'What Do Joy Behar and Muhammed Abdul Bari Have in Common?'
By Aaron Goldstein (12/22/06)
On the surface it would appear that Joy Behar and Muhammed Abdul Bari would have little in common. One is a sixty plus Italian American feminist comedienne (so-called) who is a panelist on ABC’s The View. The other is a Bangladeshi born physics researcher who is now Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain. Yet as I will demonstrate the two have an extraordinary amount in common.
Joy Behar’s transgression is well known. On December 18th, while discussing the merits of Time magazine’s selection for Person of the Year, Behar weighed in with this pearl of wisdom. “You have to put like a Hitler type,” Behar said, “Like, you put Donald Rumsfeld there or something.” To give The View’s audience credit her comment was roundly booed and jeered much to Behar’s surprise. Even Rosie O’Donnell had a grimaced look on her face.
But the discord was only momentary. None of her co-hosts (including the conservative Elisabeth Hasselbeck) verbally took Behar to task for her quip on air. Now I cannot presume to speak for Hasselbeck but I can only imagine that she said to herself in a manner reminiscent of Ronald Reagan, “Oh Joy! Now there you go again.”
After all, the previous week, Behar speculated that South Dakota Democratic Senator Tim Johnson’s cerebral hemorrhage was a conspiracy to keep the GOP’s hold on the U.S. Senate. Never mind that Johnson can only give up his Senate seat if he resigns or dies. There is every indication that Senator Johnson will recover albeit slowly. But these facts did not prevent Behar from reaching into the netherworld of kookiness. “Is there such a thing as a man-made stroke? In other words, did someone do this to him?”, Behar asked with all the earnestness of John Kerry’s chin. Hasselbeck replied, “Why is everything coming from the liberal perspective a conspiracy?” Behar retorted, “I know what this, that party is capable of.”
If the Republican Party is capable of the things Joy Behar thinks they are then she would have never lived another day to tell about it. If Behar made such an utterance about Goebbels or Himmler in Axis territory she would be as good as dead. But if Behar is capable of thinking that the Republicans would contrive to have one of their political opponents suffer a brain hemorrhage then it is not a stretch to imagine that she should see fit to liken the former Secretary of Defense to Adolf Hitler. Not surprisingly, when Hillary Rodham Clinton appeared on The View on December 20th, Behar was as docile as a newborn kitten.
One might ask why we ought to take such a woman seriously. Well, according to Variety magazine, The View enjoys an average audience of 3.4 million viewers every day. (www.variety.com/article/VR1117955333.html?categoryid=1275&cs=1) That’s a whole lot of TV sets. Simply put, when Behar speaks people pay attention. As long as the executives at ABC see fit to keep Behar and company on the air their statements, no matter how inane, are lent both credibility and legitimacy.
The day after she made her remarks Behar backed off - somewhat. “I don’t think Rumsfeld is an evil person in his heart, I just think he did some terrible things in this war, and he was very controversial,” Behar said. So does this mean Behar believes Hitler wasn’t an evil person in his heart? And does merely being controversial constitute a criteria to be lumped in with the Third Reich?
Well, if Behar was going for laughs on New York’s Upper West Side, the same cannot be said for Muhammed Abdul Bari across the Atlantic. The same day Behar likened Rumsfeld to Hitler, Bari told a group of British Members of Parliament that their government’s treatment of the Muslim community was like that of Nazi Germany’s treatment of Jews. “What is the degree of xenophobia that tipped Germany in the 1930s towards a murderous ethnic and cultural racism?”, Bari asked the MPs.
I do not know how the MPs who were gathered responded to Bari’s assertion but I suspect they said little. But if Bari honestly believes that the Muslim community in Britain is in such great peril from their own government why would the MPs have an audience with him? For crying out loud, Mr. Bari sits on the Organizing Committee for the 2012 Olympic Games. Do you think for one moment that Hitler allowed any Jews to sit on the Organizing Committee for the 1936 Olympic Games in Munich? Mr. Bari’s predecessor, Iqbal Sacranie, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II. Prince Charles, the heir apparent to the House of Windsor, is an ardent admirer of Islam. This is a far cry from the days when Britain’s Jews were expelled from its shores by King Edward I in 1290 and were not formally welcomed back until nearly 600 years later (despite a brief period of toleration during Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate). If Britain is such a harrowing place for Muslims to live why do thousands of Muslims from Northern Africa, Asia and Turkey make way for the British Isles every year? To paraphrase the late British Prime Minister Harold MacMillan the Muslims don’t know how good they’ve got it.
Frankly, Mr. Bari has a lot of chutzpah to liken Britain to Nazi Germany – a country that lived under German aerial bombardment night in and night out and refused to give in. Obviously, Mr. Bari has no understanding of British history and culture. Mr. Bari insists that British society submit to their every whim but balks at supporting the Blair government’s efforts to combat terrorism. “The attempt to place the problem on one doorstep is unfair and counter-productive,” said Mr. Bari. What other doorstep does Mr. Bari believe British authorities should visit? Funny, but I don’t recall a concerted effort by Anglicans, Catholics, Jews or Hindus to perpetuate attacks against their own neighbors. Mr. Bari’s intransigence gives the British government cause to scrutinize the Muslim community closely, himself included. Shortly after the terrorist attacks on the London Tube in July 2005, Charles Moore questioned Mr. Bari’s commitment to opposing terrorism in an article titled, “Where is the Gandhi of Islam?” that appeared in The Telegraph:
One heartening tableau was the Bishop of Stepney, Stephen Oliver, appearing with Mohammed Adbul Bari from the East London Mosque, both condemning the attacks. But if you look up Mohammed Abdul Bari, you find that he welcomed to the opening of the London Muslim Centre Sheikh Abdul Rahman al Sudais, the Saudi-government-appointed imam of the Grand Mosque in Mecca.
In Mecca two years ago, al Sudais described Jews as “scum of the earth”, “rats of the world” and “monkeys and pigs who should be annihilated”. Yet, criticise al Sudais, and Mohammed Abdul Bari leaps furiously to his defence. (www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2005/07/09/do09.xml&sSheet=/opinion/2005/07/09/ixopinion.html)
No wonder, Mr. Bari won’t commit to assisting the British government in combating terrorism. How can he very well combat terrorism when the company he keeps openly advocates it use.
Joy Behar and Muhammed Abdul Bari might seem like the odd couple but there is a synergy between the two. Both invoke images of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany in situations that do not warrant such comparisons. So why do such a thing? Is it just plain narcissism? Well, obviously both have succeeded in drawing attention to themselves, Behar especially. But it runs far deeper than mere vanity. Both are symptoms of Western thought that has forgotten the meaning not only of the Holocaust but of the evil legacy of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. This is the reason I never cared for the “Soup Nazi” on Seinfeld. We are precariously close to reaching a moment in our history where we describe someone or something we dislike as akin to Hitler or the Nazis.
This is particularly disturbing in the context of the Holocaust Conference that took place last week in Tehran at the behest of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. It attracted the sludge de la sludge of Holocaust deniers and revisionists around the globe such as David Duke and Robert Faurisson. The fact that a head of a government that is developing a nuclear weapon with the intent of wiping out the world’s only Jewish state would organize such a conference waves a red flag to the United States, Great Britain and the rest of the civilized world that tells us we ought to be vigilant in not only remembering the horror of Hitler and the Nazis but to ensure that such horrors never happen again. But so long as supposedly civilized, prosperous and well educated people like Behar and Bari ascribe Nazism to those people with whom and institutions with which they merely dislike then we can never properly remember the horrors of the Holocaust much less prevent another one from happening.
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