An anti-Zionist Jew named Jennifer Peto, who is heavily involved in the "Coalition Against Israeli Apartheid" in Toronto, has written her
masters thesis on the topic "The Victimhood of the Powerful: White Jews, Zionism and the Racism of Hegemonic Holocaust Education."
As one might be able to guess from the title, it is 112 pages of pure rubbish.
Here's her abstract:
This paper focuses on issues of Jewish identity, whiteness and victimhood within hegemonic Holocaust education. I argue that today, Jewish people of European descent enjoy white privilege and are among the most socio-economically advantaged groups in the West. Despite this privilege, the organized Jewish community makes claims about Jewish victimhood that are widely accepted within that community and within popular discourse in the West. I propose that these claims to victimhood are no longer based in a reality of oppression, but continue to be propagated because a victimized Jewish identity can produce certain effects that are beneficial to the organized Jewish community and the Israeli nation-state. I focus on two related Holocaust education projects – the March of the Living and the March of Remembrance and Hope – to show how Jewish victimhood is instrumentalized in ways that obscure Jewish privilege, deny Jewish racism and promote the interests of the Israeli nation-state.
She starts off this pseudo-scholarly paper with about six pages describing her own journey from proud Jewish Zionist to proud Jew-hating anti-Zionist.
The paper uses the term "
Jewish racism" 21 times, using the phrase as a fact that is so obvious that it needs not be proven. Yes, she briefly touches on allegations of Jews involved in slavery, but for the most part she just assumes that her readers will accept the formulation as self-evident.
Peto specifically narrows the scope of the Jews she targets to be the ones who are most like her: Ashkenazic and North American. Her footnote 5 illuminates her bizarre way of thinking:
I have chosen to focus on North America partly because it is my context, but also because it can be argued that anti-Semitism is more systemic in Europe, particularly in France where there are more frequent violent attacks against Jewish people and institutions. That said, the level of discrimination faced by Jews in Europe is far less than the racism experienced by other minorities including Arabs, Muslims and Roma people.
In other words, her entire thesis - that Jews are using the Holocaust to pretend to be victims to justify their oppression of others - falls apart when she would have to acknowledge that there really is anti-semitism out there in the world, and the specter of the Holocaust is very real to a significant segment of the Jewish world. (Her viewpoint that Jews in Europe suffer from less discrimination than Muslims is just another example of sloppy wishful thinking substituting for real analysis.)
Peto finds no shortage of authors to rely on to support her thesis of Jewish racism, and she obviously doesn't bother to find anyone that argues - with the exception of uber-leftist Michael Lerner, who wrote a 1993 paper called "Jews Are Not White."
The idiocy continues, page after page. Guess why Israel is tolerant towards gays?
The Israeli nation-state, as part of its mission to present itself as a Western, liberal nation, has taken up gay rights as an issue.
See? Jews pretend to support equal rights in order to cover up Jewish racist crimes! It's all an act! In other words, Jews are racist. When they are not racist they are just play-acting liberalism in order to whitewash their racism. You can't argue with such logic, because every counterexample is dismissed as just part of the Great Jewish Cover-Up of Inbred Kike Racism.
She also helpfully explains to the readers why she decided to use pejorative terms like "Israeli apartheid" throughout the paper, not bothering to notice that the term itself is meant to anger and not to illuminate and has no place in any sort of real scholarship.
Which is, of course, the entire point: the paper is not even a distant afterimage of real scholarship. It is an exercise on the author justifying her own emotional hatred for Jews and Israel. Psychologists wouldn't have a field day with Peto, because her motivations are so blindlingly transparent.
The question remains, though: why would such a paper -one that has no intellectual rigor, suffused with self-hatred and naked bigotry - be accepted as a masters' thesis at the University of Toronto?
Tuesday, November 09, 2010
Elder of Ziyon
.jpg)
