It is often said, by Israel’s defenders, that the Jewish state is part and parcel of the West: that Israel, the only democracy in the region, must be defended because they are, after all, reliable allies who share our values, the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem. That has been the conventional wisdom – and it’s wrong. The Mediterranean Massacre underscores the wrongness of this assumption.
Israel is not a Western country, and hasn’t been for some time: helped along by this latest incident, the realization of this fact by Western governments and peoples will represent a turning point in the Jewish state’s relations with the civilized world, especially including Jews in the Diaspora. I have argued this for years: that the successful aliya program pushed by the Israeli government has displaced the old European-derived Israeli elites with a new,more Asiatic influence, one that is now – with the rise of the Israel far right – the dominant factor in Israeli politics.
Birthed by leftist Zionists who sought to build an egalitarian community in the midst of a desert, the modern state of Israel has taken on the characteristics of its neighbors – gone native, so to speak, both culturally and politically. The large scale infusion of North African and Asiatic populations has changed Israeli society irrevocably, so that, today, the rise of a thuggish fascist demagogue like Avigdor Lieberman, the former bouncer turned Foreign Minister, is all too believable.
I don't claim to understand that last sentence about "Asiatic populations" making Avigdor Lieberman's "rise" "believable". But I never did understand the ravings of racists.
Read the rest of his column here, if you must: The Mediterranean Massacre by Justin Raimondo --Antiwar.com. There he explains that Jews and/or "Asiatics" have a...
...savage mind... (which) works differently. Shorn of what we would recognize as a moral sense, the savage glories in his capacity for pitiless violence. It’s a survival mechanism: in his world, red in tooth and claw, instilling fear in your opponent means winning more than half the battle. As a survival strategy, it’s like the one inmate who mutters ominously to himself while exhibiting all the characteristics of a violent psychotic: the other prisoners give him plenty of space because they think he’s liable to do anything.
That bit about ignoring people who mutter ominously reminds me why I generally ignore Raimondo.
3 comments:
I just checked out Antiwar.com, which I've never had an impulse to look at before. He's like Pat Buchanan - looking longingly back to the days of the isolationist, America First right, complete with racism and antisemitism.
Crikey!
Well, it's a novel slant on anti-semitism I suppose.
Jews used to be ok, but now they've gone "asiatic" he can't stomach it?
Bizarre.
Such a large American aliyah? I'd like to see your figures, Anonymous. You don't have your Israeli history correct - when Israel was founded in 1948 there were about 600,000 Jews in mandatory Palestine, most of whom were Ashkenazic. Several hundred thousands Jews from Arab countries immigrated to Israel in the next decade, along with Holocaust survivors from Europe. The next really big aliyah started after the fall of communism, when around a million people came from the former Soviet Union. (This is leaving out a lot of detail, of course, including smaller groups of olim from India and Ethiopia). Americans were never among the largest groups of olim, and that's still true.
And if you're thinking that Jews from Arab countries, once they got to Israel, had an attitude of submission to Muslims, that's also incorrect. Probably more of the Sephardic/Mizrahi population in Israel supports right-wing parties than do the Ashkenazic population.
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