Monday, April 02, 2012
The verdict is in on the Tolouse killings of Jewish children and the villain is that old standby, "Failure to Integrate". What it comes down to is that Mohammed Merah did not kill Jewish children because he hated Jews, because he had breathed in the foul poisonous vapors of a creed which believes Jews to be subhuman devils whose destruction must come to pass before the golden age of Islam finally arrives. Mohammed Merah killed Jews because he was unhappy and it was France that made him unhappy.
Murder across religious and ethnic boundaries in Europe is inevitably a crime against multiculturalism. If someone kills a Muslim, it's an assault on multiculturalism. If a Muslim kills someone, it's also an assault on multiculturalism. Whoever ends up in the morgue, the incident becomes a clarion call for recommitting ourselves to more multiculturalism.
It's unsurprising then that the real villains of the Tolouse killings are Sarkozy for banning burqas, Marine LePen for being critical of Islam and anyone who employs words or images which make Muslims feel unwelcome in France. Alienate a Muslim from French society and before you know it he's shooting up some children in order to express his grievances about integration. Fail to make him happy and the blood of his victims is on your hands.
Tariq Ramadan, the epitome of the modern moderate Muslim thinker, explained that Mohammed Merah was only a bit confused and "soft-hearted". Ramadan does have a point. When Mohammed Merah grabbed a little girl, put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger, he was being soft-hearted by the standards of the Muslim Jihadis back in Afghanistan or Iraq. After all he didn't torture or rape her first. By Islamic mores that is soft-hearted.
As the debate has shifted to Muslim integration, Muslim happiness and how Muslims see the killings, the actual victims of the attack have receded into the distance, over that far horizon where dead Jews go until they are wanted by the champions of progress and enlightenment to make a point about tolerance. That is where the six million sleep, wakened to occasionally stir from the tomb and appear at a Holocaust museum or at a film showing whose message is that we must learn to be more tolerant. But somehow the only people we need to learn to be tolerant of are the people killing us.
Jewish suffering has been universalized into multicultural pablum that has nothing to do with Jews anymore. The hijacking of Jewish history has been so comprehensive that Jews have become the new Nazis in the mythology of multiculturalism. They wear uniforms, don't they. They have a state that they're proud of. And they're fighting against all the Mohammed Merahs who only kill because they haven't gotten their fill of tolerance. Clearly Jews are the new Nazis.
No other ethno-religious group has been subject to the same vile mockery from the left, the complete disregard for their history and civil rights as the Jews. To mention the Holocaust in the context of a potential Jewish genocide is an invitation to being ridiculed or accused of exploiting history, by the same people who shamelessly exploit it when they want to bomb Yugoslavia or protest against budget cuts for minority studies programs.
The left can call anyone and everyone Hitler, but when the Jews point to an actual short dark haired world leader who keeps talking about wiping out Israel, it's just more irrational alarmism. The left imagines that it has acquired the Holocaust by virtue of its moral power and that any effort by the Jews to lay claim to their own history is vile theft. Jewish history, along with black history and Native-American history were acquired by the left when it anointed itself as the defender of the multi-cultural society. And like most copyright owners, it has a limited tolerance for violations of its intellectual property.
If Muslims suffer from a failure to integrate, Jews for the most part have been integrated quite well. They have taken on the habits of the liberal upper classes, copied their politics, their despite for the traditional and the original, and their fetishism of anything different and exotic. There are occasional separatist communities which right-thinking liberal Jews sneer at for their backwardness, but they are for the most part the rare success story of multiculturalism. They became exactly what their hosts wanted them to be.
The trouble though is that their hosts didn't really want to create more Unitarians and Presbyterians with last names like Goldberg or Cohen. Sure they taught them the phrases, created the educational systems and rewarded them for jumping through the right intellectual hoops. But the liberals never really wanted integration to succeed.In their secret hearts, they wanted it to fail. Not just fail, but fail spectacularly in blames and riots so the whole system would come toppling down.
The Jews disappointed Western liberals by becoming like them, but if Western liberals had wanted more copies of themselves, they wouldn't have been trying to tear down their own societies to begin with. The successful integration of the Jews did not win them respect, it earned them contempt from liberals who reserved their respect for the defiant ones, for the rioters and the terrorists.
That contempt isn't limited to Jews. Asians, who insist on studying, striving and succeeding, are held in similar distaste for working, instead of venting their outrage against the system. Anyone who wants to be part of the system, even if it the liberal system, is a toady and not worth bothering with. Unlike the defiant revolutionaries of La Raza or the New Black Panther Party.
Liberal Jews have absorbed that contempt and piled it on their self-hatred, ridiculing Jews for not living up to liberal standards and for trying to live up to them. Even as they pay lip service to liberal verities and the upward march to a progressive world, there is a part of them that that knows there is no escape from their own paradox but disintegration, no way out but the absurd madness that lies at the heart of their work.
Trendy black writers talk about black oppression. Trendy Jewish writers ridicule Jews. Fictional depictions of Holocaust survivors must show twisted people who were warped by their experiences. And the persecution of Jews can never be written about unless the oppressors are safely white and protestant types. And even that is frowned upon. American Jewish literature is a litany of the twisted hatred of Jews from Philip Roth to Nathan Englander. Even John Updike got it on the fun.
How does one talk of Antisemitism in the face of a rigid insistence that Jews are to be the comic sidekick to the Unitarian liberal. Funny people with large noses who occasionally mutter something about the Holocaust, but can be counted on to show up at civil rights rallies, donate to the cause and run some organizations. Not fully trustworthy, but useful except for when they start going on about their own selfish concerns and insist on having their own country just because an old book that most modern people no longer take seriously anymore says they used to have one there.
And of what relevance is Antisemitism anyway, except as a word crudely coined by a man who hated Jews to describe the ideology of hating Jews. Jewish organizations have spent generations battling Antisemitism, as if bigotry and xenophobia could be gotten rid of with a mailing and a donation. And that has only sucked Jews further into the tolerance machine, while failing to understand that defensiveness is no substitute for identity and multiculturalism is no substitute for interests.
Liberal Jews have become the eunuchs in the modern Byzantiums, trusted to administer the system because they have no interests of their own. When Jewish groups are asked to define Jewish interests they inevitably reel off a series of liberal platitudes about immigration, abortion, tolerance and gay rights. It's not that Jewish interests don't exists, it's that they have been steadily excluded from the dialogue space and liberal policies have been treated as their equivalent. Israel is the last stand. It's the last Jewish interest that is specifically ethnic and religious, rather than some vague nostrum about Tikkun Olam and what Jewish values have to say about importing HIV positive Peruvians. And it's no wonder that it's so fiercely under attack.
The eunuchs can be trusted because they have no families and no children. They have no future and so they have no outside interests. They are contemptible for those reasons, but also useful for those reasons. You can trust a eunuch to see to things without worrying that he will selfishly help his own, because he has no 'own', he is an isolate, a dead end, a withered branch. The liberal Jew has the same role and for the same reason. His identity is a transitory thing on the path to integration. He has a future, but not a Jewish future. Like the eunuch, he is a dead branch of the tree.
Everyone knows Jews are clannish. It's one of the stereotypes, right up there with cheap. But the Jewish eunuch can't be clannish, not really, because the eunuch has no clan except his own kind and they aren't much of a worry because eunuchs don't reproduce. They may form their own groups and chatter on about whatever it is eunuchs care about, but everyone knows they have no future. Wait a few generations and they'll be gone.
And that is the trouble with Israel, it is much too alive. It is a Jewish country swarming with Jews. It actually calls on ethnic and religious allegiances. It is the last Jewish interest there is. It is the dream muddying the waters of the eunuch's loyalties. And it has to be destroyed for the liberals eunuchs to keep their place in the bureaucracy of the postmodern borderless state.
The liberal Jewish eunuch hates Israel with a desperate passion that even few Muslims can equal because his entire credibility rests on its destruction or on presenting it as no threat to the beliefs of his liberal masters. Israel has made him seem unreliable and untrustworthy. It emphasizes his impotence and his cowardice. He flies into fits of anxiety over its every move, he tries to reconcile his contradictory roles without being able to fully articulate what is wrong because he has been a eunuch for so long that he no longer remembers that he doesn't have to be one anymore. That he can stop integrating, stop disintegrating and stop universalizing everything and just be himself again.
That is the great crisis of the liberal Jewish eunuch, his history has been castrated and his identity is a comical thing that even he finds absurd. There is no such crisis on the other side of the fence. The Mohammed Merahs and Tariq Ramadans know exactly who they are. They have no identity crisis and no confusing mass of half-formed identities to choose from. They are a knife at the throat and they know it.
The liberal Jewish eunuch may have tried to forget who he is, but the Muslim has not forgotten him. That is the true meaning of Antisemitism, even when Jews forget who they are, the people who hate them still remember. The blood spilled by that knife is accounted by the modernists as part of the sacrifice of multiculturalism. But as the blood spills, even the liberal eunuchs remember that they are not being killed because someone hates multiculturalism, but because someone hates Jews.
Jewish experience has been universalized by the liberal eunuch so as not to be particular or individual, but there is no escaping that particular and individual history because the past is the present and the future. The progressive march to tomorrow is not a golden door to a better world, it is a mirage and behind the mirage is a savage with a knife who has not integrated, who does not believe in all the liberal pieties and has no mercy.
The eunuch can easily become a Dhimmi. The difference between the two is not particularly great. Once again all that stands in the way is Israel. And it is Israel that shows him what he is giving up, that inspires him and infuriates him, that unsettles him with its flavor of old dreams and tales, of wars and heroism, and of a different notion of history than the one that he is used to. And what weighs most heavily on him is that even underneath the liberal pieties, he senses that there is a choice to be made here that will define who he is.
The eunuch let himself be drawn away from his deepest self and that betrayal has long since been forgotten, but the betrayal of Israel will not be as easy as turning away. There will be blood, fire and there will be death. And he will be asked to take a hand in it. But worst of all is his faint suspicious that he will have done it all for nothing. That Israel will survive despite him and having betrayed his past, present and future, he will be left with nothing at all. Not even the satisfaction of having been right all along.
The verdict is in on the Tolouse killings of Jewish children and the villain is that old standby, "Failure to Integrate". What it comes down to is that Mohammed Merah did not kill Jewish children because he hated Jews, because he had breathed in the foul poisonous vapors of a creed which believes Jews to be subhuman devils whose destruction must come to pass before the golden age of Islam finally arrives. Mohammed Merah killed Jews because he was unhappy and it was France that made him unhappy.
It's unsurprising then that the real villains of the Tolouse killings are Sarkozy for banning burqas, Marine LePen for being critical of Islam and anyone who employs words or images which make Muslims feel unwelcome in France. Alienate a Muslim from French society and before you know it he's shooting up some children in order to express his grievances about integration. Fail to make him happy and the blood of his victims is on your hands.
Tariq Ramadan, the epitome of the modern moderate Muslim thinker, explained that Mohammed Merah was only a bit confused and "soft-hearted". Ramadan does have a point. When Mohammed Merah grabbed a little girl, put a gun to her head and pulled the trigger, he was being soft-hearted by the standards of the Muslim Jihadis back in Afghanistan or Iraq. After all he didn't torture or rape her first. By Islamic mores that is soft-hearted.
As the debate has shifted to Muslim integration, Muslim happiness and how Muslims see the killings, the actual victims of the attack have receded into the distance, over that far horizon where dead Jews go until they are wanted by the champions of progress and enlightenment to make a point about tolerance. That is where the six million sleep, wakened to occasionally stir from the tomb and appear at a Holocaust museum or at a film showing whose message is that we must learn to be more tolerant. But somehow the only people we need to learn to be tolerant of are the people killing us.
Jewish suffering has been universalized into multicultural pablum that has nothing to do with Jews anymore. The hijacking of Jewish history has been so comprehensive that Jews have become the new Nazis in the mythology of multiculturalism. They wear uniforms, don't they. They have a state that they're proud of. And they're fighting against all the Mohammed Merahs who only kill because they haven't gotten their fill of tolerance. Clearly Jews are the new Nazis.
No other ethno-religious group has been subject to the same vile mockery from the left, the complete disregard for their history and civil rights as the Jews. To mention the Holocaust in the context of a potential Jewish genocide is an invitation to being ridiculed or accused of exploiting history, by the same people who shamelessly exploit it when they want to bomb Yugoslavia or protest against budget cuts for minority studies programs.
The left can call anyone and everyone Hitler, but when the Jews point to an actual short dark haired world leader who keeps talking about wiping out Israel, it's just more irrational alarmism. The left imagines that it has acquired the Holocaust by virtue of its moral power and that any effort by the Jews to lay claim to their own history is vile theft. Jewish history, along with black history and Native-American history were acquired by the left when it anointed itself as the defender of the multi-cultural society. And like most copyright owners, it has a limited tolerance for violations of its intellectual property.
If Muslims suffer from a failure to integrate, Jews for the most part have been integrated quite well. They have taken on the habits of the liberal upper classes, copied their politics, their despite for the traditional and the original, and their fetishism of anything different and exotic. There are occasional separatist communities which right-thinking liberal Jews sneer at for their backwardness, but they are for the most part the rare success story of multiculturalism. They became exactly what their hosts wanted them to be.
The trouble though is that their hosts didn't really want to create more Unitarians and Presbyterians with last names like Goldberg or Cohen. Sure they taught them the phrases, created the educational systems and rewarded them for jumping through the right intellectual hoops. But the liberals never really wanted integration to succeed.In their secret hearts, they wanted it to fail. Not just fail, but fail spectacularly in blames and riots so the whole system would come toppling down.
The Jews disappointed Western liberals by becoming like them, but if Western liberals had wanted more copies of themselves, they wouldn't have been trying to tear down their own societies to begin with. The successful integration of the Jews did not win them respect, it earned them contempt from liberals who reserved their respect for the defiant ones, for the rioters and the terrorists.
That contempt isn't limited to Jews. Asians, who insist on studying, striving and succeeding, are held in similar distaste for working, instead of venting their outrage against the system. Anyone who wants to be part of the system, even if it the liberal system, is a toady and not worth bothering with. Unlike the defiant revolutionaries of La Raza or the New Black Panther Party.
Trendy black writers talk about black oppression. Trendy Jewish writers ridicule Jews. Fictional depictions of Holocaust survivors must show twisted people who were warped by their experiences. And the persecution of Jews can never be written about unless the oppressors are safely white and protestant types. And even that is frowned upon. American Jewish literature is a litany of the twisted hatred of Jews from Philip Roth to Nathan Englander. Even John Updike got it on the fun.
How does one talk of Antisemitism in the face of a rigid insistence that Jews are to be the comic sidekick to the Unitarian liberal. Funny people with large noses who occasionally mutter something about the Holocaust, but can be counted on to show up at civil rights rallies, donate to the cause and run some organizations. Not fully trustworthy, but useful except for when they start going on about their own selfish concerns and insist on having their own country just because an old book that most modern people no longer take seriously anymore says they used to have one there.
And of what relevance is Antisemitism anyway, except as a word crudely coined by a man who hated Jews to describe the ideology of hating Jews. Jewish organizations have spent generations battling Antisemitism, as if bigotry and xenophobia could be gotten rid of with a mailing and a donation. And that has only sucked Jews further into the tolerance machine, while failing to understand that defensiveness is no substitute for identity and multiculturalism is no substitute for interests.
Liberal Jews have become the eunuchs in the modern Byzantiums, trusted to administer the system because they have no interests of their own. When Jewish groups are asked to define Jewish interests they inevitably reel off a series of liberal platitudes about immigration, abortion, tolerance and gay rights. It's not that Jewish interests don't exists, it's that they have been steadily excluded from the dialogue space and liberal policies have been treated as their equivalent. Israel is the last stand. It's the last Jewish interest that is specifically ethnic and religious, rather than some vague nostrum about Tikkun Olam and what Jewish values have to say about importing HIV positive Peruvians. And it's no wonder that it's so fiercely under attack.
The eunuchs can be trusted because they have no families and no children. They have no future and so they have no outside interests. They are contemptible for those reasons, but also useful for those reasons. You can trust a eunuch to see to things without worrying that he will selfishly help his own, because he has no 'own', he is an isolate, a dead end, a withered branch. The liberal Jew has the same role and for the same reason. His identity is a transitory thing on the path to integration. He has a future, but not a Jewish future. Like the eunuch, he is a dead branch of the tree.
Everyone knows Jews are clannish. It's one of the stereotypes, right up there with cheap. But the Jewish eunuch can't be clannish, not really, because the eunuch has no clan except his own kind and they aren't much of a worry because eunuchs don't reproduce. They may form their own groups and chatter on about whatever it is eunuchs care about, but everyone knows they have no future. Wait a few generations and they'll be gone.
And that is the trouble with Israel, it is much too alive. It is a Jewish country swarming with Jews. It actually calls on ethnic and religious allegiances. It is the last Jewish interest there is. It is the dream muddying the waters of the eunuch's loyalties. And it has to be destroyed for the liberals eunuchs to keep their place in the bureaucracy of the postmodern borderless state.
The liberal Jewish eunuch hates Israel with a desperate passion that even few Muslims can equal because his entire credibility rests on its destruction or on presenting it as no threat to the beliefs of his liberal masters. Israel has made him seem unreliable and untrustworthy. It emphasizes his impotence and his cowardice. He flies into fits of anxiety over its every move, he tries to reconcile his contradictory roles without being able to fully articulate what is wrong because he has been a eunuch for so long that he no longer remembers that he doesn't have to be one anymore. That he can stop integrating, stop disintegrating and stop universalizing everything and just be himself again.
The liberal Jewish eunuch may have tried to forget who he is, but the Muslim has not forgotten him. That is the true meaning of Antisemitism, even when Jews forget who they are, the people who hate them still remember. The blood spilled by that knife is accounted by the modernists as part of the sacrifice of multiculturalism. But as the blood spills, even the liberal eunuchs remember that they are not being killed because someone hates multiculturalism, but because someone hates Jews.Jewish experience has been universalized by the liberal eunuch so as not to be particular or individual, but there is no escaping that particular and individual history because the past is the present and the future. The progressive march to tomorrow is not a golden door to a better world, it is a mirage and behind the mirage is a savage with a knife who has not integrated, who does not believe in all the liberal pieties and has no mercy.
The eunuch can easily become a Dhimmi. The difference between the two is not particularly great. Once again all that stands in the way is Israel. And it is Israel that shows him what he is giving up, that inspires him and infuriates him, that unsettles him with its flavor of old dreams and tales, of wars and heroism, and of a different notion of history than the one that he is used to. And what weighs most heavily on him is that even underneath the liberal pieties, he senses that there is a choice to be made here that will define who he is.
The eunuch let himself be drawn away from his deepest self and that betrayal has long since been forgotten, but the betrayal of Israel will not be as easy as turning away. There will be blood, fire and there will be death. And he will be asked to take a hand in it. But worst of all is his faint suspicious that he will have done it all for nothing. That Israel will survive despite him and having betrayed his past, present and future, he will be left with nothing at all. Not even the satisfaction of having been right all along.