Part I: The Suicidal Pursuit of Perfection
Part II: Self Criticism and its Pathologies
My current interest in this topic was stirred up by two recent developments. Solomon took note of stirrings on the far left:
British anti-Zionists Purge the anti-Racists
... you probably already have seen this, but I wanted just to mention something about it -- the UK Palestine Solidarity Campaign has purged (effectively) a number of its members who, disturbed about anti-Semitism within the movement beyond even their own profound ability to overlook, attempted to get the group to do something about it. No tears for these, please, as the group includes uber-boycotter Sue Blackwell amongst others who, in any other context, are nothing but rogues...nevertheless, the incident is notable for just how bad things are way out there on the fringe. Read the entry at Harry's Place and follow the links if you're not already familiar: Atzmon's Triumph.
A couple of notes: One, while this is all an incident occurring way, way out there on the political fringe, it is not as fringe in the UK as it is over here. Second, I believe things happening out there on the penumbra have the potential for a butterfly effect of sorts -- it all seems irrelevant and fringy, but the fact is that these things have a way of echoing into the mainstream and moving the nature of the discourse. Just as very few mainstream Democrat politicians would admit to any kinship with Chomsky, yet their rhetoric often contains within it the very echoes, so this stuff that seems so way out there has its pull, whether you realize or not."
Judith Weiss extended the discussion, at Kesher Talk The Left eats its own again:
The word "schadenfreude" was invented for this situation.
Tony Greenstein is an anti-Zionist who believes that Zionism is like Nazism, that Zionists helped the Nazis carry out the Holocaust, that Israel, uniquely, is an essentially and unchangeably racist state.
Sue Blackwell is an anti-Zionist who is best known for campaigning to exclude Israeli academics from university campuses, conferences and journals around the world. Blackwell believes that Israel is an "illegitimate" state.
Roland Rance is an anti-Zionist who campaigns for the "dismantlement of the Zionist structure of the state of Israel".
...
But now the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC) in the UK has rejected them because they dared to stand up against open antisemitism within the movement.
Heh. Read Harry's House for the full farce, including the righteous denunciations by the true believers. The scariest of whom are Israel Shamir and Gilad Atzmon, of whom one can use the term "self-hating Jew" without being accused of hyperbole. Well, by anyone but Shamir and Atzmon.
Judith also includes a distillation of some of the many comments on the issue at Engage. Anti-Semitism has a consistent European tradition for a two thousand years; after the Holocaust its overt expression was suppressed, but in the last twenty-five years, as the Left and international media organs have successfully re-framed the Israel-Arab conflict in traditional Marxist terms (with Israel as the Oppressor and the Palestinians as the victims), anti-Semitism has become once more socially acceptable. For most of that time, anti-Semitism was couched in anti-Israel and anti-Zionist terms, but with the the recent purge of the UK PSC, the type of virulent anti-Semitism taught and nurtured in the Arab world on a daily basis has now been found acceptable in the precincts of the far Left, from whence it can continue its migration into polite society.
Many people have noted the apparent incongruity of the burgeoning linkage between the Far Left and the Islamists. I have pointed out the deep structural connections between the two forms of totalitarianism. Their essentially fascist nature is also clearly discernible in their shared hatred of the Jew.
It is not a coincidence that the UK PSC has now purged itself of any anti-anti-Semitic thinking. We have seen this before on the Left. Stalin famously turned on the Jews in his show trials in the 1950s, the Doctors' Plot, executing some of his closest and most fervent supporters some of whom went to their doom convinced they had betrayed the revolution and deserved their fate.
The other troubling situation is the movement of overt anti-Semitism from the far Left where it has been resident for so long to the conventional, acceptable Left, in the person of George Soros, channeling Jimmy Carter's ugly attack on Israel for "apartheid" and Walt and Meerscheimer's pseudo-intellectual screed.
[For those who would like to argue that their thesis, that there is a Jewish lobby which controls and intimidates the debate, is not anti-Semitic at its core, I would recommend you do a thought experiment. Substitute the words "African American" for Jewish and use the argument to suggest that the NAACP should not be allowed to lobby Washington on behalf of Black Americans. Imagine how quickly such arguments would be attacked firm the Left as the epitome of racism.]
Soros, who denies his Jewish roots and has never minimized his animus toward Israel, has tremendous influence on the left side of the Democratic party. He spent close to $30 million last year trying to defeat George Bush and the Republicans. He supports Moveon.org and other Left wing advocacy groups. He is firmly entrenched in Democratic activist circles; he is a power broker in the party. He also suggests that the United States change its policy and begin to deal with Hamas, as a potential partner int he peace process. Here is part of an interview with the Financial Times in which Soros lays out his prescription for dealing with the Palestinian Israeli war:
FT: What about the war in Iraq? What’s the right policy for America now and also for the Democratic Party?
SOROS: Well, I’m afraid that the situation in Iraq is out of our control. We have messed it up and we are not in really a position to correct it. So we have to extricate ourselves with the least possible damage and then we have to pay a lot more attention to the Palestine problem, which is still solveable. There is the makings of a peace settlement, even at this late stage, or exactly because we are at this late stage because Saudi Arabia feels also very much threatened by the rise of Iran is very much concerned about having a peace settlement guaranteed by the Arab neighbours. So that’s an offer on the table that needs to be picked up and I’m afraid there is some resistance here to doing so.
FT:Resistance here in the United States?
SOROS: Yes, because there is this frame of the war on terror and Hamas as a terrorist organisation that you can’t accept as part of the Palestinian government and you can’t have a peace in Palestine without Hamas because Hamas, if it’s not part of that settlement, is bound to destroy it. So you must deal with Hamas and I think we are in the process of committing a blunder, similar to the blunder of going into Iraq, by not accepting Hamas as a negotiating partner. [Emphasis mine-SW]
It is unclear from Soros if he considers Hamas a terrorist organization or not; their charter calls explicitly for the destruction of Israel and they continually reinforce this message:
Hamas: Stop calling us moderates!
Hamas is getting tired of everyone trying to paint the group as a bunch of "moderates" just because it joined forces with the more secular killers in PLO chief Mahmoud Abbas' Fatah.
First it was the international press, and now it's Osama bin Laden's Al Qaeda that is accusing Hamas of really being peaceful at heart after it agreed to a unity government deal with Fatah.
But Hamas' leaders say they made a promise to Allah to destroy the Jewish state, and they intend to honor that commitment, even if it takes a little longer than they originally hoped.
A statement released by Hamas on Monday in response to criticism from Al Qaeda deputy Ayman al-Zawahri read thus:
We will not betray promises we made to Allah to continue the path of Jihad and resistance until the liberation of Palestine, all of Palestine.
...
So be assured doctor Ayman, and all those who love Palestine like yourself, that Hamas is still the group you knew when it was founded and it will never abandon its path.
Hamas has offered Israel a 10-year truce in return for a full withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. Some in Israel and the international community are pressing Jerusalem to consider the offer positively.
But Hamas has made no secret of the fact that when those 10 years are over, it will see itself as free to resume the quest to annihilate the Jewish state. And it will at that point have a far easier time doing so having acquired Israel's most strategic geographical positions.
Hamas's truces usually last as long as Fatah's truces, which means they last anywhere from a few minutes to a few hours in between rocket attacks, sniper attacks, and human bomb attacks.
As an aside the peace plan as described by the Saudis includes the "right of return", which is simply demographic suicide by treaty for Israel.
The mainstreaming of anti-Semitism, facilitated by Jews like Soros, and via the white washing of Palestinian rhetoric and behavior to make it fit the PC paradigm, is a suicidal equivalent. When a person continually acts in ways which are damaging, cannot seem to learn from the experience, and insists on repetition, the existence of an unacknowledged need to attack oneself and one's disavowed unconscious self-representations, is unavoidable.
The Left wing Jew hates the Jew within himself that he can never escape. Hitler killed Jews three generations removed from the taint. Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism, modeled as it is on Nazi anti-Semitism, will never tolerate the Jew to survive. People like Soros imagine they can distinguish themselves as the "Good (secular, anti-Israel) Jew" but the enemies of the Jews do not make such subtle distinctions, and they are moving inexorably, deeper and deeper into the mainstream of Democratic Party politics.
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