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The Meaning of an Olympic Snub

(Wall Street Journal) Bret Stephens - If you want the short answer for why the Arab world is sliding into the abyss, look no further than the incident in which an Egyptian judoka at the Rio Olympics refused to shake his Israeli opponent's extended hand. 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 theories and the perpetual search for scapegoats. Historian Paul Johnson has noted that wherever anti-Semitism took hold, social and political decline almost inevitably followed. Among Egyptians, hatred of Israel barely abated after Menachem Begin relinquished the Sinai to Anwar Sadat. Among Palestinians, anti-Semitism became markedly worse during the years of the Oslo peace process. Successful nations make a point of trying to learn from their neighbors. The Arab world has been taught over generations only to hate theirs. So long as an Arab athlete can't pay his Israeli opposite the courtesy of a handshake, the disease of the Arab mind and the misfortunes of its world will continue. The hater always suffers more than the object of his hatred.
2016-08-16 00:00:00
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