There was a time in the decades of the 1960s and 1970s that
when someone committed a horrible crime such as those we see committed on a
regular basis today, the people that were referred to as bleeding heart
liberals jumped to their wobbly legs and gave off knee-jerk reactions to the
effect that the crime was not the fault of the poor thing but the fault of
society as a whole.
This was the age of permissiveness that was what it was –
not in the sense that everyone could do what they wanted to do as long as they
did not hurt their neighbors but in the sense that they could do what they
wanted even if it hurt their neighbors. It was reasoned that the individual was
the product of his or her society, therefore the victim of it if they did not
turn out well, and made victims of their own by their criminal activities.
Decades have passed and society has managed to put an end to
this nonsense to a great extent. It did so by making it imperative to think in
terms of personal responsibility. Nowadays, when crackpots shoot people in a
theater, a school or a public place, they are not called victims of society
that did what they did out of necessity but recognized for what they are; cold
blooded killers to whom society makes certain that justice is done. And they
are made to pay for their deeds according to the law.
So now comes this American academic, Victor Davis Hanson,
who sits at the extreme end of the political right wing, and tells us that
Netanyahu of Israel may be cranky but his crankiness is necessary. So you ask:
Why is that? And he answers: The human society is at fault for; it is what made
him cranky. Thus, society is responsible for what Netanyahu does, and he is as
much a victim of it as the victims he creates by his activities. It is that
Hanson is harking back to old and discredited ideas which he spins from a right
wing point of view. This makes him not a wobbly, knee-jerking bleeding heart
liberal but a wobbly, knee-jerking bleeding heart illiberal.
His latest presentation in this area is spelled out in an
article he wrote under the title: “Netanyahu's Necessary Crankiness” and the
subtitle: “We can afford to be overly optimistic about Iran , but Israel can't.” It was published on
October 10, 2013 in National Review Online. It has to do with the evolution of Iran 's ties with America
as redefined by the relationship that Iran 's President Hassan Rouhani is
forging with the “Western elites.”
Rouhani has wowed those elites, says Hanson, but he tells
the media not to “ignore the circumstances of Rouhani's three-decade trajectory
to power.” This means that Hanson regards the man as being the product of his
own history. If we accept this view, we must apply it equally to everyone else,
including those who are threatened by Rouhani's rise to power. This would be
Netanyahu and what he calls the Jewish people, which he says he represents and
seeks to protect from the likes of Rouhani.
Victor Hanson admits that Netanyahu sounds unyielding and
ready to start an unnecessary war, thus making Israel
look more trigger-happy than Iran .
He also admits that it is possible Rouhani is “eager to open up Iran 's nuclear
facilities for inspection.” To believe this is to take a chance, says Hanson.
He adds it is a chance that America
can take but Israel
cannot.
Why not? You want to know. It is the Holocaust, he says, a
devastation that was the latest manifestation of humanity's inhuman treatment
of the Jews. Because of this history and because of the geographical realities
that place Israel closer to
danger than America ,
Netanyahu sounds neurotic, he admits. But he adds that Netanyahu would sound
utopian if the comparisons with America
were reversed. And so, he concludes that Netanyahu cannot take a chance with
Rouhani being sincere, which is why he and Israel sound suspicious and cranky.
Okay, but two issues remain unresolved. Why is it that
humanity has unanimously and throughout time treated the Jews so shabbily? And
what is it in Netanyahu's own history that makes him so different from normal
human beings, indeed from other Israeli leaders?
To answer the second question, we look into the speech that
Netanyahu gave at the UN General Assembly in September of 2013. He recounted
this incident: “One cold day in the late 19th century, my grandfather and his
younger brother were ... seen by a group of anti-Semitic hoodlums who ran
towards them waving clubs, screaming 'Death to the Jews.' They beat him
senseless. He promised himself he would take his family to a Jewish homeland
[and] kept that promise. So many other Israelis have a similar story, a parent
or grandparent who fled every conceivable oppression and came to Israel .”
Netanyahu was not born in the 19th century, and if he knows
this story, it is because it was passed on from generation to generation. But
we know that however accurately a story is told by a parent or a grandparent to
a child, it tends to take on bigger dimensions than it deserves. Thus, it
leaves impressions that can motivate someone to go into a theater, a school or
a public place and kill people simply because they are there. Such stories can
also motivate someone to seek office, and grow up to become a Stalin, a
Milosevic, a Charles Taylor, a Pol Pot or a Netanyahu.
We now answer the first question. Humanity has treated the
Jews shabbily everywhere and throughout time because people have been telling
each other stories of that kind. Even when they intermarry with people of other
ethnic backgrounds, they pass the real and imagined pain – however accurate or
exaggerated they may be – to them, thus make them behave neurotically and
obnoxiously. And this is what can turn the fiction into a self-fulfilled
reality that the Jews, no matter their background, are made to suffer.
This sort of scenarios used to unfold by word of mouth. They
are now done on a mass scale with the sprouting of Holocaust memorials
everywhere, and the organizing of trips that take young people to sites said to
be the places where the Holocaust has taken place.
And this is creating a time bomb that is packed not with
fissionable material such as a nuclear bomb, but worse than that: a million
ready to explode netanyahus.
And when this happens, no one will say that the human
society is at fault, or excuse the Jews for what they have become. Instead,
many will begin to see the wisdom in that some sort of final solution must be
found and implemented.
Let's avoid this possible outcome by telling such apologists
as Victor Davis Hanson that he is misguided.