It’s time for a little coherent thought. On the one hand, Roger Cohen is bemoaning the rising tide of European anti-Semitism. On the
other hand, he is cheerleading Angela Merkel for opening Germany to a flood
of anti-Semites.
Cohen’s is a mind divided against itself.
European leftist intellectuals, a group of easily terrorized
cowards, have responded to the growing threat of Islamic terrorism by paying
protection. They have decided, by Cohen’s reporting, to support the Palestinian
cause by adopting the newest version of anti-Semitism.
In so doing they are mimicking the attitude of the current
occupant of the White House. Surely, Barack Obama has made the world safer for
anti-Semitism. His mere presence has stimulated the Boycott Divest Sanctions
movement; his propensities have encouraged anti-Semitic groups like Students
for Justice in Palestine.
Cohen begins his column by looking at the Labour Club at
Oxford University. As you know, the British Labour Party is their version of our
Democratic Party. Today, Cohen reports, the group is so full of anti-Semitism
that one of its leaders has just resigned:
Last
month, a co-chairman of the Oxford University Labour Club, Alex Chalmers, quit
in protest at what he described as rampant anti-Semitism among members. A
“large proportion” of the club “and the student left in Oxford more generally
have some kind of problem with Jews,” he said in a
statement.
Chalmers
referred to members of the executive committee “throwing around the term ‘Zio’”
— an insult used by the Ku Klux Klan; high-level expressions of “solidarity
with Hamas” and explicit defense of “their tactics of indiscriminately
murdering civilians”; and the dismissal of any concern about anti-Semitism as
“just the Zionists crying wolf.”
In America, leftist campus radicals are inveighing against
white privilege. They despite Western civilization and everything it stands for…
be it liberal democracy or free enterprise or the Industrial Revolution.
This leads them, naturally, to hate Israel. After all, what
is Israel but the cornerstone of the civilization they despise, a beacon of
free enterprise and liberal democracy. They did not understand, when they were
drinking in the anti-Western propaganda and the white privilege nonsense that they were absorbing anti-Semitism, straight up. Even now they do not really
understand how they were dispossessed of their minds.
Cohen points out:
The
zeitgeist on campuses these days, on both sides of the Atlantic, is one of
identity and liberation politics. Jews, of course, are a minority, but through
a fashionable cultural prism they are seen as the minority that isn’t — that is
to say white, privileged and identified with an “imperialist-colonialist”
state, Israel.
Take a deep breath. Who is the American champion of, if not
liberation politics, at least, liberation theology? Who spends his Sunday
sermons denouncing Israel and America? Who prints tracts by Hamas in his church
newsletters?
You got it: Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Many of you voted to put
his protégé in the White House. For shame.
Cohen does not connect any of it to Wright’s protégé, but he
does see that when the British Labour Party made Jeremy Corbyn its leader, it
opened the floodgates for anti-Semitism:
The
rise of the leftist Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of Britain’s opposition
Labour Party appears to have empowered a far left for whom support of the
Palestinians is uncritical and for whom, in
the words of Alan Johnson, a British political theorist, “that which
the demonological Jew once was, demonological Israel now is.”
Corbyn
is no anti-Semite. But he has called Hamas and Hezbollah agents of “long-term
peace and social justice and political justice in the whole region,” and once
invited to Parliament a Palestinian Islamist, Raed Salah, who has suggested
Jews were absent from the World Trade Center on 9/11. Corbyn called him an
“honored citizen.” The “Corbynistas” on British campuses extol their fight
against the “racist colonization of Palestine,” as one Oxford student, James
Elliott, put it. Elliott was narrowly
defeated last month in a bid to become youth representative on
Labour’s national executive committee.
As for whether Corbyn is an anti-Semite, his praise for
Hamas and Hezbollah makes him one… regardless of what is beating in his dark
heart.
You would think that a self-proclaimed Zionist like Cohen would
understand that Israel has been abandoned by most of its allies and is
surrounded by enemies who want to destroy it. The fault for the occupation lies
in the Palestinian death cult. Blaming it on Israel is a grave error.
Those who do so are buying the leftist narrative wherein
Israel is an oppressive capitalistic neo-colonialist state and whereby the
Palestinian people are the oppressed new proletariat that will rise up to
overthrow its capitalist oppressors, thereby to enjoy the peace and prosperity
that exist in its Muslim neighbors… like Jordan, Syria and Egypt.
As I said, on these issues Cohen is not thinking straight.
Or better, he is not thinking:
Today,
it is Palestinians in the West Bank who are dehumanized through Israeli
dominion, settlement expansion and violence. The West Bank is the tomb of
Israel as a Jewish and democratic state. Palestinians, in turn, incite against
Jews and resort to violence, including random stabbings.
As it happens, Cohen is vaguely aware of the import of his
criticisms of Israel. He tries to weasel his way out of his dilemma by saying
that criticism and demonization are not the same thing. In the abstract they
are not. And yet, when Israelis are being stabbed at random on a daily basis,
when Hamas is building terror tunnels and stockpiling rockets, all for the purpose
of killing Jews, criticism can only serve to embolden those who hate Israel.
In time of war, when faced with an enemy that will be
satisfied with nothing less than your annihilation, criticism feeds
demonization. Under such circumstances occupying the moral high ground makes you a target... no more and no less.
3 comments:
Dancing for the Boa Constrictor:
http://chicagoboyz.net/archives/31528.html
I would not say his mind is divided against itself; seems more like a severely raging case of cognitive dissonance, which he ignores. Cohen is one with the NYT, and does not allow himself to think differently.
And Jeremiah Wright's protege has been a keen aficionado of "collateral damage." It's basically the Obama Doctrine: "You're useless to me if you don't fit the narrative."
Cohen is divided because he can't get around this idea. Few elites can, whether Left or Right. They've commingled their philosophies of radical tolerance to such an alarming degree that everything is ass-backwards... they have no idea how to think and choose much of anything. This is the cognitive elite, a cognoscenti. Yet "cognoscenti" and "cognitive elite" won't do. We must find some obscure Bantu word so they can self-identify with such a sophisticated moniker at their next NPR interview.
"Paying protection" is exactly what American sophisticates do through political correctness. That's exactly what one gets with self-congratulation.
The international Left is a racket with a solution. Their message: "You're next!"
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