Anti-Semitic Jokes, Support for Terrorists, and the Mass Slaughter of Palestinians Won’t Sully the Reputation of a Lebanese Politician

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: