Boycotters on the couch
To those who’ve been paying attention to the growth of anti-Israelism on campus, the ASA boycott was predictable.
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The same is true – or will be true – in much of America, where the history book most widely used in high schools is Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, which teaches that America was born in sin, stealing the land from the Indians, and steeped in racism, enslaving the blacks. America, the book argues, continues to exploit innocent Third Worlders through a sophisticated imperialism.Many parents will doubt that their college students feel guilt about their middle class prosperity. But just ask them to explain why Middle Easterners, Asians and Africans are so much poorer than we are. Then ask them if they think they deserve to have so much more.Many, the most sensitive perhaps, need a way to come to terms with this inequity. The Left – often through public school and campus curricula – teaches them the way.As with Rousseau, Bruckner explains, modern alienated Westerners, thinking about unmodern people, fantasize of “noble savages” – unspoiled innocents whose natural and admirable lives should be left untouched by Western exploiters. Today, the noblest savage – the one who has come to represent the primary victim of Western malignance – is the Palestinian.I imagine that in the minds of the leftist ASA boycotters, one can find the fantasies of Georges Montaron, cited by Bruckner, who writes that the “hero is the Fedayeen, the living image of the liberator, like Che Guevara...the Palestinian resistance is a flame that lights the way of the oppressed...”The international Left, having failed to win over the working class, pivoted and invested its hopes in the anti-Western Third World, but especially in the Arab/ Muslim world. Terrorist attacks on Western civilians are ascribed by leftist professors to Arab/Muslim humiliation over the creation of Israel. Islam has become, in the eyes of leftist “thinkers,” the “religion of the oppressed.”Noble savages have no agency: they cannot themselves be racist, homophobic, anti-Semitic terrorists – because they are our victims and they only act (justifiably!) in response to that. The 9/11 attackers are described as poor wretches protesting against our insolent wealth, our way of life, our predatory economy.Jacques Derrida, a fixture of university English Lit courses, explains that we Westerners are the real terrorists, as we “let” people in the Third World die from AIDS. Again, the general reading public may find this too bizarre to take seriously. This would be a big mistake.Ask your kids.People who support the Palestinians, Bruckner writes, “are not so much engaged in inquiring into a specific antagonism – a real estate dispute involving two equally legitimate owners – as in settling accounts with Western culture.”For middle class European and American students, who cannot explain their own relative prosperity without feeling guilt, Palestinianism can be a therapeutic.By hating the primary symbol of Western abomination, theft and cruel exploitation in the Middle East – that is, by hating the Jews of Israel – they exonerate themselves. They wipe away the sins of their own undeserved prosperity.Understanding this psychodrama, and the “intellectual” work behind it, can help us win the campus battles.We need to speak to those campus converts to Palestinianism.We need to show them gently how their need to feel morally pure, to escape the moral taint their professors have imposed on them, has them lionizing barbarism and abandoning true liberal principles.Yes, the Palestinians suffer, we need to explain, but so much less than so many others, and so much of this is due to their errors and conduct. We need to show America’s youth that those Enlightenment ideas which have been so twisted could mobilize people of courage and character to side with the Middle Easterners who are most oppressed and threatened: today’s Christians, women, slaves, gays, and yes, today’s Jews.The writer was named one of America’s top 50 Jewish leaders by The Forward. He is the president of Americans for Peace and Tolerance in Boston and is widely known.
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