OSLO SYNDROME:

‘The Oslo Syndrome’: The West has some VERY serious problems, folks (Frank J. Gaffney, June 1, 2005, Jewish World Review)

Call it "the Oslo Syndrome."

This is the title of an important new book by Dr. Kenneth Levin, a psychiatrist and historian who is a clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School. As the subtitle — "Delusions of a People Under Siege" — makes clear, Dr. Levin is concerned with a pathology that has prompted the Jews of Israel to embrace the false promise of peace ostensibly on offer first from Arafat, now from his former right-hand man. A similar malady appears to be afflicting official Washington, as well.

Dr. Levin describes the roots of this pathology as follows: "[It] lies in psychological responses common among chronically besieged populations, whether minorities subjected to defamation, discrimination and assault or small nations under persistent attack by their neighbors. People living under such stressful conditions often choose to accept at face value the indictments of their accusers in the hope of thereby escaping their predicament."

"The Oslo Syndrome" chronicles the delusions of successive groups within the Jewish world, with a particular focus on the most prominent and contemporary of the phenomena — that of politicians and organizations associated with "the Peace Movement." Dr. Levin explains: "The Peace Movement's stance in fact was as divorced from reality as had been German Jews' blaming of Polish Jews for anti-Semitism, or secular European Jews' blaming of the religious, or socialist Jews' blaming of the Jewish bourgeoisie. But proponents of the Movement, cowed by the persistence of the siege and desperate to see its end, chose to delude themselves. They grasped at any seemingly positive statement coming from an Arab political figure and ignored all the countervailing evidence."

For example, the self-deluded chose to ignore unwelcome statements by Faisal al-Husseini, an Arafat and Abbas crony who was for years the Palestine Liberation Organization's proxy representative in Jerusalem. Al-Husseini declared in 2001 that the Oslo "peace" accords of 1992 between Israel and Arafat were but a "Trojan Horse," designed to advance the Palestinians' abiding goal of liberating their "country," whose boundaries would be "from the [Jordan] river to the [Mediterranean] sea." In other words: No Israel.

Al-Husseini's ambitions were of a piece with those long espoused by his relative, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the notorious Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, whose complicity with Adolf Hitler helped advance the Fuhrer's "Final Solution" for the Jews and deny the latter refuge in their historic homeland. Incredibly, even the Holocaust Museum in Washington — a magnificent institution designed to serve as a conscience for all time — is in denial and contributing to the Oslo Syndrome: It refuses to include in its permanent exhibition anything about the Mufti's role in past Arab anti-Semitism, or to address manifestations of this form of systemic racism so evident in the Muslim world today.

Dr. Levin notes in an article published at www.JewishPress.com that, "The ongoing Arab siege does cast a shadow over the lives of Israelis. At the same time, they have created a free, vibrant, extraordinarily successful society. It remains to be seen whether they are prepared to go on nurturing what they have built as they await changes in the Arab world that will open it to genuine peace, or they will instead, in their eagerness for 'normalcy' and an end to the siege, once more delude themselves into pursuing fantasies of peace that will threaten everything they have created." Or, he might have added, whether the U.S. government will, in its own act of self-delusion, encourage or compel Israel to do the latter?

Mr. Levin and I share a publisher and I made some editorial comments (which he couldn't have been less interested in accepting) on an early draft of the book that had some fairly significant structural problems. But his basic concept--of Jewry falling prey throughout its history to a lassitude-inducing siege mentality--is quite compelling and his history of the Oslo process is an invaluable resource.

MORE:
-ESSAY: Not Oslo again: pursuing fantasies of peace threatens all (Dr. Kenneth Levin, March 17, 2005, Jewish Tribune)
-REVIEW: of The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege
By Kenneth Levin (P. DAVID HORNIK, Jerusalem Post)
-REVIEW: of Oslo Syndrome (Atlas Shrugs)

Posted by Orrin Judd at June 1, 2005 8:45 AM