It’s always someone else’s fault
Do you remember in the 1990s, the big hooha about allegedly recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse? I remember listening to a show on NPR back then that exposed some of the more famous recovered memory therapists as hypnotists who would ask their patients leading questions such as, “You remember when you were a little girl and your father [did some perverted act], don’t you?”
It was no surprise that unhappy, vulnerable women in a hypnotic state remembered quite a bit. The deal with the whole childhood sexual abuse bandwagon was that, if you remembered it, it definitely happened (something with which I do not quarrel); and if you didn’t remember it, it still definitely happened — you just suppressed it. In other words, in that universe, childhood sexual abuse always happened, any other evidence to the contrary.
If you’re wondering why I’m waffling on about this sad and distasteful subject — one that diluted the tragedy of real abuse, and created a new tragedy of imagined abuse — it’s because I was reminded of it by the whole story of that disgraceful “Israel Lobby” paper that emerged from the John F. Kennedy School at Harvard. You’ve heard about it. James Taranto does a good job of detailing the paper’s endless fallacies, all of which, through bootstrapping manage to show the author’s premise — namely, that Jews control the world. (See Taranto’s posts here, here and here.) It’s the Protocols of the Elder’s of Zion, updated.
Well, Harvard suddenly backed off — no surprise — and the article’s authors know why: It’s all the Jew’s fault. They have no actual proof, of course, but it must have been those evil Jews because the Jews control the world.
Considering how adept we Jews are at controlling the world, someone will have to explain to me the mass murders of Jews during the middle ages and Renaissance, the abysmally poverty stricken Pale in the Slavic world, the pogroms in that same part of the world, the Holocaust, and the way in which Jews/Israel are being reviled and attacked world-wide now. Maybe I’m missing something here, but life on the receiving end of the knife really doesn’t strike me as a sign of an all-powerful group.
The current “Jews control the world” crowd is at about the same level of sophistication, rationality and intelligence as those who at one and the same time believed both that their neighbors were witches, with magical powers, and that they could capture, torture and murder these same allegedly magical beings without themselves being harmed. Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised, though. Our modern witch/Jew hunters are usually part of the same crowd that simultaneously believes Bush to be one step above a vegetable and the evil mastermind of the world.
Talking to Technorati: Anti-Semitism, Jews, Witches, Repressed memories, Sexual abuse
