I have read many angry articles and posts this morning regarding yesterday's atrocity in Jerusalem where 8 young men were murdered while studying the Torah. I would suggest that pity is a more appropriate response for the Palestinians. They are a pathetic people, made more so by the fact that their pathos is self-imposed. Hating the Palestinians, while a natural reaction to an atrocity, is no more useful than hating a rabid dog for his venom; the rabid dog must be put down but he is to be pitied rather than hated. The Palestinians thought they were simply following through on a long, storied progression of successful anti-Semites, but the rules have changed and they don't appreciate that they are victims of a bait-and-switch.
Throughout history Jews have been handy people to have around. They have traditionally been learned, peaceful, and ever willing to use their talents and abilities in any way acceptable to the greater society for their own benefit and for that of their society. When the inevitable crises hit, the Jews provided an ideal "other" upon which to focus the citizenry's discontent, and as a bonus, when times were difficult, the leaders could reliably turn on the Jews and confiscate their property. It has been a traditional and highly successful historical pattern throughout Christian Europe, Eurasia and the Muslim world. Unfortunately for those who have relied on anti-Semitism as part of their legitimacy and to enrich and ensure their rule, a combination of factors have made the Jews much less valuable to the anti-Semitic world in the last century.
First, Germany and their fellow travelers in Europe shattered the paradigm. Historically, tyrants prospered by evicting Jews and stealing their property. Those tyrants who tried to exterminate the Jews always failed and destroyed themselves. It is not for nothing that the wry description of most Jewish holidays is: They tried to kill us; they failed; let's eat! When Germany tried to institutionalize genocide and the rest of the world neglected to offer a home to which the Jews could relocate, it led to the destruction of Germany and the deaths of millions of non Jews along with the 6 million.
Second, the Holocaust led to the establishment of the state of Israel. Interestingly, there is some evidence that Israel's establishment was supported by many anti-Semites in Europe who relished the idea of finally making Europe "Judenrein" and getting rid of their "Jewish problem." Palestine was an ideal solution. Most of Palestine was either swampland or desert and there were few indigenous people there. (No one had heard of Palestinians in 1948; they were "discovered" in the 1960s when Yassar Arafat found that establishing a national liberation movement based on terror was a money making operation.) Send the Jews to Palestine and the world could forget about them. Unfortunately the Jews, as is their wont, did not cooperate. They built a modern, liberal, democratic state which has been wildly successful and has become wealthy far out of proportion to its neighbors. Between envy and traditional anti-Semitism (which predated the establishment of the state of Israel; please see Siggy's Deja Vu All Over Again, The Mufti And The Palestinian Authority) the Jewish state in the middle of the Ummah became an unacceptable insult, humiliation, and provocation.
The third problem for the anti-Semites is that, while the Arab world could have destroyed Israel in isolation, the American people in their wisdom had recognized a kindred spirit in the Jews who built a country out of sand, swamp, and stone. Israel, with America's support, could not be destroyed using conventional means.
Since 1948 the Arab world has been faced with the irresistible force of their own anti-Semitism and the immovable object of Israel's increasingly certain existence. The Arab world must either face reality and accept Israel or continue to escalate. Unfortunately, anti-Semites cannot accept reality because their entire world view depends on their hatred (and unconscious idealization) of the Jews.
In Pity the Poor Anti-Semite the pointed out the core conflict within the Arab anti-Semite:
Here is the crucial point for those who imagine that a tiny group of people, barely 60 years out of an almost successful genocide, left with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, comprising approximately .05% of the world's population, who came to the desert in Palestine and built a modern technological nation, would have the time and interest to simultaneously devote themselves to oppressing the Muslim world, with almost 100 times their population and oceans of oil:
The anti-Semite necessarily defines himself as monumentally inferior to the Jew.
This resides in the core of the anti-Semite and renders him permanently damaged and weakened. Only the aid of a being much greater than themselves, Allah, can save them from disaster. Short of such divine intervention, they are doomed to remain defeated. The Muslim nations of the world do not see it as within their abilities to compete in a world of high technology, higher education, competitive open economies; no, they look to nuclear weapons, only available to them by virtue of their Allah given oil money rather than by the sweat of their own brows, to bring them relief from the often imagined depredations of the now conflated Jewish/American demi-Gods.
It is this inferiority that leaves the Arab celebrating as a great triumph the murder of unarmed Jewish students, many of them teenagers, as they study their Torah. What a pathetic triumph! Consider how this reflects on those who celebrate. They have no ability to confront armed Jews face to face and must settle for suicidal forays against children and unarmed non-combatants for their great successes. Recall that one of the precipitants for the summer war with Hizbollah was the belief that they could trade the kidnapped Israeli soldiers for the great hero Samir Kuntar whose claim to fame was that he murdered two children.
Anti-Semites are always declaring their deep seated feelings of inferiority in their hatred. Consider the alternative for the Palestinians. Given the opportunity to build a state, they fail every time. They exist on the largess of others (and do quite well, thanks to the international community's liberal guilt and fear) and produce nothing on their own except blood of innocents. What a shabby contribution to the world.
The most highly idealized way for a Palestinian to achieve status is to kill Jews in a suicide attack. This is an aspiration? This is hope? This is a dream? This is something to pity. The Palestinians have turned themselves into a farcical group of cowardly thugs who loudly proclaim their greatness because a complete failure of a human being was able to walk into a school and murder youngsters.
When a murderous loser shot students at Virginia Tech, his family and his community were horrified. They were shamed by his behavior. For them success was hard work, achieving educational or entrepreneurial success. The Palestinians and their supporters in the Ummah and the international community, who rationalize murder of innocents by falling back on time tested excuses for atrocious behavior (the poor Palestinians are oppressed), have so devalued hard work, education, success as it is understood in most of the civilized world, that they have turned themselves into the cruel caricatures that they use to describe the Jews they hate so much. In a classic example of projection, in order to convince themselves and others of the legitimacy of their morally repugnant acts, the Palestinians must pretend that the Israelis are attempting to commit genocide, (which is, of course, the exact publicly stated intent of Hamas, Hizbollah and their supporters.) The beauty of this formulation is that even the Palestinians do not believe the Israelis are amoral enough to want to commit genocide against them; in fact, the Palestinians use the Israeli's morality as a weapon.
Stratfor summarizes Hamas's need to continue the fight against Israel:
Over 120 people have been killed in the last week of Gaza fighting. This includes three Israelis. About half the Palestinian dead are civilians. Hamas fighters try and stay close to civilians, as the Israelis are more cautious when fighting around civilians, and when civilians are killed, Hamas can accuse the Israelis of war crimes, or whatever. Hamas leaders appear to believe their own propaganda, that they are on a mission from God, to destroy Israel, and now is the time. On a more practical level, Hamas has backed itself into a corner. Only via radical talk, and action, can they keep most Gazans on their side. But Gaza is miserable, and if Hamas admits that all this woe is for nothing, the Gaza population will turn on them. Unfortunately, this appears to make the prospect of "going out in a blaze of glory" attractive to the Hamas leadership. This option is not very popular with most of the people living in Gaza. [Emphasis mine-SW]
For the Palestinians Jew hatred is now the central core of their religion. It impels them to celebrate the murder of Jewish children as great victories even as a small part of their consciousness is aware of how wretched this makes them appear int he eyes of the world and in the mirror. They, like so many anti-Semites before them, will destroy themselves trying to kill Jews and celebrate their own destruction as a great victory in the holy war. They are a pathetic, mentally ill people who are hated by their brothers and sisters throughout the Muslims world only slightly less than the Jews are hated.
Sadly for the glory of the Palestinians, the Jews are no longer the cooperative dhimmis or victims that the anti-Semites have always depended on. The Jews will not go quietly; in fact, the Jews have no intention of tolerating another Holocaust. I doubt the Jews will even gratify the Palestinians desire for martyrdom. Most likely the Jews, those supermen who have survived the centuries by their wits and can now leverage their intellects via technology, will find a way to wall off the Palestinians, and they can stew in their hatred for as long as ti takes for them to wake from their self-imposed nightmare. The Palestinians, in love with death and Jew hatred, have transformed themselves from human beings into rabid dogs trapped in a cage of their own construction and left to gnaw upon themselves with the occasional snarling attack upon their care takers; how sad.
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