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 The
Hate Israel Intelligentsia
Keeping Jews in their place…
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 4/24/06
As
if there isn’t enough evidence of the ideological corruption
of America’s universities, along come Chicago’s
John Mearsheimer and Harvard’s Stephen Walt, arguing that
the “Israel lobby” dominates American foreign
policy to the hurt of our own national interests.
Alan Dershowitz has
exposed the errors of fact and the sophomoric
logic that mar this thesis, and that should embarrass what
are supposed to be two of the best universities in the country.
Personally, I consider it intellectual malfeasance to harp
on the Israel lobby while ignoring the Palestinian lobby––which
includes most of the faculty of American universities, most
of the Middle Eastern Studies Departments, most of the media’s
editorial boards, the Council on American Islamic Relations,
the U.N., and a significant chunk of the State Department.
Critical
analysis like Dershowitz’s is important, but
equally significant is the question of how ideas usually found
on neo-Nazi websites can be seriously entertained by otherwise
educated people. Anti-Semitism certainly isn’t the whole
answer, if only because the term is too broad to catch the various
subsets of anti-Jewish bigotry. This isn’t to say that
anti-Semitism doesn’t still exist. Obviously, old-fashioned
anti-Semites, particularly in Europe, have found that in a post-Holocaust
world, one can still indulge the same bigoted stereotypes of
all-powerful cabals secretly manipulating world events, as long
as one dresses them up in “pro-Palestinian” or “anti-Zionist” camouflage.
But I’m not sure that most of those, including Muslims,
who rail against the evil Jews really want them all to disappear,
as Hitler did. They just want the Jews to stop being so uppity
and to keep in their place.
In other words, the hater of Israel doesn’t mind if Jews
stick around, as long as they play the role they’re supposed
to: the marginalized victim whose fate is to suffer and provide
us with objects of pity. That’s why popular culture’s
favorite Jew is the Holocaust victim. As such, the Jew can even
keep his religious identity, as long as it is kept thin and reduced
to a few charming folkways no more significant than clog-dancing
or bagpipes. In other words, don’t be too observantly Jewish,
and don’t take being Jewish too seriously. Actually taking
religion seriously is the monopoly of Muslims, who especially
in Europe are allowed all sorts of leeway in expressing their
fanatical devotion to their faith, even when it conflicts with
the foundational political ideals of their countries.
But to keep someone a pitiful victim is to reduce
his humanity, to leave him a passive object that exists only
to arouse in others
particular sorts of feelings. In other words, the victim can
never be fully equal to others, but must remain in a subordinate
condition. Here is where the position of Jews in the European
imagination is similar to their status in the Muslim world. Most
Muslims don’t want Jews to disappear, just Israel. Jews
have lived in the Muslim world for centuries, but they did so
as a subordinated minority whose public behavior and demeanor
were always supposed to testify that they were inferior to their
Islamic overlords. As possessors of the ultimate divine revelation,
Muslims were justified in reminding Jews and Christians, who
both rejected that culminating revelation, that they were inferiors
allowed to live only by their spiritual superiors’ dispensation,
which could be arbitrarily lifted at any time.
This is the contemptuous, conditional forbearance
that many today extol as Muslim “tolerance.” It reminds me
of the position of blacks in the Jim Crow South. After all, many
Southerners who believed in segregation despised the Klu Klux
Klan’s terrorism, and sincerely liked black people. These
more respectable segregationists didn’t want to kill all
the blacks, just to make sure that they lived in a way that publicly
testified to their inferiority. Such Southerners believed that
given the innate, ineradicable differences between the races,
both peoples were better served by maintaining in social and
political life the various mechanisms for asserting the superiority
of the white race and its natural right to rule. So too with
the dhimmi in Muslim societies: they can live and even practice
their religion, so long as they demonstrate that they are inferior.
But the existence of Israel upsets all these
long-established roles for Jews. Not just because Israel fights––Jews
can fight, as they did at Masada and in the Warsaw ghetto. But
they’re not supposed to win. To have their own nation,
and thus be equal to the world’s other nations, and then
to defeat in battle better armed, more numerous enemies, is to
violate the image of the Jew established for centuries. It is
to make him our equal, and to call forth paranoid fantasies about
nefariously influential cabals to explain this disturbing change.
For the Jew’s job is to be a victim, and thus perpetually
inferior. He is to suffer and die, or else to leech away his
Jewish identity and thus not really be a Jew, which is another
sort of death.
These thoughts are speculative, no doubt, but
the bizarre demonization of Israel cries out for explanation.
So does the obscene double
standard applied to Israel’s actions when defending herself,
and the actions of the enemies sworn to her destruction. So does
the obsession with Israel in the U.N. and in the E.U. So does
the callous indifference to the murder of Israelis and the numerous
attempts to destroy her. What else explains the astonishing phenomenon
of a terrorist gang being taken for a legitimate government by
the rest of the world? What else explains the long indulgence
of the corrupt thug Arafat? What else explains an entire U.N.
agency dedicated to one small group, even as in the rest of the
world millions have starved and died? What else explains the
way year after year propagandistic lies and disinformation such
as the “Jenin massacre” are shrugged away even after
they are exposed?
The reason isn’t just ignorance, though
I have personally encountered fervent supporters of the Palestinians
who could
not recite two accurate facts from the history of the Middle
East. Nor is anti-Semitism of the rabid Nazi variety the answer.
Something else is at work here, an intellectual and moral corruption
that cannot be cured with better P.R. or information campaigns.
Its persistence means that Israel cannot become complacent even
about the support of the United States. Israel ultimately can
rely on nothing other than her own strong right arm. ONE
copyright
2006 Bruce S. Thornton
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Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
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Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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