The 84-year-old revolutionary phoenix, risen from the ashes, has given us a new spin on ‘al het’ with his recent statements.
On assignment in Mexico City in 1974, I learned that, in the house preserved as the Trotsky Museum, his grandson had discovered a copybook in which the founder of the Red Armypenciled his acknowledgment of Zionism as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people. Jewish-born Leon Bronstein apparently emerged from the Trotsky closet just beforehis assassination. Had that document been validated and published, it may have created havoc in the Fourth International and even among Soviet acolytes.
A year later, the Zionism equals racism resolution was conceived at the UN Women’s Conference in Mexico City. Despite its repeal in 1991, it left an indelible imprint on the ThirdWorld and was the bedrock for the 2000 Durban calumny painting Israel as an “apartheid state,” which in turn unleashed the current boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS)campaigns. Since 2003, the antiglobalization World Social Forum annually reconsecrates the marriage between extreme left and jihadi Islamism. In Brazil’s Porto Alegre stadium,70,000 young people from around the world hoisted banners of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, whooping “Viva la Intifada Internacional.”
Each autumn, at the satellite European Social Forum, atheist Trotskyites wave Hizbullah banners screaming Allahu Akbar, while planning flotillas and “antiwar” slogans rehearsedfor Cast Lead and other such operations. In a rain-swept stadium in Mar del Plata, Argentina, I sat among thousands of soaked spectators at the Alternative Summit of the Americas,tetchy after almost two hours of Hugo Chavez’s peroration.
The consummate theatrocrat, sensing the mood, withdrew his mobile phone. Placing it to his ear, his voice was shaking to crescendo into the microphone: “Is it? Can it be? It is!Fidel! The adoring multitude rose in unison, roaring “Fidel! Fidel!,” succumbing to another hour of Chavez oratory in the rain.
Visiting Havana during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, I protested anti- Israeli cartoons in the official daily, Granma, portraying IDF soldiers as pigs plastered with Stars ofDavid. A week later, Fidel asked to visit Havana’s government-supported Patronato Jewish Center, whereupon I was amazed to learn that the cartoons were suspended. Now, the84-year-old revolutionary phoenix, risen from the ashes, has given us a new spin on al het.
In an Atlantic interview with US journalist Jeffrey Goldberg entitled “Fidel to Ahmadinejad: ‘Stop Slandering the Jews,’” the reborn Castro declaimed:
“I don’t think anyone has been slandered more than the Jews. I would say much more than the Muslims. They have been slandered much more than the Muslims because they are blamedand slandered for everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything. The Iranian government should understand that the Jews were expelled from their land, persecuted andmistreated all over the world as the ones who killed God. In my judgment here’s what happened to them: Reverse selection. What’s reverse selection? Over 2,000 years they weresubjected to terrible persecution and then to the pogroms. One might have assumed that they would have disappeared; I think their culture and religion kept them together as anation.
“The Jews have lived an existence that is much harder than ours. There is nothing that compares to the Holocaust.”
The Wiesenthal Center, in a laudatory response, urged Castro to make good on his words by influencing “his self-proclaimed disciple, Hugo Chavez, to criminalize anti- Semitism inVenezuela.”
We proposed that Castro “validate his warnings by co-opting Chavez into pressing his ally, Ahmadinejad, to end his Holocaust denial, his threats against Israel and his nuclearweaponization.”
Vatican II marginalized the charge of deicide to right-wing schismatics and leftist proponents of the theology of liberation. A targeted dissemination of the new Castro manifestocould have a similar effect among the fashionista anti- Zionist left, with an Internet multiplier on the atheist/Islamist nexus
The impact in the Muslim world would further the fragmentation, at the same time reinforcing a Sunni rejection of Holocaust denial, if only as added value in isolating Shi’iteIranian expansionism.
Any challenge to the rationale of the Marxian-Islamist marriage of convenience is legitimate. Regardless of Castro’s motives, the potential in his 5771 gift merits celebration,and should be directed to encourage a shifting configuration among our enemies. It is too late for a redemptive “Viva Trotsky – the perhaps uncloseted Zionist.” But, even if alittle bemused, I am ready for “Viva Fidel!”
The writer is director for international relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
