B
ret Stephens seems like a fine person a good writer and astute observer of politics and society. I enjoyed Yonoson Rosenblum’s profile of him some months ago in which he came across as he does in his writing as someone sincere about having Jews’ best interests at heart.
But good intentions will only get one so far. Nothing can entirely compensate for a lack of profound grounding in Torah and when that is missing even a bright well-meaning fellow like him can get things very wrong. And so he does in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece prompted by the incident at the Rio Olympics in which an Egyptian judoka having lost his match with an Israeli Olympian named Or Sasson refused to shake the latter’s hand.
Mr. Stephens uses the snub as a metaphor for the abiding anti-Semitism that has characterized the Arab world. This deep-seated animus has resulted not only in the driving out of its 900000 Jews but also Stephens writes in a “combination of lost human capital ruinously expensive wars misdirected ideological obsessions and an intellectual life perverted by conspiracy theory and the perpetual search for scapegoats.”
He goes on to cite the historian Paul Johnson’s trenchant observation that “wherever anti-Semitism took hold social and political decline almost inevitably followed.” Stephens too sees the Islamic world’s all-consuming hatred of Jews as the chief reason for its lowly economic standing paucity of technological and academic achievement and general societal stagnation and he criticizes the fact that anti-Semitism barely registers as a factor in academic and media discussions of the reasons for Arab decline.
