Bush-Euro Relations Chill Over U.S. Support Of Sharon

by Jim Lobe

Right-wingers in and outside President George W. Bush's administration have seized on le Pen's victory over Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin as evidence of an anti-Semitic resurgence in Europe and the Old World's moral hypocrisy in pressing Washington to be more even-handed in addressing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Neo-conservatives, who are particularly influential among the political appointees at the Pentagon and in Vice President Dick Cheney's office, charge that European criticism of Israeli policies is motivated by anti-Semitism and should be dismissed.

"What we are seeing is pent-up anti-Semitism, the release -- with Israel as the trigger -- of a millennium-old urge that powerfully infected and shaped European history," according to nationally syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, a leading neo-conservative close to both the Pentagon's leadership and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's Likud Party.

The charge of European anti-Semitism has been used to muster opposition to the mission of a European-led UN delegation to Jenin, the refugee camp devastated by the recent Israeli offensive.

It also appears intended to stiffen the administration's resistance to European entreaties on a range of issues, especially the Middle East, that have widened the gap between Washington and Brussels since Bush took power 16 months ago.

Despite their 50-year alliance, the United States and Europe have a long history of distrust. George Washington, the first U.S. president, warned against forging any permanent alliances with European powers. In contrast to the New World, Europe and Europeans -- particularly the French -- have mostly been depicted in U.S. culture as cynical, duplicitous, hypocritical, cowardly and decadent.

It was only in the face of the Soviet threat after World War II that the United States forged a peacetime alliance with European powers. With the disappearance of that threat more than a decade ago, old tensions -- particularly revolving around Washington's unilateralism -- have resurfaced. They have become particularly acute under Bush.

Trans-Atlantic relations came under growing strain in Bush's first year of office when, among other unilateral moves, he rejected the Kyoto Protocol on reducing greenhouse gas emissions; withdrew from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty; assailed several other international arms-control instruments; and refused to abide by the Geneva Convention in his treatment of al-Qaeda and Taliban prisoners seized in Afghanistan.

Bush's "axis of evil" speech in late January, in which he named Iraq, Iran, and North Korea as possible targets in his war against terrorism, only added to the tensions and was strongly denounced by European leaders.

Chris Patten, the EU's commissioner for external affairs, is among those to have publicly denounced the whole notion of an axis of evil and warned that Washington's unilateral instincts and military ambitions were profoundly misguided.

"I do not support anti-Americanism at all," said German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer in February. "But even with all the differences in size and weight, alliances between free democracies should not be reduced to following. Alliance partners are not satellites."

Bush's decision to slap steep tariffs on imported European steel dealt another blow to trans-Atlantic friendship. The White House's refusal to denounce Sharon as he unleashed his latest military offensive late March appeared only to add fuel to the fire.

Even before Sharon moved, Washington Post columnist David Broder, whose opinions often define conventional political wisdom here, wrote from Paris that Europeans were furious and ready to fight back on the tariffs and shocked by Bush's determination to widen the war on terrorism to Iraq and beyond.

Amid public appeals by European leaders for Bush to rein in Sharon, the EU began considering trade sanctions against the Jewish state and Germany, widely considered the most pro-Israel of EU countries, cut off arms sales.

But neo-conservative and Christian Right forces -- Sharon's strongest supporters here -- argue that Europe's protests lack moral authority, and they cite growing violence against Jewish targets across Europe and le Pen's unexpectedly strong showing as evidence that the Old World, and France in particular, are as corrupt and cynical as U.S. traditional stereotypes have made them out to be.

Le Pen's performance "will not restrain French intellectuals and foreign ministers from lecturing Americans on their 'simplisme' -- their preference for morality over realpolitik, their reliance on military power, their fantasies about an 'axis of evil' and, perhaps most unbearable their principled support for Israel," wrote Krauthammer.

Krauthammer appeared to be taking his cues from Likud leader and former Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who spent much of the past month here lobbying for stronger U.S. support of Israel. In one speech before le Pen's improbable victory, he denounced possible European sanctions against Israel thus: "These Europeans on whose soil six million Jews were massacred 60 years ago, and they're siding with a mass killer now when the Jews rise to protect themselves."

The hawks are not alone in invoking the specter of European anti-Semitism in relation to present-day criticism of Israel. In an editorial entitled "The Return of an Ancient Hatred," the New York Times insisted Israel should not be above criticism but added: "Guilt over the Holocaust may be salved with the thought that Jews, too, can act with cruelty."

"(M)uch of Europe has a special responsibility to be cautious," it went on. "Its cultures are drenched in a history of anti-Semitism."

Similarly, the Washington Post has featured long extracts from a recent denunciation of anti-Semitism in Europe by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci and German journalist Heribert Prantl, who wrote: "Because many people believe the past has been conquered, 'the Jews' can once again be held, powerfully, to blame."