The progressive movement is, for all intents and purposes, telling Jews that our only moral option is suicide.
{Calm down and listen, please.}
It is in the name of social justice that Israel is constantly and forever lambasted by the left. This is not in doubt. The prevailing view on the left is that Israel is an occupying power. It is also a colonial pawn of the United States as well as, somehow or other, the tail that wags the American dog.
How it can be both is anyone's guess, but those tend to be common "criticisms."
When anti-Zionist and anti-Israel progressives catapult such narratives, which they do on a daily basis within such venues as Daily Kos, they regularly use themes closely associated with traditional anti-Semitism. Those themes include the blood libel, i.e., that the Jewish state intentionally targets innocent civilians and children, and most commonly the notion that Jews secretly control the US government or media.
This is the blood libel. It is the medieval trope updated for the current moment. What we see above in Oliphant's cartoon... and, remember, Oliphant is the foremost political cartoonist in the entire world... is the Jew as Nazi and merciless killer. It's a very interesting cartoon, actually. But it is also pure poison and hatred.
It tells the world that Jews like to kill children. But this is the very same message that is told about us every generation. Are we supposed to believe that this time, after 2,000 years of persecution, that we really deserve it?
I do not think so.
What we are being told is that when Jews are attacked, which we are routinely in the Middle East, our only moral option is to allow ourselves to be slaughtered. If Israel responds to the never ending rocketing of S'derot and Ashkelon than the progressives will scream to the heavens about Israeli aggression. Thus our only moral option, for our friends on the left, is our own deaths.
That is the moral imperative that we are presented with.
Another big theme among progressive-left racists is the idea from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion that Jews secretly control the government and / or media, behind the scenes, pulling the strings, like a giant octopus with many tentacles. This bit of anti-Jewish racism is exceedingly popular among progressives and "liberals." They love to tell one another that the reason most Americans are supportive of the Jewish state is because the evil AIPAC controls the US government and media. This is precisely the kind of thing that Hitler thought about the Weimar Republic.
We cannot, therefore, doubt that considerable anti-Semitism does come from the left and does so, ironically enough, under the banner of "human rights" and "social justice." This is what is so perverse about current anti-Semitic voices. They claim to stand for essential human decency even as they single us out for slaughter.
And that's the main point. Anti-Semitism, unlike other forms of racism, is genocidal.
Today, at least in the west, other forms of racism generally have economic, and other, consequences on the targeted group. What it doesn't result in is full on efforts to slaughter those people. What is distinct about anti-Semitism is that it always leads to violence against the Jews.
Thus progressive-left anti-Semitism, marching under the guise of social justice, is in fact a genocidal movement, which is why it tends to ally itself with the Radical Jihad.
There's a reason why the Jihadis aboard the Mavi Marmara were supported by western leftists. It's because the Jihad is anti-Semitic to the core and the progressive-left is comfortable with anti-Semitism.
We see it every day on Daily Kos.
They just love toying with genocidal anti-Semitism over there. The guy in the picture above was one of the "peace activists" aboard the ship, the Turkish Mavi Marmara, that sought to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza.
He has got considerable support on the progressive-left.
It's a forbidden thrill.
Forbidden thrill. Interesting concept and I have toyed with the concept sometimes myself. Glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks that way. But then from Che Guevara t-shirts to keffiyahs, they have always identified with murderers.
ReplyDeletePaul Berman noted in one of his books, either Terror and Liberalism or The Flight of the Intellectuals, that it was during the very height of the second intifada, when Jews were being slaughtered in the streets of Israel, that that was also the height of progressive-left denunciation of Jewish Israelis.
ReplyDeleteThere's a sadism that goes along with all this, Doodad.
A dirty little secret and a forbidden thrill.