Thursday, May 21, 2015
Elder of Ziyon
Vic Rosenthal's weekly column:
Why are elites in Israel and the US helping their deadly enemies?
The phenomenon of Israel-hating Jews has been discussed a great deal, and there are some theories that go a long way toward explaining the prominence, even leadership, of Jews in BDS and other anti-Israel movements. The extremism of the Left in Israel, particularly among academics, is a case study in epidemic insanity.
Israel is a small country, and it has been fighting a continuous war in the military, diplomatic and information arenas since its inception. It isn’t helped by the activities of anti-State Jews, but they have been increasingly marginalized politically since the debacle of Oslo.
I have always liked Kenneth Levin’s “Oslo Syndrome” explanation for the perverse behavior of some Jews, a special case of the Stockholm Syndrome in which a victim finds himself identifying with and supporting his victimizer in the subconscious belief that it will keep him from harm. Oppressed by the endemic Jew-hatred of their Diaspora hosts, Jews begin to accept their anti-Jewish narratives themselves and try to mitigate the hatred by becoming ‘better’ (i.e., less Jewish or Zionist) and making concessions to their enemies. It rarely works.
The Christian majority in the US does not have an ‘Oslo Syndrome’. It never suffered the kind of persecution that Jews in Europe and Muslim countries in the Mideast and North Africa did — and yet, the plague of political correctness that includes the toleration of blatant subversion of Western ideals, and even the acceptance of calls to destroy the nation, has taken root in America just as deeply as in Europe and Britain.
One reason is that the culture of an organization — a corporation, a motorcycle gang or a nation — comes from the top.
Unlike Israel, the US and Europe haven’t marginalized their anti-Western extremists. Sometimes they hold the reins of power. The US elected a President — twice — who rejects the idea that the world should be led by the developed West, in particular the US.
His reaction to 9/11 is a case in point. Although we may be too close to see it, Sept. 11, 2001 was a historical inflection point of great significance.
George Bush responded in the traditional way, declaring war on those he perceived as the perpetrators. But Obama saw it differently, agreeing with Osama Bin Laden that the attack was a consequence of Western colonialism in the Middle East (especially support for Israel). While he still believed that those who were directly responsible and should be punished, he took the position that we ourselves are indirectly responsible, guilty of oppressing Muslims and meddling in their affairs. Like Charlie Hebdo or Pamela Geller, we brought it on ourselves.
It’s certainly true that the West has exploited the less-developed world, and that wealth has been removed — stolen, even — from it by amoral corporations. But the question is, should we therefore reject the principle that the world is better off under the enlightened (if sometimes coercive) leadership of the more developed cultures, and hand control to the ones that practice female genital mutilation, murder vaccinators, hang gays, and dream of genocide? The ruling Western culture might have its flaws, but there are far worse alternatives.
Unfortunately, it seems that the President of the US doesn’t agree.
Obama is a mystery that I don’t want to try to unravel today, but his attitude meshes with other things that are happening in the larger society. One of them is simple fear. There is nothing like a terrorist attack to make people think twice about doing or saying anything that might anger those prone to terrorism. Associated with the fear is the Stockholm Syndrome I mentioned before. Terror attacks are specifically intended to induce this syndrome.
There is also the idea, which I think is derived from Christian doctrine, that a ‘good’ person loves all humanity, even enemies. Conflict is seen as something that should be handled by making a greater effort to understand the other side and to help him to understand your own feelings. As you can imagine, negotiations with an enemy who does not share this mindset can easily be exploited.
All this combined with the normal human expectation that the near future will resemble the recent past creates a very dangerous situation. We assume that because the West is massively more powerful than the Islamic State or Iran, that we could crush them like a bug if they ever really challenged our supremacy. But don’t forget the dictum that civilization involves a tradeoff of many small inconveniences for a few major catastrophes. The more technologically advanced an entity is, the more vulnerable it is to disruption. Terrorism can be a weapon of mass destruction.
In other words, the West could lose.
Israel is smaller than the US or Europe, but although the fact is obscured by the noise generated by the Left, Israel may be more unified and focused on the challenges it faces (this will be hard to believe for media-consuming Israelis, but I think it’s true).
If the US falls, then the time of Western ascendance is over. The civilized world can’t afford the luxury of an anti-Western president in Washington.
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