“A derangement of the world”

Melanie Phillips quotes William Shawcross, who has powerful words about the world’s attack on Israel:

It is not surprising that such racist loathing creates a siege mentality in Israel. Worse is the fact that Israelis know it’s not just ‘the black Islamic banners’ with which they have to contend, but also the irrational hatred of much of the rest of the world.

The realities of Gaza, Israel and the West Bank—where, with Israel’s assistance, the Palestinian economy is booming—are deemed irrelevant to the conventional narrative. Israel is a cartoon villain, beyond sympathy, beyond even redemption.

What is deeply shocking—and frightening—is that the narrative the world accepts is always that of Israel the evildoer… The hatred that Israel arouses is absurd, even obscene… The Muslim world and the Western Left are in an unholy alliance; they do not want to improve the Jewish state, they want to remove it.

To which Phillips adds her own powerful words:

The treatment being meted out to Israel is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the treatment meted out to any other nation. Ever. It’s not just that the tyrannies of the present are not even reported on, let alone seen as a worthy and legitimate target of protest. Even the great progressive causes of the past, such as the campaign against apartheid South Africa, for example, never provoked such hysterical obsession, let alone such a sustained and frenzied onslaught of lie after distortion after fabrication after blood libel. Just like the Jew-hatred of the past, the characteristics of this victimisation are unique; just like the Jew-hatred of the past, it treats the Jewish people as some kind of cosmic evil; and just like the Jew-hatred of the past, ultimately it simply defies explanation. But it is happening, right now, before our disbelieving eyes; it is quite simply a derangement of the world.

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Posted June 12

D. from Seattle writes (June 10):

Melanie Phillips wrote: “The treatment being meted out to Israel is qualitatively and quantitatively different from the treatment meted out to any other nation. Ever.”

I believe this is not correct: Serbs, for example, have been demonized to no end for about 10—15 years, from the early 1990s till about early to mid 2000s, and for quite similar reasons, i.e. for armed resistance to Jihad and Islamic insurgency (there of course was an ethnic/national component in the mix, but religious component was dominant, IMO). The difference between Israel and Serbia is that the demonization of Serbia ended a few years after its defeat, i.e. after Serbia de facto, if not de jure, accepted the partition of its territory.

Since Israel has been much more successful in defending itself (militarily, politically, economically, etc) we see a prolonged campaign of demonization of Israel, so people forget that other countries have been in similar circumstances in the past, but that those simply haven’t been able to resist as long as Israel has. I hope Israel will continue to resist its enemies successfully and that it ultimately prevails.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 09, 2010 09:47 PM | Send