Friday, March 01, 2019
From Ian:
Progressive Replacement Theology
NYTs: To Argue for the Abolition of the Jewish Homeland Flirts with Anti-Semitism
Progressive Replacement Theology
Instead, a new faith emerged: progressivism. A time traveler, unaware of the developments of the last eight decades, might’ve been forgiven for listening to a modern-day progressive speak and mistaking her for a fundamentalist Christian: Jesus’ observation that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven sounds like something Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, in a moment of inspiration, might say to an adoring interviewer on CNN. With its emphasis on social justice, criminal justice reform, elevating the poor, and rejecting the rapacious policies of the greedy and the affluent, progressivism sounds a lot like Christianity. Except that it has chosen to reject Christianity and all other forms of faith as silly superstitions, to abolish history by proposing that it has but one throughline—progress!—and to set up instead a religion that fails to see itself as one and, as such, is condemned to repeat Christianity’s worst transgressions.Melanie Phillips: Why Labour’s antisemitism is a crisis for the world
Beginning, sadly, with the Jews. In Ilhan Omar’s suggestion that none in Congress before her had been refugees, in Salazar and Ocasio-Cortez’s sudden and questionable claim of Jewish heritage, even in the rush of many on the far left to argue that Jews of color are the real Jews and that the rest of us are somehow complicit in Klan-like prejudice—in all these we see the old wheels of replacement theology turning. Judaism may have given us much understanding of justice, but if progressivism is to claim its modern-day mantle, Judaism has to be argued away, which begins by anointing the progressives the real new Jews.
If you doubt that any of this is true, try for a moment to think rationally about the way most progressives talk about Israel. Let us, for the sake of argument, assume for a moment that those who assiduously claim that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not interchangeable are correct. Let us accept that one may have a host of pressing critiques of Jerusalem and its policies. What, we may now ask, are those all about? To hear many American progressives tell it, Israel is worthy of special attention because of the inordinate amount of American foreign aid it receives. If that were the case, we could safely assume that as Israel receives about twice as much aid as, say, Egypt, we might expect our media to write one story about Egypt’s transgressions for every two they write about Israel. The ratio, sadly, is very different. It’s skewed, too, if you compare the uproar about Israel to the attention paid to other areas of conflict and human rights violations around the world: Everywhere you look, the world’s only Jewish state is singled out for calumny. The reason is simple: Israel provides progressivism’s zealots with a convenient opportunity to mask their theological decrees as rational, reasonable, and worldly politics. By focusing all of your attention, energy, and rage on the Jews, you may declare yourself, just as Origen and Hippolytus had centuries ago, to be the rightful heir to an enlightened tradition abandoned by those who were once God’s chosen people but who are no longer.
You’d hope that the tenured hordes that make up so much of progressivism’s vanguard would know all this, but religious extremism, as Jewish history has tragically proved again and again, is blinding. We can only hope that one day soon a progressive Augustine may arise and temper the hate of his new secular faith. Until then, we Jews should do what we’ve done so gallantly for millennia and protect ourselves against the spurious claims of fanatics with dangerous ideas. (h/t Elder of Lobby)
Mahmoud Abbas – viewed by the Western Left as a statesman-in-waiting – has a doctorate in Holocaust denial, explicitly venerates the Palestinian Nazi-ally Haj Amin al-Husseini who undertook to slaughter every Jew in the Middle East in the event of Hitler’s victory, and uses his media outlets to transmit medieval and Nazi-style demonization of the Jews.
His followers claim the Jews were behind 9/11, that Israel is out to destroy the Islamic world, and that the Jews control the world’s media, finance and US foreign policy.
So why should Labour Party members who support the Palestinians with their agenda of Holocaust denial, attacks on Judaism and unhinged conspiracy theories about Jewish power, now be so shocked that Labour Party members are themselves coming out with Holocaust denial, attacks on Judaism and unhinged conspiracy theories about Jewish power?
Antisemitism, which is always with us, is kept down only by unequivocal social disapproval. Support for Palestinianism, however, has served to legitimize it. This has not just encouraged its brazen expression on the Left. It has also created a climate which has emboldened neo-Nazis and their ilk to crawl out from under their stone.
There are of course other reasons behind the epidemic of antisemitism: cultures that are fragmenting or dying, a Western world that has lost confidence in modernity and reason, and a Europe that cannot bear the guilt of the Holocaust.
Ultimately, though, the scapegoating of the Jews signals a fundamental loss of moral compass. That this is now taking place across the world should terrify not just Jews but everyone.
NYTs: To Argue for the Abolition of the Jewish Homeland Flirts with Anti-Semitism
There's nothing anti-Semitic about sympathy for the Palestinian cause or support of Palestinian statehood. But where anti-Zionism crosses into anti-Semitism should be obvious: dehumanizing or demonizing Jews and propagating the myth of their sinister omnipotence; accusing Jews of double loyalties as a means to suggest their national belonging is of lesser worth; denying the Jewish people's right to self-determination; blaming through conflation all Jews for the policies of the Israeli government; pursuing the systematic "Nazification" of Israel; turning Zionism into a synonym of racism.
The denial of the millennial Jewish link to the Holy Land and the dismissal of the legal basis for the modern Jewish state in UN Resolution 181 of 1947 (Arab armies went to war against its Palestinian-Jewish territorial compromise and lost) as a means to argue for the abolition of the Jewish homeland and portray it as an immoral, colonial exercise in theft often flirts with anti-Semitism. It is at its most egregious when it issues from Europeans who seem to have forgotten where the Holocaust was perpetrated. Once in the gas chambers was enough for the Jews.
The fundamental link between European anti-Semitism and the decision of Jews to embrace Zionism in the conviction that only a Jewish homeland could keep them safe is something contemporary European theorists of a demonic Israel prefer to forget.
.png)
