Americans leaders and statesmen, argues Yigal Carmon, have long suffered from a “syndrome” that presumes the trustworthiness of their foreign counterparts even in the absence of evidence. Reviewing numerous instances of such naïveté—from Franklin D. Roosevelt to the present—Carmon focuses on current dealings with North Korea and Qatar: two countries that have proved themselves to be anything but trustworthy:

This syndrome, which stubbornly denies reality, compounds other cultural differences between democracies and dictatorships and renders the West almost unable to contend with evil. Only a few days ago, when the North Korean dictator Kim Jung Un invited the United States to “a heartfelt dialogue,” the Western media swallowed it whole and celebrated it with great fanfare. . . . When the American syndrome meets Arab, Muslim, and other authoritarian regimes, the American side stands no chance, despite the disparity of power. . . .

Qatar is an unelected, family-run authoritarian regime that stamps out domestic freedom of expression. For years, it has been the unapologetic breeding ground of anti-American, anti-Semitic, and anti-Israel incitement, as well as a major promoter of Islamic extremism and terrorism. . . . [I]t has promoted al-Qaeda and its various offshoots, as well as the Muslim Brotherhood and its branches, especially Hamas. For decades, it has sheltered the notorious spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheikh Yousuf al-Qaradawi, who advocates a second Holocaust “at the hands of the believers, God willing.” . . .

Qatar is allied militarily with Turkey’s extreme Islamist president Recep Tayyip Erdogan [and] has also come out of the closet as a staunch ally of Iran. . . . Like other authoritarian regimes, it has weaponized its totally state-controlled media, [Al Jazeera], to fight its enemies and to support its allies. Qatar rebuilt southern Lebanon on Hizballah’s behalf after the 2006 war, and did the same for Hamas in Gaza after its wars with Israel. . . . [Furthermore], virulent incitement against America and its allies continues to dominate Al Jazeera’s broadcasts to the entire Arabic-speaking world. . . .

[Most recently, taking its inspiration from the claims about hidden Jewish influence found in] the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, [Qatar] extended invitations to the leader of the Zionist Organization of America, Orthodox rabbis, and the vice-president of the Conference of Presidents of American Jewish Organizations to come visit. However, . . . it prepared a standby: a documentary by Al Jazeera TV targeting Jewish organizations in America that can be broadcast if and when necessary. As an Arabic saying regarding Americans goes: screw them, collaborate with them, and double-cross them all at once.

In 2001, in the immediate wake of al-Qaeda’s attacks on America, Jonathan Rosen was asked to write something about anti-Semitism. So many of the points he raised in the resulting essay, reproduced in full at the link below, ring true today, and make clear just how predictable so much of the global reaction to October 7 has been. Rosen reflects on what he wrote then from the standpoint of 2024:

It is worth remembering that the Nazis saw the Holocaust as self-defense, though Jews were a minuscule fragment of a giant militarized nation. This was irrational, of course, even as they spoke the language of science, redefining Jews as a biological menace, like a virus, making the murder of babies and the elderly necessary, too, because like a microbe only extermination was the cure. It was the existence of Jews that made them a provocation, just as the existence of Israel, in any borders, inspired the Hamas massacre, as its 1988 covenant, never revoked, makes abundantly clear. The towers were a similar provocation.

It was back in 2001 that Rosen found himself “awakened to anti-Semitism,” as he wrote at the time:

I am not being chased down alleyways and called a Christ-killer. . . . But in recent weeks I have been reminded, in ways too plentiful to ignore, about the role Jews play in the fantasy life of the world. Jews were not the cause of World War II, but they were at the metaphysical center of that conflict nonetheless, since the Holocaust was part of Hitler’s agenda and a key motivation of his campaign. Jews are not the cause of World War III, if that’s what we are facing, but they have been placed at the center of it in mysterious and disturbing ways.

I felt this in a different form reading coverage of Israel in European papers. Though public expressions of anti-Semitism are taboo in a post-Holocaust world, many Europeans, in writing about Israel, have felt free to conjure images of determined child killers and mass murderers. Earlier this year, the Spanish daily La Vanguardia published a cartoon depicting a large building labeled “Museum of the Jewish Holocaust” and behind it a building under construction labeled “Future Museum of the Palestinian Holocaust.”