June 28, 2005
CORROSIVE CONFLUENCE:
Anti-Americanism & the New Anti-Semitism: The New War Against The Jews (HILLEL HALKIN, June 28, 2005, NY Sun)
The scary thing is that once again, 50 years after the Holocaust, the Jews have so many enemies. And make no mistake about it: They are dangerous.Nor are all of them primitives out of the Middle Ages. Some are very suave, very cultivated gentlemen. They wear three-piece suits and they speak with Oxonian accents and they say things like "bloody nuisance" and "spot on." Some are even leaders of the Anglican Church.
You may have noticed it. The international advisory body of that church voted last Friday in London to urge its congregations, which have 75 million members worldwide, to disinvest in Israel because of its "oppression" of the Palestinians.
These are not benighted Slavophiles. They are sophisticated High Churchmen. With them one can argue. One can say: "Of all the world's 'oppressing' countries - China, which oppresses Tibet; India, which oppresses Kashmir; Russia, which oppresses Chechnya, et cetera, et cetera - the one you've decided to boycott as good Christians is the country of the Jewish people? The country of the same Jews whom you Christians have hounded throughout your history and whom you Anglicans and Englishmen watched as they were slaughtered by the millions in Europe while you did nothing to rescue them and barred the gates of Palestine and England to those of them who might have fled? Have you no shame? No honor? No awareness of your own appalling hypocrisy?"
No, they have no shame, no honor, no awareness of their own appalling hypocrisy. And they are anti-Semites no less than State Prosecutor Ustinov and his 500 imbeciles. In fact, they are State Prosecutor Ustinov's allies.
This cannot be said too often. In an age in which a Jewish state's right to exist is still not recognized by much of the world - in which tens of millions of Arabs and hundreds of millions of Muslims regularly clamor for its destruction - in which a Muslim country now in the process of arming itself with nuclear weapons openly refers to it as an outlaw creation that must be wiped from the face of the earth - anyone deliberately undermining this state's legitimacy, even if he wears a respectable English clergyman's collar, is contributing to another possible genocide of the Jews.
Criticism of Israel? By all means. This is perfectly legitimate. So is concern for the Palestinians. But disinvestment is not criticism. It is an attempt to turn Israel into a pariah state. And Jews, having been treated as pariahs by Christian civilization since the age of Constantine, know exactly what this means.
Half a century after the Holocaust, a new war against the Jews has been declared. We are only now - innocents that we have been, lulled by the world and our own wishful thinking into believing that widespread Jew-hatred is a thing of the past - waking up to its true dimensions.
It is not a war that we Jews will necessarily win, although it is not one that we can afford to lose.
Three ideologies are aligning to create a new strain of anti-Semitism that threatens Jews first in Israel, second in Europe, and third throughout the world:
1. Not only do the destruction of Israel and elimination of the Jewish people obsess Islamic extremists and terrorists, historian Paul Johnson notes in the June 2005 Commentary in his article “The Anti-Semitic Disease” that “over the last half-century, anti-Semitism has been the essential ideology of the Arab world.” This hatred is not limited to the extremist few on the fringe.
2. The Political Hard Left in the United States and Europe has adopted the Palestinians as their cause celebre with the support of allies in the media. It’s easy for articulate university professors to promote a picture of the Middle East conflict which lays all the blame on Israel, the Jews, and a claimed neoconservative (code word for Jewish) cabal that allegedly run United States foreign policy. Political Conservatives have tended to support Israel, as have Evangelical Christians, but well known is Pat Buchanan’s 1990 comment that support for Israel goes too far -- “"Capitol Hill is Israeli occupied territory. In addition, there are campaigns on approximately two dozen university campuses and by at least two mainstream Protestant denominations -- the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the United Church of Christ -- that urge divestment of stock in corporations that do business with Israel. They incorrectly claim that the Middle East situation is similar to apartheid in South Africa.
Both 1 and 2 fail to understand (or intentionally manipulate for their own purposes) that the Arab power elite and Islamic extremists are using Israel and the Jews as a scapegoat for Arab social problems that are actually arising from the resistance to the momentum of modernity throughout the Third World.
3. Arabs and Islamic extremists are funding and supporting Neo-Nazis in United States and Europe
Accompanying this anti-Semitism is a powerful anti-Americanism. Paul Johnson explains: “Anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism have proceeded hand in hand in today’s Europe just as they once did in Hitler’s mind (as the unpublished second half of Mein Kampf decisively shows)….(Among) academics and intellectuals, where it … becoming more virulent, widespread, and intractable ever since the United States began to shoulder the duties of the war against international terrorism.”
I have not seen recent poll data about Americans’ perceptions about the terrorist threat. But I suspect that many Americans have become complacent as we approach the fourth anniversary of 9-11. These people hate us and they want to kill us or control us. Not just all Jews. All Americans. Concessions will not stop them. Hope that they would play by our rules if we only gave them a chance, if only we talked more, will fail. Who can argue that appeasement stopped Hitler? Why would it stop terrorists who rammed jets into the World Trade Towers and the Pentagon? Or chop off heads? Or massacre hundreds of Russian school children? Weakness encourages them.
Stanford professor Russell A. Berman describes what he calls “the psychology of appeasement”:
“In her classic study The Origins of Totalitarianism, the political theorist Hannah Arendt explored a basic component in the psychology of appeasement. Why was it, she wondered, that much of the outside world was long reluctant to believe in the enormity of the crimes of Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia? …. Her answer involves the recognition that the everyday life of democracies lacks the extraordinary violence of totalitarian settings. Because democratic political life assumes that individuals are treated with a modicum of respect within the context of the rule of law, it becomes difficult to imagine that regimes of terror prevail elsewhere. As she wrote, ‘The normality of the normal world is the most efficient protection against disclosure of totalitarian mass crimes.’… Accustomed to such democratic normalcy, the public tends not only to dismiss accounts of extraordinary atrocities but to believe that the totalitarian leaders act in good faith….
”Particularly in Europe, the argument is made that Islamic radicalism is simply about Israel, and if only the West would abandon its support for Israeli democracy—just as the West abandoned Czech democracy in 1938—the terrorists would promptly turn into trustworthy partners. Other elements enter into this European stance, especially a rapidly growing anti-Semitism. At its core, however, the psychology of appeasement involves the profound misjudgment that terrorists act in a rational and utilitarian manner to achieve specific and limited policy goals through compromise.
“Yet nothing indicates that Al Qaeda or associated terrorist groups are susceptible to rational argument or negotiation. It is characteristic that the September 11 attacks were not linked to any particular set of specific demands, hence the extensive and inconclusive speculation regarding the terrorists’ true goals. Eradication of Israel? Islamic rule in Kashmir? The very ambiguity indicates the absence of a rational political agenda. The only constant is a rhetoric of martyrdom: ‘You love life, but we love death,’ as the terrorists claiming responsibility for the Madrid bombing put it with horrifying clarity. Similarly, after the lynching of four American contractors in Fallujah, a militant declared, ‘We are not afraid of death. We are going to heaven’(presumably for mutilating corpses). This fanaticism is not interested in the normal give-and-take of politics. Still, the proponents of appeasement regularly proceed from a blind preference for negotiation and compromise. Arendt’s phrasing is again quite apt: because it is used to a well-mannered normalcy, democratic public opinion ‘indulges in wishful thinking and shirks reality in the face of real insanity.’
Appeasement is the political strategy of pursuing compromise with an uncompromising opponent. It involves a denial of the opponent’s fanatic character and is, therefore, precisely as Arendt put it, a matter of shirking reality. The only real alternative, however, entails subduing the opponent. Such a course of action presupposes the will to use force and to face the attendant costs. Appeasement is a way to avoid recognizing these costs, but only in the short term, until that time in the future when the costs of defeat become unmistakable.
Last year a friend forwarded a letter that a retired attorney wrote in May 2004 to his four grown sons to give them a longer term point of view that “fewer and fewer of (his) generation are left to speak to.” He says: “Our country is now facing the most serious threat to its existence, as we know it, that we have faced in your lifetime and mine (which includes WWII). The deadly seriousness is greatly compounded by the fact that there are very few of us who think we can possibly lose this war (on terrorism) and even fewer who realize what losing really means.” He adds:
“(Americans) have been criticized for many years as being 'arrogant'. That charge is valid in at least one respect. We are arrogant in that we believe that we are so good, powerful and smart, that we can win the hearts and minds of all those who attack us, and that with both hands tied behind our back, we can defeat anything bad in the world. We can't. If we don't recognize this, our nation as we know it will not survive, and no other free country in the World will survive if we are defeated. And finally, name any Muslim countries throughout the world that allow freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of religion, freedom of the Press, equal rights for anyone - let alone everyone, equal status or any status for women, or that have been productive in one single way that contributes to the good of the World.
”If we don't win this war right now, keep a close eye on how the Muslims take over France in the next 5 years or less. They will continue to increase the Muslim population of France and continue to encroach little by little on the established French traditions. The French will be fighting among themselves over what should or should not be done, which will continue to weaken them and keep them from any united resolve. Doesn't that sound eerily familiar?
”Democracies don't have their freedoms taken away from them by some external military force. Instead, they give their freedoms away, politically correct piece by politically correct piece. And they are giving those freedoms away to those who have shown, worldwide, that they abhor freedom and will not apply it to you or even to themselves, once they are in power. They have universally shown that when they have taken over, they then start brutally killing each other over who will be the few who control the masses.”
Countries where people are free to choose their own constitution and leaders will not choose a dictator who will export terror that threatens the United States. I do not see this as imposing American-style democracy on another country. I see it helping a countries like Afghanistan or Iraq who had been ruled by despots gain the chance to create the form of democracy that fits their culture.
Creating a democratic society following decades of totalitarian rule is bound to be difficult. Stopping terrorists will require patience and perseverance for many years. Those who are dissatisfied that Iraq is not being rebuilt overnight forget the years it took to reconstruct Japan and Germany after World War II. Remember the Marshall Plan? We forget it took ten years for the United States to institute the Constitution with the Bill of Rights following Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown. The difficult path ran from the toothless Articles of Confederation which went into effect in 1781, to the 1787 Constitutional Convention, to the battle in the press between the Federalists (for the Constitution) and the anti-Federalists (against) to win ratification by the states in 1788, to the addition of the Bill of Rights and its ratification by the end of 1791. With the tensions, debates and negotiations that characterized the Constitutional Convention, George Washington and James Madison both described the Constitution’s passage as “The Miracle at Philadelphia.” Iraq had an interim constitution a year after the start of war.
The media focus on incidences of violence in Iraq and pretty much ignore a huge amount of tangible progress in terms of infrastructure and the like.
For the latest data on that, Australian blogger Arthur Chrenkoff every two weeks summarizes good news @ http://chrenkoff.blogspot.com/
Source for Paul Johnson quotes is http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article.asp?aid=11906035_1
Source for Russell Berman quote is http://www.hooverdigest.org/043/berman.html
Posted by Jim Siegel at June 28, 2005 2:00 PMApparently I slipped into an alternate universe during the night.
Never expected anybody else to be complaining about appeasement on brothersjuddblog.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at June 28, 2005 2:16 PMExcellent. The Psychology of appeasement is exactly what our alliance with Israel is designed to prevent. It commits us to strategic presence in the middle east, for the foreseeable future: in perpetuity, as far as you and I are concerned.
Francification--civilizational cuttling and running, as the French did from Algeria and Vietnam--in not an option, for we have placed an outpost of fellow people of the wagon train in the heart of the Islamic world, and we will not suffer them to be puished into the sea.
It has been truly brilliant, worthy of the memory of Polk and McKinley, putting Metternich and Bismark to shame.
Posted by: Lou Gots at June 28, 2005 4:03 PMIt is not necessarily appeasement - the suave and/or genteel anti-semites are fellow travelers with Hamas, Fatah, Hezbollah, the Iranian mullahs, and Zarqawi. The more murderous Arabs certainly welcome them into the fold, don't they? And the "appeasers" are always more than happy to attend the parties, no?
The position is not limited to foolish churchmen, either. Think of all the leftist academics who bleed green for Palestine, and uniformly attack Israel. The Congressional Black Caucus is another example - they are not strictly appeasers, but just haters.
Posted by: jim hamlen at June 28, 2005 4:57 PMPossibly they make a distinction, thinking that they will not themselves be targets after the Jews are gone and therefore do not need to appease.
If so, they're wrong.
Must make it tough for the American anti-Semites if the brethren are anti-American, too. Nobody waves the flag more heartily than a good ol' Southern Baptist Jew hater.
I cannot recommend highly enough Ross's 'So It Was True,' which is not, despite my endorsement, wholly antiChristian. (Ross would say, not antiChristian at all.)
Posted by: Harry Eagar at June 28, 2005 6:33 PMHow far up his own backside does a man's head have to be that he can't tell these people from Pat Buchanan?
Posted by: joe shropshire at June 28, 2005 7:37 PMRead the book -- or at least chapters 6 & 7 -- and get back to me.
We could also talk about where I grew up -- next to the Jewish country club that was created because the Baptists wouldn't have them in the Piedmont Driving Club.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at June 28, 2005 9:17 PM"And the "appeasers" are always more than happy to attend the parties, no?"
To say nothing of taking those little consulting positions and speaking engagements funded by the Saudis.
Posted by: DSmith at June 28, 2005 9:20 PMYes, yes, not being able to join the country club. Now, that's oppression.
In this, I am a Marxist.
Posted by: David Cohen at June 29, 2005 7:38 AMA lot happened since you grew up, Harry. At some point, southern Southern Baptists woke up and realized that they didn't actually know any Jews to hate. Then eschataological dispensationalism took hold by force. Modern southern popular Christianity is overwhelmingly premillenial. Your typical Alabama Baptist now has a strange affinity for Jews which even he can't articulate (even if it's an imagined Jewishness rather than the real thing). It's a beautiful irony that such a goofy theology would have driven such a cultural shift. Also delicious that this movement has the Christophobes convinced that Christianity wants to instigate global thermonuclear war.
Posted by: Judd at June 29, 2005 8:08 AMJudd, I agree a lot has happened since I left the South, but I'm aware of it.
The embrace of Israel is not as new among Southerners as you imagine. The interpretation today is slightly (but only slightly) less scary for a Jew than it was 70 years ago.
I listen to premillenialist sermons at least once a week, and they make my skin crawl.
David, see later post quoting Riis about Jews in America. It takes a peculiar kind of hate to refuse to occupy the same golf course with another man.
The expression of the hate was milder than in, say, Poland. But it was the same hate.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at June 29, 2005 3:05 PMJim:
Great post. Thank-you.
What has to be faced is that modern anti-semitism and anti-Americanism are not conscious expressions of national or racial hate, but intellectual constructs that operate outside any personal animosity. Harry's musings about golf clubs and Christianity are amusing, but very dated. Our popular demonizing of WW11 Gernany has led us to ask the wrong question. The question is not why a modern, enlightened country could have proved to be so anti-semitic, but why a country that was not very anti-semitic in the context of its times could have stood by and allowd minority anti-semitism to take such free and destructive hold.
I can't tell you how many perfectly decent people who I judge to be anti-American I've met recently who are completely convinced they are America's biggest fan and whose only beef is that they have been denied direct access to the White House so that they can correct your errors.
Posted by: Peter B at June 29, 2005 8:13 PMHarry: That was my post. I really do think that most Jews can see some daylight between "Let's kill them all" and "Let's keep them out of the country club." Frankly, we're not all that eager to spend our Sunday afternoons with them, either.
Of course, I can see that someone who's life revolves around Christ to the extent that your's does might find it hard to empathize with the Jews.
Posted by: David Cohen at June 29, 2005 8:20 PMPeter:
I'm not sure "not very anti-semitic in the context of its time" says very much, in as much as the context throughout Europe was virulently anti-semitic.
Of the things in life I find completely boggling, though, anti-semitism tops the list. How could such a mindless, baseless, hatred persist so widely for so long?
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at June 30, 2005 6:38 AMJeff: Darwinism suggests that anti-semtism is the rational response of threatened non-Jews to Jewish group survival strategies.
Posted by: David Cohen at June 30, 2005 8:41 AMJeff:
Your refusal to probe what actually happened in Western Europe and your determination to piggy-back the Nazi experience on medieval pogroms and theology is actually kind of depressing. Unlike in Eastern Europe, by the twentieth century, Germany was perhaps the least anti-semitic country in Europe. Pogroms were a distant memory, legal disabilities had been removed and there had been much cultural assimilation. Many, many Nazis had no particular hostile animus (Heydrich is a good example). The popular hostility was inflamed by charges of betrayal in WW1 and economic domination, not appeals to purity of faith. Sure, many churches went along to their shame and traditional anti-semitism still survived in rural areas, but they were not the movers and shakers of the movement, and the fact that the Nazis were anti-Christian and anti-church is simply too well documented to be denied. According to Martin Gilbert, if you were a Jew seeking shelter and hiding from a local, your chances in Berlin were probably better than in almost any other occupied city.
That the churches have had to confront their complicity, and that Christians generally have had to face-up to some awful truths about themselves and their history is denied by no one here. But you seem determined at all costs to exculpate your creed and anyone who shares it, even though there is plenty of evidence that the perps were motivated by it and acted on it. (Have you ever meditated on Arendt's concept of "banality of evil"?) Not your most glorious moment.
Posted by: Peter B at June 30, 2005 9:18 AMDavid:
That would be a fine thesis, except you would have to find a society of non-Jews who were actually threatened by the Jews in their midst.
Even then, it would be rational only if the society was better off without the Jews. I suggest that Spain after 1492 very clearly shows that actual effects of such elimination were very much contrary to some a priori presumption of "rational" response.
That is what I find most baffling--anti-Semitism has always greatly weakened the offending society by attacking a portion of the society that was making it stronger.
Peter:
I have probably read 40 or 50 books regarding the Holocaust and general anti-semitism. That Germany may, or may not, have been the least anti-semitic by the twentieth century is not only a very low bar, it completely ignores such things as the wildly popular Oberamergau Passion Plays.
Up to the Third Reich, Germany was predominantly Catholic, and Catholicism still had over thirty years to go before it confronted its anti-semitic demons.
I'm not at all sure what my "creed" has any play here, and certainly not the way you suggest. Nazism and Communism were both organized religions, like it or not. Calling them "Rational" is to completely mistake their essence.
Finally, your post got a heck of a lot of mileage out of my two sentences, one of which aimed to air nothing more than an abiding inability to comprehend.
Jeff:
You may have read widely, but you are still getting some basic facts very wrong. Germany was not predominantly Catholic.
It is impossible to discuss with you when you simply throw out grandiose hyptheses as self-evident truth. "Communism and Nazism were religions" is not an empirical statement. It's fun to appropriate the right to define words as we wish, but it does tend to foreclose debate. So is what you are saying that every believer in every faith, ideology, political theory, etc. is essentially blinded by religion and has blood on his hands for it except for 21st century American secular utilitarians who are innocent as newborns and see clearly through it all?
Posted by: Peter B at June 30, 2005 1:18 PMOh come on, Peter. Everybody who rejects religion isn't automatically allied to everybody else on every other issue.
It amuses Orrin to call me a stalinist, and I have a thick skin so it doesn't bother me, but rejecting catholicism is not the same as embracing bolshevism.
This is so obviously the case that it would seem to be supererogatory to have to say it. Yet not only is it a continuing confusion at brothersjuddblog, it also was an identical sort of confusion that helped fire the furnaces for all those Jews.
The Final Solution was a concatentation of 1,700 years of Jew-hatred preached by Christianity and about 10 years of Jews = communists hatred preached by German rightists. (There were other ingredients, too, but those were the big ones.)
The original sin was Jew-hatred.
As far as I can tell, no other religion except Christianity has ever debased another race/religion the way Christianity treats Jews.
If Germany was the least antisemitic country in Europe (hard to measure but it had more cross-marriage than other places; allegedly 40% of the population of Vienna had some Jewish ancestry), we could hypothesize that the snap-back effect was stronger there and perhaps that would be all that would be needed to explain German 'excesses.'
Except that such excesses had continued for centuries.
It is more economical to propose that the Nazi pogoms were not different in origin or intent from the simultaneous Polish pogroms or from previous pogroms from England to Russia. Just put it down to a larger reach by a more efficient foe.
It is not obvious that, once Jew-hatred is established as a religious creed, anything other than historical happenstance prevents it from being carried to finality.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at June 30, 2005 4:56 PMHarry:
Sure. And I suppose Stalin's and other Marxist slaughters were just concatenations of two thousand years of Christianity favouring the meek and poor and being suspicious of wealth.
Tell us, what do you see as the source of the current wave of anti-semitism in Europe and on North American campus'?
Posted by: Peter B at July 1, 2005 6:07 AM