In the Middle East, James von Brunn — the 88-year-old white supremacist who shot and killed a security guard last week at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington — would represent mainstream public opinion, writes columnist Richard Cohen in the Washington Post:
To far more people than we would like to admit, the mystery of James W. von Brunn, the alleged shooter at the Holocaust Memorial Museum, is not that he held such weird and depraved views about Jews and the Holocaust, but that those views are considered weird and depraved. In vast parts of the Islamic world, too many people not only deny the Holocaust but embrace the thinking that made it possible.
In his remarkable speech at Cairo University, President Obama only inferentially mentioned this aspect of what has become an ugly part of the Middle East: a tolerance for and advocacy of old-style anti-Semitism. There is, in fact, nothing that von Brunn professed that is not commonly heard or published in the Middle East. Do Jews control world finance, media, international organizations and the United States itself? Of course. Are they capable of the most foul deeds, including the infamous "blood libel," which means using the blood of non-Jewish children in the preparation of traditional foods? Again, of course.
Full column here.
