In an interview last week, the eighty-one-year-old speaker of the Lebanese parliament, Nabih Berri, joked that one can tell whether a pregnant woman is carrying a Jewish child by throwing a piece of gold at her feet. “If the fetus jumps out of his mother’s womb and grabs the gold, you know that he is a Jew.” Berri told this joke when asked about his meeting a few days earlier with the Jewish, and reliably pro-Israel, New York congressman Eliot Engel. While his vulgar sentiments received no attention outside of the Jewish media, Berri, who has held his position since 1992, has been the subject of fawning pieces in the French press, and frequently serves as a go-between for the U.S. and Hizballah. Ben Cohen elaborates:
Berri [is] also a warlord—specifically one of the founders, and the current head, of the Lebanese Shiite Amal militia. While at the helm of [Amal], Berri amassed a fortune of $78 million. . . . Many of the more gruesome episodes of his career have long been forgotten: for example, Berri’s mid-1980s alliance with the Syrian dictator Hafez Assad against Yasir Arafat’s PLO. For three years, Amal militiamen imposed a punishing siege upon three of the main Palestinian refugee camps, during which thousands of Palestinian civilians were killed, wounded, starved, arrested, and tortured. . . .
Once an enemy of Hizballah, Iran’s proxy in Lebanon, Berri is now the terror group’s political guardian, stating only last year that Hizballah’s “resistance” was one of the three pillars, along with the “people” and the Lebanese regular army, of Lebanon’s national security. . . .
For all the transformations of our [Western] culture’s sensitivity to race and gender in the last 50 years, we still don’t bat an eyelid when Arab or Muslim leaders come out with same anti-Semitic garbage that has dominated casual discourse about Israel and Jews in the region for at least a century. . . . In telling [this anti-Semitic joke], Berri sent a message to the next generation of Lebanese politicians that anti-Semitism is a legitimate instrument of politics, and that violently mocking Jews is a normal component of rhetoric. Meanwhile, the silence of the outside world tells them that because of Lebanon’s conflict with Israel, attacks on Jews, however vile, will pass without comment or censure.
Read more on JNS: https://www.jns.org/opinion/57310/