Anti-Semitism and the Ghost of Appeasement |
Western calls for a diplomatic solution with the Islamic Republic of Iran, coupled with criticism of Trump and Netanyahu, revive a dangerous illusion: that appeasement can tame a regime that stands in direct opposition to everything the West claims to uphold. The logic echoes the policies of appeasement towards Nazi Germany, where diplomacy became a rhetorical substitute for abdication and fecklessness.
Trump is a leader with a penchant for authoritarianism, but he touches on a real point: the EU and Britain have repeatedly shown themselves to be lacking direction. Iran remains a threat to the “free world.” Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, the Islamic Republic has been a major destabilizing force in the Middle East, despite the tendency among several Western observers – influenced by ingrained anti-Semitic prejudices or selective narratives shaped by Al Jazeera – to shift that responsibility elsewhere, namely Israel. The war wasn’t started by the US or Israel but by the Islamic Republic at its birth, with the manifest aim of destroying Israel. And it was Khamenei’s objective to pursue that goal as the next step of a never-ending revolution – never-ending because of the structural need for perpetual mobilization inherent in any totalitarian regime.
To criticize Trump and Netanyahu for doing the “dirty” job no one has had the resolve to undertake is, unfortunately, in line with a long history of European fecklessness – from the 1930s to the 1990s war in the Balkans – exacerbated today by a political class that has proven itself not up to the historical moment and even ready to treat the Iranian regime as an interlocutor worthy of trust. The European Union’s decision to appoint Luigi Di Maio as its “special” envoy to the Middle East – recently even made an Honorary Professor at King’s College London – speaks volumes about that lack of preparedness. That unpreparedness, often funnelled into anti-Semitic double standards that treat the Iranian regime as a victim of an illegal aggression, led the Spanish government to even reopen its embassy in Teheran, and Macron and Starmer to openly condemn the “aggression.” Diplomacy with totalitarianism does not restrain it – it only prolongs its survival.
It is striking how readily European powers moved against Gaddafi – who, not long before, had been engaged by figures such as Anthony Giddens, institutions like the LSE, and newspapers like The Guardian, ever ready for ambiguity – only to leave Libya destroyed by civil war and in the hands of ISIS. Even Qatar, following its own strategic calculus, was ready to join the campaign. Yet today, when confronted with actors whose record is far more violent and dangerous to the entire Middle East and beyond, hesitation prevails. Perhaps because Israel is involved? The United States is left to act while its Western allies equivocate. It seems a reenactment of the Munich Agreement of 1938. Paradoxically, the Western press and politicians condemning Trump and stating that “diplomacy is dead” (à la Antonio Guterres), while eulogizing Larjani (the Iranian “Kantian” butcher), may well have eulogized his Nazi counterparts. Even Hitler tried to appeal to the British haughty sense of superiority in the name of a shared sense of belonging to a Germanic “race.” Diplomacy might indeed have worked, albeit at the cost of dignity – had the conflict been limited to the Nazi aggression in the Sudetenland and Poland, World War II could well have remained a regional European war, similar to Russia’s aggression against Ukraine.
Now that claims of a supposed Gaza genocide are being reassessed – claims amplified by Iranian state propaganda and outlets such as Al Jazeera, and readily embraced by Woke activism from Greta Thunberg to Zohran Mamdani – the West has an opportunity for overdue soul-searching. It has a chance to reconsider a double standard that often abandons caution and nuance precisely when Israel and Jews are the subject, as reflected in the persistent tendency to label Hamas terrorists merely as “militants.” The spectacle of students across American and British campuses – even feminists and LGBT activists – openly supporting Hamas and Iran and opposing the very existence of Israel illustrates the paradox of the post-modern anti-Semitic wave sweeping the West: people expressing their “freedom” to endorse regimes that would execute them for demonstrating or just for who they are.
If anything, the emerging alignment seems increasingly clear: a strategic bloc linking the United States, Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, Israel, and Japan – one that even China may find pragmatic to engage with. Now that peace in the Middle East is close at hand, for all the previous US blunders – from the coup against Mossadeq to the war in Iraq – European states and Britain are missing out on history, possibly because it is Trump, and not Obama, to do the right thing. By pursuing a fight against the Iranian regime, Trump is acting in line with the Wilsonian “liberal internationalism” once praised by self-styled progressives, who now criticize him for that very policy. The US liberation of Europe (and East Asia) in World War II wasn’t that different from the current fight against the Iranian theocracy. If it wasn’t for the US, Europe would be still under Nazism, and the West would not have the freedom it cherishes. However, if Trump stops short of regime change and instead strikes a deal with Iran, he will indeed TACO.