There are many reasons people have difficulty protecting themselves, ranging from confusion over what threatens them to uncertainty about what they are defending. At the moment, the West shows every indication of suffering from a wide range of ailments that interfere with its ability to defend itself. As Soccer Dad so ably summarizes and many have pointed out, the Jew has traditionally been the "canary in the coal mine" and in this arena, the difficulty Israel has in defending itself is instructive.
Richard Landes, whose work has been so invaluable in illuminating some of the ways in which the Western Media have become willing, though often unwitting, accomplices for anti-Western and anti-Israeli Information Warfare, has taken a look at a particular problem the Jewish state suffers from, On the Israeli Press and the Al Durah Affair, and he raised a rather plaintive question:
One of the most common questions people ask when they see the Al Durah and Pallywood footage is, “why don’t the Israelis say anything?” — actually one of Charles Enderlin’s favorite defenses. The answer is complex, and some day I’ll try and address it in detail. [Emphasis mine-SW] But for now, I just want to remark that one of the reasons is that the Israeli press is remarkably aggressive and largely leftish (if not more). Ha-Aretz trashed both the investigation and the investigators when they first came out with their claims that the odds were enormous against it being Israeli bullets.
One of my students asked if Ha-Aretz was an Israeli paper. Why? “Because it sounds like it’s written by Palestinians.”
Ah, Israeli self-criticism. It’s hard to realize how hard the Israeli media is on Israel.
Understanding why the Israeli press is "remarkably aggressive and largely leftish" is likely to be a multi-faceted and complex task. Israeli self-criticism often verges on Jewish self-hatred and Jewish anti-Semitism. When our enemies can only hope to defeat us by destroying our will to fight, and their primary weapon is Information Warfare, excessive self-criticism overtly interferes with our country's ability to defend itself; as such, Israel's plight may offer a useful paradigm for understanding some of the difficulty the elites in America have in aggressively defending ourselves.
I look forward to seeing what Richard has to offer in this regard, and would like to make a small contribution to understanding "the plight of the canary."
The Jew has a long tradition of persecution. At the same time, perhaps because of an even longer tradition of study and contemplation, the Jew has tended to be successful in all societies that allow him to flourish and reward intellectual accomplishment. The tension between success as a visible minority and aggressive envy from the larger community has always been a delicate balancing act. As a result, Jews have always been somewhat ambivalent about becoming too visible in their communities, fearing that, as has happened so many times before, the anti-Semitic impulse will become harnessed by the forces of envy and the pogroms will return.
Religious, observant Jews, believe they have no choice but to defend their Jewishness. According to the Bible, G-d granted the land of Israel to the Jews for all time. As a result, many religious Jews have settled in the "occupied territories." Without rehashing disputed history, the world has seen fit to doubt the Jews' claim to the land and instead has bestowed legitimacy on a people who only came into existence quite recently. Since the founding of the Jewish state in 1948, it has been repeatedly attacked with overt threats of genocide which continue to this day. In such a condition, how can so many Jews be so self-critical?
The secular Jew, burdened by his heritage but without the solace of religious belief, is in a particularly delicate position. As a post-modern sophisticate he finds himself embarrassed by those who openly express their Jewish religious beliefs. The post-modern man sees religion as backward, primitive, and the source of much evil in the world.
[In an ironic paradox, they fail to see the religious basis of many of their most cherished beliefs, a topic I have explored in a number of posts, including Political Deification.]
This embarrassment is fueled by anxiety. The Jew who openly expresses pride in his religion and is unashamedly aggressive in the defense of his religion and his co-religionists, is seen as endangering the secular Jew. The meme that the liberal press, along with the liberal elites in Israel and in the West in general have expressed in one form or another since at least the 1967 war can be summarized as follows:
"If only those crazy religious fanatics would leave the occupied territory, the Palestinians, and the world, wouldn't hate us so much."
The liberal Jew lives with the constant terror that the world, filled with incipient and overt anti-Semites, will one day wake up to notice the Jew and will succumb to the historical abuse and persecution of the Jews. It may not be easy for non-Jews living in America to recognize that most Jews, despite their success in America, have a deep seated existential insecurity. Without the solace of religion, the secular Jew is left only with the anxiety and a search for an illusion of safety.
For many liberal Jews (and while liberal and secular Jews are not identical, there has always been a great deal of overlap) the need to remain in good standing with the liberal elites of which they are part is a powerful motivator. They will tend to bend over backwards to find common ground with the "powers that be." When the ground begins to shift, as the Western left has become increasingly anti-Israel and overtly anti-Semitic, the liberal Jew must shift with the ground or risk disorientation. It is bad enough when a Christopher Hitchins breaks with the left over Iraq; he may be ostracized and abandoned by old friends, but for a Jew there is the extra feeling of danger that such rejection could easily turn into overt persecution. The German Jews were the most cosmopolitan and assimilated Jews in the Western world in the early 1900s; this did not protect them from the horrors that occurred in what they thought was their homeland.
Now that Jews have their own homeland and refuge, the tendency to identify with those upon whose sufferance their survival depends, all too easily leads to excessive self-criticism. I imagine most Jews have, at one time or another, expressed the question, when confronted by news of a fellow Jew's success or failure, "Is it good for the Jews?" Furthermore, the dread of evoking our more powerful neighbors' envious hatred is ever-present. In such circumstances, the tendency to extreme self-criticism and its close relative, appeasement, in order to preempt attack, emerges naturally from the Jew's historical tendency to question himself.
What does this mean for America? Mark Steyn recently wrote that "we are all Jews now." America is now the most successful nation in the history of the world and Americans are, by far, the most successful minority in the history of the world. The fact that we are a diverse mix of religions and races does not change the fact the Americans are a tiny minority in an envious and hostile world. The diffidence of so many Americans and the need of so many to attack our own country is a distortion of the laudable tendency to self-criticism that all successful societies require. Just as with Israel and the Jew, some Americans, out of guilt and anxiety, tend toward excessive self-criticism that verges on overt anti-Americanism.
There is a slim hope that, perhaps, "the times, they are a'changing." Even some of our fiercest (self) critics have begun to notice the danger.
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