Coughing up the Kool-Aid
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.
