RUTHFULLY YOURS

An Israeli heavyweight judoka named Or Sasson defeated an Egyptian opponent named Islam El Shehaby Friday in a first-round match at the Rio Olympics. The Egyptian refused to shake his opponent’s extended hand, earning boos from the crowd. Mr. Sasson went on to win a bronze medal.

If you want the short answer for why the Arab world is sliding into the abyss, look no further than this little incident. It did itself in chiefly through its long-abiding and all-consuming hatred of Israel, and of Jews.

That’s not a point you will find in a long article about the Arab crackup by Scott Anderson in last weekend’s New York Times Magazine, where hatred of Israel is treated like sand in Arabia—a given of the landscape. Nor is it much mentioned in the wide literature about the legacy of colonialism in the Middle East, or the oil curse, governance gap, democracy deficit, youth bulge, sectarian divide, legitimacy crisis and every other explanation for Arab decline.

Yet the fact remains that over the past 70 years the Arab world got rid of its Jews, some 900,000 people, while holding on to its hatred of them. Over time the result proved fatal: 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. The Arab world’s problems are a problem of the Arab mind, and the name for that problem is anti-Semitism.

As a historical phenomenon, this is not unique. In a 2005 essay in Commentary, historian Paul Johnson noted that wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline almost inevitably followed.

Spain expelled its Jews with the Alhambra Decree of 1492. The effect, Mr. Johnson noted, “was to deprive Spain (and its colonies) of a class already notable for the astute handling of finance.” In czarist Russia, anti-Semitic laws led to mass Jewish emigration as well as an “immense increase in administrative corruption produced by the system of restrictions.” Germany might well have won the race for an atomic bomb if Hitler hadn’t sent Albert Einstein, Leo Szilard, Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller into exile in the U.S.

The news that the Israeli government charged Mohammed el-Halabi, the Gaza director of World Vision, a major international evangelical Christian aid organization, with funneling millions to fortify Hamas government’s terrorist capabilities has reportedly “shocked” the organization.

The reason for this “shock” is not the evidence of his diverting 60% of the charity’s Gaza budget to further Hamas terrorism. The organization was “shocked” because the Israelis, after years of complaining and warning, are bringing him to justice.

World Vision did not even pretend to be embarrassed by el-Halabi’s use of $50 million not to help the needy in Gaza, but to pay Hamas members, buy weapons and transfer “building supplies intended to support farming projects… to Hamas for constructing tunnels and military installations.” Instead, World Vision’s German spokesperson protested the “huge gap” between “what we know” and the Israeli charges, while the Australian CEO declared he was “profoundly perplexed and mystified.”

Claims like this and outright denials of international aid diversion for Palestinian terrorist activities are nothing new.

Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza, was established in December 1987, days into the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s (PLO) first Intifada against Israel. And as soon as the Internet was made available for public use in the early 1990s, the Palestinians began using it to portray the people they use as human shields throughout the territories and Gaza not as the casualties of its own murderous agenda, but as victims of Israeli retaliations. Like the Palestinian Authority (PA), Hamas realized that posting photos of wounded children and crying mothers has a considerable effect in the ‘hearts’ and ‘minds’ battle for gaining support from the international community. Indeed, the strategy of extracting maximum civilian casualties from among their constituents has always yielded larger funding.

In December 2003, for example, as Yasser Arafat’s second Intifada (28 September 2000 – 8 February 2005) against Israel was raging, an international donors’ conference in Rome awarded the Palestinian Authority with $1 billion, ignoring the PA’s funding of terrorist activities.

Evidence that Hamas suicide bombers were paid with EU aid money did not move an Austrian member of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the European Parliament, Hannes Swoboda. He insisted in writing and while arguing against my testimony before the European Parliament on this issue that “No wrongdoing or misuse of funds by the Palestinian Authority, no instances of funds being used for terrorist activities instead of infrastructure development, have been proved. Only if the DNA of the suicide bombers will match the DNA of those who received euros will we accept it as evidence.”