Coughing up the Kool-Aid
Bookworm on Mar 01 2009 at 9:36 pm | Filed under: Israel, Jews
Sometimes, things just come together. After shamefully neglecting my facebook, I checked in today and got a letter from a friend, asking why non-Jewish Americans should still support Israel when both American and Israeli Jews have so consistently made bad choices in support of that nation. It’s a good question, and one that deserves an answer.
Interestingly, I had at my fingertips some answers to the question about poor Jewish and Israeli choices, since it was a big topic at a gathering of Marin conservatives that I attended last night, many of whom were Jewish and some of whom were Israelis. The bad choices have truly come back to haunt Jews and Israelis, and it’s worth analyzing them in the hope that we can shift this poisonous paradigm back to rationality before it’s too late.
So, I offer to you the ideas party guests advanced regarding the abysmal policy and ideological failures American and Israeli Jews have supported in the last 20 or so years. (By the way, idea numbers one and two came from Neocon Hippie, a frequent visitor to this blog. He had a third, equally good idea, but I simply can’t remember what it was as I sit here now.)
1. American Jews, like most Americans, wrongly believe Hitler was a right winger, rather than a totalitarian. They’re therefore scared of right wingers.
2. American Jews, like most Americans, wrongly believe Hitler was backed by the church. They’re therefore scared of Christians.
3. American Jews, like most Americans, have fed too long at the trough of moral relativism. They are hampered by the fact that they cannot understand that fighting for evil is different from fighting for good. To them, fighting is fighting. Likewise, to them, peace is peace, even if it’s the Roman desert version.
4. American Jews, like most Americans, believe that people are rational actors and that, if you just talk nicely to them, and explain why their behavior is wrong, they’ll get in line behind you. They cannot understand fanaticism.
5. American Jews attend college in disproportionate numbers compared to the rest of the population. American colleges and universities are true cesspools of ideological thinking and factual misinformation. In other words, Jews are more, rather than less, likely to be entirely misinformed about the situation in the Middle East. (This might actually have been Neocon Hippie’s third idea.)
Israeli Jews have, of course, suffered from precisely the same line of loopy liberal thinking (including the perverted university education), a situation even worse by the fact that the nation was founded as a socialist experiment.
Nevertheless, as the last election in Israel showed, staring death in the face is starting to shake up Israeli Jews. I’m very optimistic about the fact that Bibi, who is a hard headed realist, and a terrorism expert, is going to lead the government. I’m also, in a weird way, optimistic about the fact that Obama is appointing more and more fiercely anti-Israel people in his administration. Israel is going to start thinking about her survival in a very clinical fashion, unhindered by an administration that was theoretically friendly to Israel but that, guided by Condi Rice, was incapable of following through on that support. The collective political intellect, dulled by American protection, is going to toughen up, and that’s probably a good thing.
The bottom line for me is that the current situation will force both American and Israeli Jews to finally start regurgitating the poisonous, ill-informed, multicultural, morally relativistic Kool-Aid they’ve been drinking for so many decades.
So don’t give up on them yet. There’s still hope.
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15 Responses to “Coughing up the Kool-Aid”
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Thanks for the acknowledgement, Bookworm.
The third idea that I mentioned last night was that American Jews believe that the Holocaust was caused by what they see as the ultra-nationalism/patriotism of Nazi Germany. Consequently, they tend to feel negatively about any expression of American patriotism as well as strong Israeli nationalism or Zionism, and believe that the way to avoid another holocaust is via a kind of “can’t we all just get along” mushy one-world internationalism. As such, they tend to have faith in the UN despite its abysmal record of anti-Semitism.
Ah! That was it. And the acknowledgment was your due for some thoughtful and accurate ideas about a serious issue.
The clearest-headed Jews on earth live in Israel, where being surrounded by haters who will kill even their own children to get to you is a cold sandwich that only reality can deliver.
Israel has 200+ nuclear warheads and has made it clear that it will clean up the neighborhood—Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Mecca—if the Islamo-psychos try to take her out. Even a chickenshit like Barack Obama can understand what that means. An out-of-control war in the Middle East could interfere with the work that Allah has sent our Marxist dunce prexy to do, namely reducing the United States to the pathetic condition of a Canada, Cuba or France.
The day of reckoning for American Jews is approaching: Either join the ranks of the self-haters like Chomsky, Soros and Michael Lerner, or man up like Bibi, Moshe, Golda and the other Jews who were not joking when they said, “Never again.”
I think your #5 is key, but needs to be extended. The degree to which an individual is anti-Israel is directly proportional to the degree to which he lives within the force field which centers on academia and is amplified and transmitted by such institutions as NYT, PBS, and NPR. It’s not just *going to college* that does it; it’s remaining within its field of influence within graduation.
This also goes a long way toward explaining why American Evangelicals tend to be pro-Israel…while this is often set down to theological reasons, it is also important that Evangelicals are generally members of social groups in which NYT-reading and NPR-listening is not common.
There is always hope, Book. After all, the horse may yet learn to sing, so des neh.
Btw, the context behind that saying concerns a man slated to be executed promising the King of Persia that if he can make his horse sing that he would then get a pardon. So the King stayed his execution by a year. Now some people then came and talked to the prisoner and asked him “do you really think you can make the horse sing?” Of course, he answered, “No, but in a year’s time, the King may die, I may die, and who knows, maybe the horse will learn to sing”.
Who don’t our third graders in the U.S. have a geography exercise where they take a world map covering Europe, eastern Africa, the Middle East, and western Asia, and color in the countries that are pro-Israel, the countries that are anti-Israel, and the countries that are neutral.
After the shock of looking at such a color-coded map, a lesson about bullies, threats, murder, holocaust, and extinction could shortly follow.
I have worked with Bay Area psychologists and psychiatrists for many years and many of them are Jews. Great people, lots of them. But I have always avoided looking too closely at them in one particular way: the frightening disconnect between the places they perceive and react to anti-Semitism and the places where they seem utterly blind to it.
For example, Carl Jung had some opinions about Jews as a group that were typical of people of his class and time. (And these opinions seem rather benign compared to the bilge our progressive elites now disgorge.) Jewish shrinks get very exercised about this. It is, in real life, a tiny issue of no significance any longer. Ann Coulter opines that Jews should convert to Christianity because it is the fulfillment of the Torah. (Hardly a novel idea.) They become apoplectic.
But these same bright, passionate, curious people become hesitant and highminded and empathetic and guilt-ridden when having to deal with the reality of Muslim masses who truly loathe Jews and who, when given the chance, murder them, sometimes torture and slaughter them, and boast about it.
I have a gay Jewish colleague who condemns me as “a self loathing fag” for having voted for George Bush and who then goes out and raises money for Palestinian Arabs!
It is a disconnect that I avoided looking at because it is so frightening. These folks are in many ways the cream of the crop.
If these people, who not only have a personal history of achievement and intellect and familiarity with the labyrinths of the human psyche, but also a communal history which now includes genocidal Arab hatred of the only piece of land on earth Jews might call their own….if these people are so unable to look reality in the face, it makes me very very nervous about the mind and spine of the West.
Ah, what you share is very interesting, Excathedra. One very common misperception that I have picked up among Jews is that Hitler was a madman and the Nazis were brainless, knuckle-dragging bubbas drooling out of the corners of their mouths. Perhaps this caricature helps to make the monster more understanding.
What these enlightened individuals cannot confront is that the Hitler was actually quite a brilliant man and the National Socialist vision was not all that different from the Leftwing Socialist visions held today (including by many Democrats): Hitler was a vegetarian environmentalist (environmentalism was a major tenet of the Nazi youth movement) atheist who loved animals and children and believed in national health insurance, national retirement plans, national work safety rules, subsidized services, universal education, nationalization of industry, full employment, shovel-ready infrastructure projects (autobahns), and material well-being for all (not only would everybody owning their own homes, they would own their own Volkswagens). So, from a Democrat perspective, what’s there not to like? National socialism was a credo actively supported by German and Austrian academia. Dissenting professors were driven from the University. Of course, the “people” had to be mobilized by community organizers (…they were easy to spot with distinguishing arm bands) in order to achieve all these aims. Sacrifices had to be made for the State to achieve its goal.
The only problem was there were people in the way of creating this Utopia on earth. They were called Jews, disabled people, Slavs and other inferior races. Today, they might be Republicans, Evangelicals and, of course, Jews.
As Ecclesiastes says, there really isn’t anything new under the sun.
So, all those idealistic, well-educated, intellectual Jews seeking Utopia on earth of whom you speak…we’ve seen them before. They went by another label then.
Danny, HEAR HEAR!!!
That was a brilliant and concise summary of Hitler’s National Socialist party. Aka Nazis. Most people out there think the Nazis were reactionary conservatives. Most people couldn’t be more wrong. They have so much in common with today’s liberals that it’s scary. Take away the Nazi genocidal hatreds, and there is little difference. Give the USA some really terrible times that last, say, a decade, and then give the libs a charismatic genocidal leader… yipes. The fascist tendencies have already been on display during the Obama election, as they sought and still seek to suppress dissent, and they demand that we’re all in this together and so we all must toe the same line… or else…
Awesome job spelling it out, Danny!
Thanks, MikeD. Feedback is much appreciated. I guess that I forgot to mention that, under Hitler, Christians were also undesirables (something that most Jews have a hard time recognizing because it goes so much against the popular template). The problem was that there were too many Christians to get rid of so they had to be undermined piece by piece (such as requiring that Mein Kampf replace the Bible on church lecterns).
Book, I would like to add one more item to Neocon Hippie’s list: Tikkun Olam – the idea that it is a person’s duty to “repair” or “perfect” the world. From my understanding (which, as a gentile, may be very limited, I confess). The prayer, I believe, is linked specifically to the goal of “repairing the world under God’s sovereignty”, so it is in a spiritual sense. However, many many marginally religious (if at all) synagogues apply it in a non-spiritual sense and this is where human fallibility, hubris and narcissism come into play to create visions of secular utopias and all their attendent evils.
To truly repair the world, you must first repair yourself.
But they are repairing themselves. Or rather, they believe that so long as they can stay superior to barbarians or others they deem inferior, they will be held pure and able, thus will they cure the world of ills.
Similar to how there are Christians who don’t believe you need a military to protect America cause you need to “turn the other cheek” or as Helen noted before, Jesus would have been a Democrat.
Regarding Jesus, I have no doubt but that the man who violently overturned the money changers’ tables understood the difference between, on the one hand, ignoring minor or inevitable slights and, on the other hand, taking a strong affirmative stand against fundamental wrongs.
Danny – #9
That was fantastic. Thank you.
In concurrence with Danny 9, I’ve read a few of Hitler’s speeches. Not a lot, nor even in the entirety, but they were very rational in the way he promised social change and prosperity.
For example, the justification for locking up gays, Jews, and other undesirables was Goering’s often successful propaganda line that this has made the trains run on time and kept the streets safe. Where in other nations you have corruption and crime, in Germany things are safe.
Now whether that was actually true or not, doesn’t matter, just like reporters didn’t care what was really going on in Soviet Russia or in 2007 Iraq.
What matters is that it feels good. It feels true. It feels like something that “should be right”. That’s what matters to people. But only to the people not currently suffering.