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 Army penciled his acknowledgment of Zionism as the national
liberation movement of the Jewish people. Jewish-born Leon Bronstein apparently
emerged from the Trotsky closet just before his 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 Third
World 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 rehearsed for 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 of
David. 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, the 84-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 blamed and slandered for
everything. No one blames the Muslims for anything. The Iranian government
should understand that the Jews were expelled from their land, persecuted and
mistreated 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 were subjected 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 a nation.
“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 in Venezuela.”
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
nuclear weaponization.”
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 manifesto could 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’ite Iranian
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 a
little bemused, I am ready for “Viva Fidel!”
The writer is director for
international relations of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.