Wednesday, February 01, 2017
Moral panic. It's a term that was coined by Stanley Cohen in
1987 in his seminal work, Folk
Devils and Moral Panics, and it perfectly describes the great uproar
over Trump's immigration ban (not to mention his election). A moral panic, according
to Cohen, is a random or intermittent event generating widespread concern that
societal norms may be in peril. The moral panic is characterized by, “a
condition, episode, person or group of persons [who] become defined as a threat
to societal values and interests."
Now a moral panic doesn't just up and set itself on fire. It
needs the media to light the match. The mass media, as Cohen explains, seizes
on a potential episode of moral panic and styles things so as to exaggerate or
amplify the facts. Soon enough, the event becomes a national issue (or as in
the case of the immigration ban, international).
Cohen's theory goes that had the media stayed uninvolved, the
issue at the center of the moral panic would have, of a certain, have remained a piddling local story, relevant only
to those directly affected. The media's involvement is the sole catalyst for any
moral panic, the only reason any issue (an immigration ban, Trump's election) can
end up causing widespread fear and fascination.
So what you have with a moral panic is an event sensationalized
by the media. The mass media then follows things up by putting out a call for
action, a demand for some sort of punitive action, a response. This, Cohen
calls, "control culture."
It is moral panic that drove the Women's March on Washington
as a response to Trump's election. It is moral panic that motivated the protests
at airports, and had synagogues
issuing heartfelt statements of umbrage over the immigration ban. And it is the
mass media that inflamed the masses and fomented these mass responses. It is
the media controlling the culture.
It is upsetting to know that people are so easily maneuvered
and exploited into making a hullabaloo over something simply because the media
desires it so. To think that people allow themselves to serve as puppets,
letting their strings be pulled this way and that in obeisance to someone
else's agenda so far away out of sight that the common man doesn't even know it
exists! But that is the way of all effective moral panics.
And of course, any moral panic worth its salt has a whole
bunch of Jews clamoring for their outrage over the issue to be seen and heard.
Like a fish, this Jewish response stinks from the head down, with rabbis culling comparisons
to Jewish history as reason enough to organize and demonstrate. "We were
refugees, too!" they cry,
dignity and righteousness in their shrill collective voices.
Just like Cohen says, had the media not run with this,
sensationalized it and demanded action, you would not now have rabbis up in
arms and marching with signs. Without the media, the immigration ban would have
been but a momentary blip on the screen, unnoticed, and unseen.
You know how I know this?
I know this because in 2005, 11,000 Jews were expelled from
their homes in the Jewish State and there were no American rabbis protesting
(save for the Modern Orthodox), no Conservative or Reform Jews holding signs or
expressing indignation. These 11,000 of their Jewish brethren who were forcibly
dragged out of their homes consisted of 8,000 Jewish settlers in Gaza and
another 3,000 from Northern Samaria. They were expelled from their beautiful homes
after a national
referendum in the democratic State of Israel in which 65% of the Israeli people
voted against the plan.
 |
| By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Neve Dekalim) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
The effects of this expulsion reverberate until today. There
remains a few hundred people who UNTIL NOW have no
permanent housing solution. In the wake of the expulsion, families fell
apart at the seams, with divorce rampant among the expellees. Heads of
households had heart attacks and died, children lost their faith in God. It's
documented.
 |
| By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Bedolach) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
Worst of all, rather than bring peace, the Expulsion, A/K/A
"Disengagement" brought tens of thousands of missiles raining down on
Israel from the very territory it ceded, from the place where those who were
expelled had built beautiful homes and
businesses and schools and synagogues. The Arabs, instead of building
homes and schools in the "gift" we gave them, built a terrorist
enclave using what we gave them to target and kill us.
 |
| By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Shirat Hayam) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
But the Washington Post, CNN, and the New York Times, don't
see the expulsion and subsequent homelessness, loss of income, and unemployment
of 11,000 Jews in the same light as 90,000 people who have had their plans
postponed for 120 days. And they don't care about the tens of thousands of
missiles shot at us from the territory we gave them, from which we uprooted
11,000 Jewish people against their will, only 60 years after we were uprooted
from Europe in the West, and Arab countries in the East.
 |
| By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Ganei Tal) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
The Expulsion isn't on the media's list of moral panic material.
Because Jews.
And so, no rabbis (other than the settler-loving Modern Orthodox)
marched on behalf of the 11,000 Jews forcibly taken from their homes and left
homeless with nothing. No indignation was expressed at the pulpit. No marches
took place. No signs were held. No aid extended.
 |
| By Israel Defense Forces (The Evacuation of Kfar Hayam) [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
No interviews appeared. It wasn't seen as a Jewish cause. No
parallels in Jewish history were found.
No rabbis issued heartfelt words about
Jews expelled from Speyer,
Germany, or Spain,
or England.
 |
| A street in the Judengasse in Speyer, Germany. (Wikimedia Commons) |
There was no moral panic. Because no media. And so the
Expulsion, known so mildly when it is spoken of at all as "Disengagement"
remained and remains a local blip. A painful Israeli problem that doesn't touch
the Jews in New York or Boston or Washington, outside of the Modern Orthodox
that is, that last bastion, the final vestige of caring for Jews who live in
places Arabs covet.
It is like science fiction to me, these puppets of the
media, JINO's who cannot generate their own umbrage but can only be lit up by
an outside force possessing interests completely at odds with Jewish
philosophy. Trump's immigration ban may be awkwardly implemented and a serious
inconvenience to 90,000, some of them leaving a war zone, but it is temporary, whereas
the expulsion from Gaza was forever.
And still, you don't hear a peep. No Reform rabbi mentions
them in a Rosh Hashana sermon. No Conservative congregation sends them things,
the expellees. No one says boo. It's not even in their consciousness. They'd
sooner have an empty seat at the Seder
table for Harvey Milk
than Anita
Tucker, whose only crime was making the desert bloom with celery. (Dollars
to donuts they've heard of him, but not of her.)
 |
| By Harvey Milk in 1978 at Mayor Moscone's Desk.jpg: Daniel Nicoletta derivative work: Hekerui (Harvey Milk in 1978 at Mayor Moscone's Desk.jpg) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)], via Wikimedia Commons |
 |
| Anita Tucker |
Israel expels 42 families from Amona over a contrived legal technicality, but oh the irony, takes in 100 Syrian babies. And the mass media? Silent. Not on its agenda, so not on its clipboard of moral panic material. And so the Jews of America say nothing. Do nothing. Care nothing at all about the pain of these 42 families with nowhere to go, Jews like them.
They scorn their own—Jews—in favor of a moral panic about Arab refugees,
typically the enemy of their people (as they are in Gaza, the place we gave
them, and the reason for the expulsion of 11,000 innocent Jewish people against
their will and the will of the people of Israel).
Such is the power of the media's hold over these
empty-headed Jews. They have no brains of their own. They have no impetus to do
a thing, unless the media tells them to do it.
It is sick and sad and scary and did I say sick?
Because it makes me want to vomit.
Because if you are susceptible to being drawn into a moral
panic, but fail to be moved by the expulsion of the 11,000 Jews of Israel and
their plight, then you are no longer human, let alone Jewish. Because Jews should
only be accountable to their maker, and not to the media.
American Jewry, it is certain, is in extremis.
