Saving Corporal Shalit

In an article that complements Caroline Glick’s, below, Diana West has discovered the true framework for understanding the meaning and intention of the Israeli faux-incursion into the Palestinian territories: Steven Spielberg’s wretched Saving Private Ryan, about which she writes:

The “mess” in question [in Spielberg’s movie], of course, is World War II. Defeating Hitler, for example, ending fascism in Europe, even liberating the remnant of European Jewry from Nazi death camps all fail to garner for the U.S. Army the mega-director’s cinematic approval. The fantasy rescue of a single GI from combat, however, becomes not just a cause celebre, but the Spielbergian casus belli.

This is exactly right. Modern liberals do not recognize anything higher or larger than the individual. Saving our country or our civilization—who cares? Saving one person—ahh, that’s a sacred cause, that’s something we can sink our teeth into.

In one of my earlier posts on the incursion I corrected myself and said the incursion was was a principled exception after all, rather than an unprincipled one, because there are certain things the Israelis will not accept, such as taking one of their people hostage. But this only confirms my point about liberalism: for liberals, the protection of an individual is a principle, the protection of one’s society from its mortal enemies is not.

This is not to diminish the threat of torture and a horrible death that hangs over Cpl. Shalit, since in Spielberg’s post-Sixties narcissistic vision, it was a matter of removing one soldier from the possibility of being killed in combat. But the principle is the same.

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Dimitri writes:

You are in general right about Saving Corporal Shalit. however, there is something Israeli-specific here. Olmert would not move a finger for a settler, or for citizens of Sderot, who are bombarded every day but are mostly from Morocco and Russia. However a soldier in Israel symbolizes (though it may be not true) a young, non-religious European (Ashkenazi) Jew, who has to spend the precious years of his life in the army instead of visiting cafe, making love etc. It is the leftist and Olmert’s base, and Olmert must at least show that he tried to save Shalit.
P.S. Leftist Israeli governments, like this one or Rabin’s one, sometimes make severe assaults on Arabs, but then retreat very fast without any result. It seems to me that the aim of such strike is only to show that they are strong guys. And strange as it is, international community usually does not strongly condemn those useless strikes. The thing that they really condemn is Jews living on some part of Israel. I guess, if Jews lived on the ships in Mediterranean sea, but from time to time bombarded Arab cities, nobody would object.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 30, 2006 12:17 PM | Send