Sunday, January 1, 2023

He is confused about the new antisemitism

Why would a historian of Victor Davis Hanson stature make such a glaring mistake: “Ms. Tlaib knew well that ‘to the sea’ could mean only the extinction of Israel itself and its 9 million Jews”? It could not have escaped his attention that 9 million is the entire population of Israel, which is divided into 6 million Jews and 3 million others that happen to be Muslim, Christian, Druze and of other minorities.

 

The answer to the above question could be that Victor Hanson is signaling early in the conversation he is not serious about the accuracy of what he’s reporting because his interest lies in steering the ongoing humdrum debate on the subject of antisemitism into a direction that will yield more useful insights than have been coming out up to now.

 

You can see him make the attempt in the article he wrote under the title: “New antisemitism masked by a general hatred of Israel,” published on December 29, 2022 in The Washington Times. It is where the writer made the point that the antisemitic hatred of the Right became that of the Left in 1967, attributing the flip to what he called, “the Jewish state’s incredible victory in the 1967 Six-Day War”.

 

But no serious historian that was alive in the aftermath of that so-called war, would say something like this without causing his readers to think that the quote was loaded with inaccuracies. It is that the media in America on both the Left and the Right were dominated by Jews, and they celebrated Israel’s victory for years. It is as if the Japanese were still celebrating what they view as their 1945 victory in the Pacific War simply because they hit America hard at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Likewise, the Jews kept talking about their “1967 war” victory when in reality it was only an air attack that started the six-year war of attrition, at the end of which (in 1973) Israel was soundly defeated and booted out of the Sinai.

 

But while the Jews enjoyed the celebration, basking as they did in a glorious moment that was truly unprecedented in their long sordid history, it also gave them the opportunity to divulge their cannibalistic tendency to live off the flesh and blood of others — figuratively speaking. This happened to them because they believed they were implementing the will of God who chose them to be their favorite children. And this is when the American Left and Right celebrations of Israel, flipped to become America’s Left and Right open expression of antisemitism toward the Jews.

 

All that developed because the confidence that the Jews acquired in their ability to make things happen their way, went so much overboard, they began by mistreating the Palestinians in their own occupied land. Having gotten away with that, the Jews gradually moved up the rungs of the egocentric ladder to a point where every Jewish nobody that wanted it, was given access to the media outlets. And these people used the privilege to remind the political elites of America that their first priority can only be to finance Israel and protect it against real and imagined enemies.

 

Then something far-reaching happened in America, and had a profound bearing on the Jewish situation. In fact, there were two developments, one of which had roots that go back several decades. We need to understand the two phenomena before proceeding with the discussion. It is that in America, as it is everywhere in the world, the human rights movement was started by the oppressed groups. These were the minorities in America, especially that of African descent, being the most visible minority, therefore the most affected by discrimination.

 

Later, the women piggybacked on that movement and started their own drive for liberation. They succeeded beyond their wildest dream but opened the door for the inevitable. It was that a next step was bound to be attempted. This was the transgenderism that’s meant to merge the male and female genders into a single identity, leaving no room for any difference to appear between them. The transformation is taking place now, and we’ll see how far the movement will go before there will be a societal backlash.

 

The other phenomenon was spurred by the principle that greed was good for America, especially in this age of globalization, because it allows small companies to grow and compete against their foreign competitors. But greed that imposes a form of exploitation by definition, does not distinguish between those it exploits. And this is how the idea of the greedy accumulation of wealth without having to work for it, was embraced and adopted by the majority if not the entire population.

 

That description of the current situation painted the position of middleman as being the ideal business to be in. It is the one in which you can get rich quickly by exploiting those who supply you with goods, and those to whom you supply the goods you don’t make yourself. But who are the new middlemen? They are among others, what Victor Hanson calls agents, executives and commissioners. The complaint is that while it is the talented players and the entertainers who create the products that constitute the wealth, it is the middlemen who accumulate and enjoy the money that’s generated by those talents.

 

Finally, the idea of achieving complete equality by the process of merging the genders, added to the idea of the middlemen merging their operations to better exploit the buyers and the sellers, produced a culture of suspicion that’s apparent in the stance that Ye has taken – complaining as he did about being exploited by Jews – and in the stance that Whoopi Goldberg has taken, pointing out as she did that she belongs to a minority that’s visibly identifiable whereas most Jews are not.

 

So then, what did Victor Hanson say about that? He said this: “When in her ignorance, Whoopi Goldberg claimed that the Holocaust was not about race, she was oblivious that Hitler and the Nazis did not believe that Jews were fully human”.

 

Did you get that? Victor Hanson says that Whoopi Goldberg is wrong for not seeing all Jews as being of one and the same race, when Hitler himself and his Nazi collaborators did so. Well, they qualified their response by specifying that the Jews were members of a subhuman race. So what?

 

And based on that, Victor Davis Hanson has called Whoopi Goldberg ignorant. Go figure.