Yeah, this street-smart liberal Jewish woman really knows her friends from her enemies

I will present two quotations without further comment, except to say that the second quote almost perfectly illustrates the truth of the first quote, and much else besides.

The first is from my 2004 article at FrontPage Magazine, “Why Jews Welcome Moslems”:

Now, when Jews put together the idea that “all bigotry is indivisible,” with the idea that “any social prejudice or exclusion directed against Jews leads potentially to Auschwitz,” they must reach the conclusion that any exclusion of any minority group, no matter how alien it may be to the host society, is a potential Auschwitz.

So there it is. We have identified the core assumption that makes many liberal and neoconservative Jews keep pushing relentlessly for mass immigration, even the mass immigration of their mortal enemies. As these Jews see it, any immigration restrictions against Moslems would release a latent ethnocentrism in the white American majority that would then turn instantly against the Jews. To state this thought process in the baldest terms, these Jews believe that if philo-Semitic white gentiles exclude Jew-hating Moslems from America, it would lead those same gentiles to commit another Jewish Holocaust.

The second quote is from an article in Opinion Journal by a female Israeli academic who goes by the rather extravagant name of Fania Oz-Salzberger:

Last September the European Coalition for Israel convened in Brussels, its most prominent speakers lamenting the loss of European Jewry alongside the rise of European Islam. The tone was belligerent, the linkage crude: “The enemies of Israel are also a threat to Europe,” delegates were told. And also: “In only two generations, most parts of Europe will be under Islamic law.” Other self-declared friends grimly speak of Londonistan and augur the coming of the European Caliphate. Such statements may reflect genuine concern, but are disconcerting when made on European soil.

Unlike the late Oriana Fallaci, whose commitment to the Jews stemmed from her heroic anti-Fascist youth, and whose harsh critique of Islam came from an enraged liberal soul, many of these new friends are Muslim-bashers first and Israel-backers second. Their blanket condemnation of Muslim communities on their continent rings eerily familiar. Their sweeping verdict against a whole civilization has that strange déjà vu feel. And their rather sudden nostalgia for Europe’s lost Jews is, I’m sorry to say, far too late and somewhat suspect. As the Mishna wisely warns, “Any love that depends upon some thing, when that thing is no more, the love is no more.” You see, we have a very long experience with human relationships.

I, for one Israeli, would be grateful to my newfound buddies if their sympathy for me did not rely on the trashing of another religion. Unlike them, I’m touched by the sight of young Muslim women in European university campuses. They remind my of my own grandmother, a student in Prague who had to flee after the Nazi rise to power, and of all the other young and hopeful Jews whose dreams and lives were shattered by the European culture they so admired. I will therefore not solicit support based on unqualified dislike of other human groups, least of all on the continent that kicked out my grandparents.

- end of initial entry -

Here follow discussions that branch off into different but related topics:

Phillips on Islam and Islamism

Defending Islam critics such as herself from the self-important liberal idiot Fania Oz-Salzberger, whose Opinion Journal article she justly describes as a “piece of unadulterated trash,” Melanie Phillips writes:

In my book, I explicitly draw a distinction between Islam and Islamism, precisely in order not to demonise those Muslims who are genuinely committed against the ideology of hatred and conquest that is driving the jihad.

But later in the same entry she writes:

Yes, it’s true that medieval Islamic rule did not inflict upon the Jews horrors as great as those inflicted by medieval Christendom. Unlike the Christians, the Muslims didn’t slaughter all the Jews unless they converted; it only slaughtered some of them in periodic pogroms. The ‘golden age’ of Sephardi Jewry was a brief and atypical affair. Even then, the Jews in Muslim lands were forced to live as ‘dhimmi’ or second class citizens: made to pay special taxes, to live under a host of humiliating restrictions and to wear clothes designed to single them out as a lowly caste.

Leaving aside Phillips’s sweeping unqualified statement that Christians “slaughtered all the Jews unless they converted,” she’s saying that Muslims in the Middle Ages slaughtered Jews in periodic pogroms (true), and that Muslims forced Jews to live as dhimmis (also true, though she doesn’t mention the far vaster number of Christian dhimmis).

Now, were the Muslims who slaughtered Jews and subjected them to dhimmi status following Islam, or “Islamism”? Obviously they were following Islam. What then is the basis of Phillips’s distinction between a good Islam and a bad Islamism?

Miss Phillips doesn’t want to get any e-mail from me. But would someone ask her this?

Phillips on Christian slaughters of Jews

I asked Andrew Bostom:

What bothered me was Phillips’s statement that Christians slaughtered all the Jews unless they converted. The unqualified language makes it sound as if they slaughtered all the Jews of Europe. But even if she only means individual incidents, what were these incidents? I seem to remember something that happened in York, England where a group of Jews chose death rather than conversion. But how often did such things happen? (Further, according to Wikipedia, the massacres in London and York were the actions of criminal mobs, not constituted authorities.)

Dr. Bostom replied:

They did happen periodically throughout Europe, and not just England—France and Germany as well during the Middle Ages, and Spain under the Visigoths during the 7th century. Expulsion too was an outcome. But there were epochs of tolerance as well. Carolingian France; late Middle Ages Poland…Phillips is unaware of this history. All I can say, is that the greatest Jewish intellectuals of the Middle Ages—Maimonides, Yehuda Halevi—saw NO great advantage whatsoever to living under Islamdom versus Christianity.

Legitimate criticism of Jews

In response to Oz-Salzberger’s article, a reader writes:

… the problem is that too many liberal Jews hate Western culture, faith, morality, art even, and loath the host-society’s tradition more than they fear the Caliphate & Sharia. In human affairs hatred is, and always has been, a more powerful motivator than fear.

LA replies:

This is a legitimate point and I think there is a way of bringing it out in public debate that is non-anti-Semitic, by basing ourselves on discrete and demonstrated facts. Bernard Lewis for example, has a demonstrable anti-Christian animus and agenda, expressed through gross historical lies which have the effect of delegitimizing Europe and advancing Islam.

Another example, which I have written about, is the Jewish tendency to identify with and sentimentalize minorities. Look at Oz-Salzberger’s song and dance about the young Muslim women on European campuses who remind her of her grandmother! This is something you see coming frequently from Jewish writers. They see non-Western immigrants through the filter of their own family saga, and thus embrace them unconditionally, no questions or criticisms allowed. Well, that is not a legitimate basis for conducting a debate on immigration policy and other national policies, as I pointed out in Huddled Clichés.

My point is that the Christian majority can engage in legitimate, non-anti-Semitic criticism of the Jewish minority it if points to specific behaviors by that minority that are not right and that can be changed. For example, if Jews come out and explicitly tell the world that their mission in life as Jews is to advance minorities at the expense of majority and national cultures, or that their sacred moral obligation as Jews is to demand open borders (I have several quotes along those lines from early 2006 when the debate over the the “Comprehensive” immigration and amnesty bill was heating up and many Jewish writers and spokesmen were expressing their support for open borders with an unprecedented degree of frankness and passion), then that is an objectionable position that can be challenged as such, in a rational and moral way. But this to my knowledge has never been done. Modern society seems to have only two modes of dealing with Jews: accommodation, or anti-Semitism. The middle way, rational criticism of Jews when it is called for, never occurs to anyone. And further, because Jews are rational people, if they get a message from the majority that they, the Jews, are transgressing the boundaries, the Jews will recognize that and modify their behavior. But in the absence of any resistance and criticism, the Jews, like anyone else, indulge their normal self-aggrandizing impulses.

But for your standard liberal Jews (Oz-Salzberger) and neoconservative Jews (Norman Podhoretz, whose statements I was commenting on in the quote at the beginning of this blog entry), what I’ve just said is anti-Jewish bigotry, because “all bigotry is indivisible.” To say that certain Jewish ideas and tendencies are not good for society and ought to be restrained, is part of a continuum that leads to Auschwitz. To say that Muslims (or Islamists if you prefer) are a threat to European society, leads to Auschwitz. Oz-Salzberger thus sides with the virulently anti-Jewish Muslims over the Europeans who are trying to do something about them.

Neoconservatism, modern liberalism, and right-liberalism

LA continues:

I just realized something else. I’ve often said that modern liberalism, which began after WWII, is defined by its demand for the elimination of all discrmination, an idea that, if carried out consistently, would make the preservation of any traditional society or institution impossible. Norman Podhoretz says that even social exclusions of Jews lead to Auschwitz and that all bigotry is indivisible, from which it follows that all forms of discrimination must be eliminated. Therefore Podhoretz is a modern liberal.

In other words, even if you are called a neoconservative, if you take the common Jewish position that no discrimination of any kind against any group can be allowed because any discrimination of any kind against any group is likely to turn into the mass murder of Jews, then you are by definition a modern liberal. And the modern liberal ideology of anti-discrimination is incompatible with the existence of any nation or culture or traditional institution on earth.

Of course this ideology is not limited to Jews. All that is needed to have the destructive effect on civilization I’ve mentioned is consistent right-liberalism—meaning the elimination of all discrimination that excludes individuals based on their group attributes or group membership.

Any confusion created by my use of the terms “modern liberalism” and “right-liberalism” could be resolved by saying that we’re talking about “modern right-liberalism,” by which I mean the increasingly consistent devotion of right-liberalism to the elimination of discrimination, starting around 1945 and extending to the present. The older right-liberalism corresponds roughly with classical liberalism. It emphasized individual rights, just as modern right-liberalism does, but the rights it emphasized were such rights as economic self-determination, freedom from government regulation, defense of the right of free association, and the legitimacy of the nation as a community of rights-bearing individuals who have instituted a government in order to secure their individual and common rights. Over the last several decades that older right-liberalism has, with increasing speed, turned into a systematic attack on discrimination. In place of the old right-liberal idea of free men forming a social contract and a national government which has the natural rights of self-determinination and sovereignty including whom to admit or not to admit into the country, we now have the current Wall Street Journal version of right-liberalism which denies any right of a nation to decide whom to admit or not to admit. The prohibition of discrimination—at least discrimination by Western nations and their respective majority cultures—has become the One Ring that Rules All Others. And in that regard, right-liberalism and left-liberalism are one.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 10, 2007 11:59 PM | Send