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 What
the Jews won't tell you
Why is it that the subject
of Jews enflames so many passions? I stand by my
contention that paranoia suffused outgoing Malaysian
Prime Minister Mahathir Mohammed's Islamic Conference
speech on October 16 in last week's column Mahathir Is Right: The Jews Do Run The
World. But paranoia
is only part of the story; after all, Dr Mahathir does
not imagine that Gypsies or Armenians are out to get
him.
There is something more to say about this,
which the Jews will not admit to you, if indeed they
admit it to themselves. It is what Protestant
theologians once called "the scandal of election". More
on this below.
"Where there is smoke, there also
must be fire," many Asians think to themselves when they
hear how much hatred the Jews seem to elicit. There must
be more too it than a territorial dispute in the Eastern
Mediterranean. It is not just Muslims who hate and fear
the Jews. In Europe, according to a November 1 report in
the Spanish newspaper El Pais, a new opinion poll by the
European Commission shows that Europeans think Israel is
more dangerous than North Korea or Iran.
Is it
possible that so many people hate the Jews for no reason
whatever? How can a people that comprise just
three-hundredths of a percent of the world population
provoke so much rancor?
There is something more
to it, and it is not the delusion that a Jewish
conspiracy controls the United States. American Jews
require no conspiracy to exercise influence, as they do
so in the full light of day in the rough-and-tumble of
democracy. Arab-American organizations do precisely the
same thing, albeit with poorer results. So does Saudi
Arabia. It is entirely possible to believe that American
policy, too, heavily favors Israel, as do Howard Dean
and Patrick Buchanan, without going over the deep end.
Jews protest that they are no different from any
other minority, and that anti-Semitism amounts to a
mental disease. Of these organizations, the most
authoritative on matters of anti-Semitism is the Simon
Wiesenthal Center of Los Angeles, whose website offers
the following gem:
"The philosopher Jean-Paul
Sartre ... emphasized that it is not the anti-Semite's
personal experience with Jews that evokes his hatred
toward them, but rather his tendency to see the source
of his own personal failings in his abstract perception
of Jews. Psychologists explain this type of antipathy in
times of stress as a projection of the frustration of
the modern anonymous masses and the consequences of this
frustration on an object outside their circle. The Jew
is the available scapegoat and meets these basically
paranoid needs. In periods of crisis, or in the face of
failure or public outbursts of anger, an accusing finger
was pointed at the Jews."
In effect, says the
Wiesenthal Center, anti-Semitism is a simple paranoid
delusion, like the madman's belief that martians have
planted a radio transmitter in his brain. It is a
chemical imbalance in the brain. If there were no Jews,
paranoids would talk of a Parsi or Mongolian world
conspiracy.
Most Jews, from what I can tell,
appear to believe this rubbish. I do not think the
Wiesenthal Center dissimulates here, but rather that it
has psychological problems of its own. The Jews do not
wish to admit to themselves that Jew-hatred has profound
roots which will not respond to psychiatric treatment.
The Jews are hated for many reasons, to be sure,
not least of which is the fact that as the oldest of the
Abrahamic religions, they have a claim to legitimacy
which represents a stumbling block to Christians as well
as Muslims. The two newer and larger Abrahamic religions
would feel rather more comfortable if the Jews were
perceived to suffer for rejecting Christ or Mohammed
respectively.
Something else about the Jews,
however, gnaws at the soul of Europeans as well as
Muslims. The heart of the problem is the world's
perception that the Jews truly are an eternal people,
not subject to the curse of mortality that hangs over
the heads of the peoples of the world. Writing of
Europe's population crisis on April 8 (Why Europe chooses extinction)I
cited the theologian Franz Rosenzweig: "All religion,
Rosenzweig argued, responds to man's anxiety in the face
of death [against which philosophy is like a child
stuffing his fingers in his ears and shouting, 'I can't
hear you!']. The pagans of old faced death with the
confidence that their race would continue. But tribes
and nations anticipate their own extinction just as
individuals anticipate their own death, he added: 'The
love of the nations for their own nationhood is sweet
and pregnant with the presentiment of death'. Each
nation, he wrote, knows that some day other peoples will
occupy their lands, and their language and culture will
be interred in dusty books."
Under
globalization, the world faces a great extinction of the
peoples, the worst since the collapse of the Roman
Empire, I have argued on numerous occasions. Every week
two languages of the 6,000 spoken on the planet become
extinct forever. Most of these are tribal tongues from
New Guinea, with only a few hundred speakers. At present
birth rates, several European languages will be at risk
some time in the next century.
Apart from China
and India, of how many cultures can we say that they are
not at risk? Despite its high rate of population growth,
the Muslim world feels fragile. Few Muslim countries
have adapted well to globalization, and the Muslim world
feels besieged by the encroaching culture of the West.
Jewish theology states that God elected the Jews as his
people, and that the covenant between God and the
descendants of Abraham never would perish as long as the
Jews remained true to it. Most modern Jews are
profoundly uncomfortable with this notion ("God of
Mercy, choose a different people!" goes the joke).
Yet the Jews have existed for well over 3,000
years, and Hebrew is the only language West of the Indus
that is spoken today more or less as it was spoken 3,000
years ago. How improbable is it that a nation of former
slaves, a race of shepherds rather than city builders
who had to hire outside contractors to build a temple to
their God, is the sole survivor of the civilizations of
the time?
Every people wishes to be eternal, to
be, as it were, God's chosen. Adolf Hitler's notion of
the Master Race, some commentators aver, is an
adaptation of the Jewish notion of election. Hitler's
determination to destroy the Jews stemmed from his
belief that Germany could not really be the Chosen
People as long as the Jews remained in existence. The
more vulnerable become the fading peoples of Western
Europe, the hotter burns their wrath against the Eternal
People. Americans, of course, are not a people but a
concept. America is where individuals go to abandon
their culture, language, customs and history, to be
recast in the melting-pot and emerge as Americans.
As I have argued previously in this space,
America comes closer than has any other political entity
towards fulfilling the Christian idea of an ecclesia, of
an assembly of souls called out of the nations. That is
why Americans have no fundamental issue with the Jews.
Americans enjoy the newborn's sense of immortality,
because they have exchanged cultural memory for the
promise of a new beginning.
Indians and Chinese,
for that matter, rarely take an interest in
anti-Semitism, because their cultures are both ancient
and robust. It is the peoples whose love for their own
culture is sweet and pregnant with the presentiment of
death that have deep cause to detest the Jews.
(Copyright 2003 Asia Times Online Co, Ltd. All
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