Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Extremism and Displaced Anxiety

A number of stories have appeared in recent weeks about the steep rise in antisemitism in Europe, among them some focusing the rise in Britain, especially London. According to an column in the Boston Globe -- which puts so many moral equivalences into play that the column loses all relevance -- the biggest employer in London is the London Police Department (ponder the implications of that!), and it's response to the rise of "extremism" is for the Police Department to hire more Muslims. Antisemitism swallowed by the generic "extremism," the response to which is to increase the social and cultural influence of those who are -- statistically -- the most likely to espouse antisemitism.

Meanwhile, BBC is airing a documentary by British comedian Stephen Fry which, according to reports (I have not seen it) takes the Brits to task for their reflex anti-Americanism.
In an interview in Good Housekeeping, [Fry] said: "When they mock America for its supposed lack of knowledge, irony or sophistication, they are revealing nothing but the pathetic inadequacy and inferiority complex of the British.
All of which makes this salient comment by Victor David Hanson all the more salient:
European postmodern man offers mostly platitudes that he thinks please those who might be dangerous to him, and finds psychological recompense and solace by gratuitously trashing those who aren't.
Read Hanson's piece here.

1 comment:

Pelican said...

Did you ever consider the possibility that what you call "anti-semitism" might just be caused by the anger at the fact of the manifestly unjust actions of organized Jewry, especially Israel, and the fact that they can get away with it because the rules of discourse impugn any criticism of them as "anti-semitic"?

Consider:

Suppose a German were elected pope. Suppose the Papal States still had
an army, as they did during the Middle Ages. Suppose that after
ascending the throne of Peter, the German pope began bringing Germans to live with him in the Vatican. After a few months it was becoming clear that the Germans who had come to live at the
Vatican at the pope's invitation were now running out of room or, to use the German term, "Lebensraum." As a result the Germans began moving into adjacent
neighborhoods driving the Romans from their homes, killing anyone who resisted, and stealing their property. Whole sections of Rome were ethnically cleansed and the Italians whose
property was confiscated by the Germans
were rounded up and put in refugee or concentration camps, where they
were slowly starved to death by being
deprived of food, electricity and water. Whenever the displaced Romans
complained too loudly, the German pope
would send in his fleet of helicopter gunships and destroy their hospitals, schools, and other public buildings,
especially when the terrorized civilian population would gather there
to escape the bombing. The pope's aircraft, supplied by Germany, would also drop white phosphorus bombs on UN
warehouses containing food for the starving civilian population. Just before the pope launched this campaign of genocide on the ethnically cleansed Italians, he ordered all of the world's bishops to denounce anyone who protested as "anti-Catholic." The bishops also told the pope's troops that they should have no qualms about killing innocent women and children because Italians were racially inferior and because the Italian Liberation organization used them as human shields anyway.

Can anyone seriously imagine world opinion tolerating such a
situation? If not, how is it that world opinion, including the Catholic Church, tolerates what I have described above when Israelis do it to Palestinians? Doesn't the silence over what is happening in Gaza amount to a much more serious form of "holocaust denial" than anything connected even remotely to what Bishop Williamson said?

>