerable sage.
A Jewish refugee from Nazi-occupied Vienna, he is, to be sure, a sage with a very particular worldview: That of an inveterate Zionist. The other day, in a BBC radio interview, Weidenfeld scorned the foreign policy failings of US President Barack Obama. At the same time, he discussed the rise of European anti-Semitism, ascribing it to “Islamic extremism” that threatens all Europeans. Indeed, he confessed to fearing more for the gentile population of Europe than for its Jews, since Jews can always find sanctuary in Israel.
Weidenfeld’s denigration of Obama’s foreign policy went unchallenged by his deferential BBC interviewer. In common with many other media organizations, the BBC may be said to be encouraging mass amnesia regarding the prelude to the Obama presidency. Public consciousness is steadily being purged of all recollection of the actions of the United States in the aftermath of 9/11, the massively counter-productive application of military force in Afghanistan and Iraq. Less and less is it remembered how Washington ideologues, partisans of Israel prominent among them, proclaimed the democratic benefits that would accrue to Iraq and the wider Middle East from the removal of Saddam Hussein, targeting for destruction an Arab state that had nothing to do with the attack on the twin towers.
It may be, as critics of Obama insist, that the US ought to have made a timely intervention in Syria. But it is astonishing that they are afforded such lavish opportunities to disparage his foreign policy without acknowledging the epoch-making debacle he inherited. A narrative has crystallized that is oblivious of the vast contribution that the US has made to destabilize the Middle East. The increasingly hidden truth is that the toppling of Saddam Hussein monstrously inflated the very threat it purported to be pre-empting, creating conditions that have spawned a fanatically anti-western Islamic State with which diplomatic relations are impossible.
What is also conveniently overlooked is how the destabilization of the region has helped to sustain in power an unremittingly intransigent Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, with his (to Israelis) cogent claim that to accept a Palestinian state would be to establish a fresh base for radicals on Israel’s doorstep.
Right-wing pundits in the US and UK are especially contemptuous of the Obama administration’s efforts to “de-link” Islam from the murderous extremism of the Islamic State. Zealous in their efforts to portray Islam as fundamentally militant, they are correspondingly zealous in passing over the long record of violence perpetrated in the name of Christianity and Judaism. You would never guess from their tendentious opinion-mongering that the key architects of the calamitous deepening of East/West tensions are two men who may be considered both Christians and extremists: Former US President George W. Bush and former British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The subject of a damning new book, Blair Inc.: the Man behind the Mask by Francis Beckett, David Hencke and Nick Kochan, Blair is among the most extreme personalities of his age: Extreme in his apocalyptic warnings about Islamism, extreme in his advocacy of war, extreme in his refusal to admit that he could ever be wrong, extreme not least in his pursuit of personal enrichment and publicity.
Now, it seems, Washington and Brussels are at last pulling the plug on Blair’s painfully protracted stint as the West’s peace envoy in the Middle East — a role that was a reward for his loyalty to George W. Bush and that, in political terms, has been an exercise in extreme futility. Blair Inc. abounds in indications that he has used his official position to expand his private business interests rather than to work for a resolution to the Palestine-Israel conflict.
It has been a sorry chapter in the career of a politician who advocated the invasion of Iraq as a large step toward attaining justice for Palestinians. Many will feel that in signaling the end of Blair’s pantomime statesmanship in the Middle East, Barack Obama has at least one solid achievement to his credit.
