Part 4
Victim culture
But there’s a broader degree to which liberals have been complicit in fuelling the current incendiary atmosphere. The “progressive” world has not only created a dominant narrative of Israeli “colonialism” and Palestinian victimisation by Israeli “oppression”. It has created a similarly unchallengeable narrative of a Muslim world composed entirely of victims of the west.
For decades, it has promoted the doctrine that white-skinned westerners are colonial oppressors so everything they do is bad, while those in the brown or black-skinned developing world are their victims and therefore morally pure.
Under the dogma of identity politics, victim status gives “powerless” (and therefore morally pure) groups defined by race, ethnicity, sexuality or gender a free pass for their misdeeds, for which their “oppressors” are blamed instead.
Accordingly, no criticism can be made of Muslims; those who do so are promptly accused of “Islamophobia”. According to this mindset, Islamic terrorism or extremism has nothing whatever to do with Islam; it is instead caused by poverty, discrimination, marginalisation and so forth.
This failure to understand the theological driver of Islamic extremism, whose aim is to Islamise the world and defeat modernity as a source of evil that threatens Islam, means in turn a failure to grasp the Islamists’ belief that modernity is driven by the Jews who they believe are the prime source of evil in the world. Islamism, or modern jihadi Islam, fuses theological Jew-hatred with Nazism, reflecting the Nazi influence on the fanatical ideologues who created Islamism in the early decades of the last century.
Antisemitism is rampant throughout the Islamic world. This is ignored by the west, which also doesn’t understand antisemitism and thinks it’s just another form of racism rather than a uniquely deranged, paranoid and murderous creed.
Accordingly, the west is gripped by the naive and ignorant belief that the “Middle East conflict” is over the division of the land. It is not. It was always at root an Islamic holy war against the Jewish presence in the land. The west’s mistaken support has conscripted western liberals into a Palestinian narrative based entirely on lies, demonisation and the writing of the Jewish people out of their own history.
Restoring the narrative
The narrative of Israeli oppressors and Palestinian victims is the default position in progressive circles. But with the Hamas pogrom on October 7 this narrative was holed below the water line. To their unbridled horror, western liberals watched people whose cause they had supported commit acts of barbarous depravity, while the people they had called colonialist oppressors were slaughtered — in the cause that western liberals had supported, sanitised and legitimised.
It’s hard to exaggerate the consternation and disorientation this has caused among such liberals. It’s not just the humiliation and embarrassment at having made a bad mistake. It’s much deeper than that. Their entire moral personality is constructed around the belief that everything they stand for is morally virtuous. Anyone who dissents is not just wrong but evil. All who dissent are “right-wing”. All evil is right-wing and all right-wingers are evil. Tyranny can only come from the right. Antisemitism therefore can only come from the right.
But now it’s come from their own side. So what does that make
them? Also right-wing and evil? This is intolerable. So they have to get their Israel-Palestine narrative back on track.
That’s why they seized upon Israel’s alleged bombing to destruction of Gaza’s al-Ahli hospital which they claimed had caused hundreds of patients to die. This was quickly shown to be totally untrue: the hospital wasn’t destroyed (even the solar panels on the roof were left intact), and it wasn’t an Israeli attack at all but a Palestinian rocket aimed at murdering Israeli civilians that had misfired and fallen within Gaza, hitting the hospital’s car parking lot. Yet despite this, the liberal media continued to try to pin this “atrocity” upon Israel. The narrative had to be got back on track.
But there’s something even darker that had to be got back on track. This is the need to blame the Jews for their own suffering.
As the black joke has it, the west can’t forgive the Jews for the Holocaust. It can’t deal with the fact that the Shoah was perpetrated by the country, Germany, that stood at the very apex of high western culture; it can’t deal with the fact that other western countries stood by as accessories to the genocide.
To deal with this intolerable burden of guilt, the west tries to erase Jewish victimisation. Demonising the Israelis as latter-day “Nazis” gives it the perfect means to do so. It legitimises the Jew-baiting which went underground after the Holocaust. It makes it acceptable to demonise the Jews again, this time under cover of “merely” being “anti-Israel” or “anti-Zionism”. It enables it to get back to disliking Jews again.
So Gaza is misrepresented as an “open prison” (ignoring altogether its border with Egypt, which normally keeps it closed to the aid Israel allows through its own crossing-point) “occupied” by the “cruel” Israelis who cause a humanitarian “catastrophe”.
It’s no use telling such people that Israel has the most moral army in the world, or leads the way in medical advances and saving lives, or is always first to offer help after any natural disasters. Such people don’t want to know how moral the Jews are. That makes them feel really bad. They need the Jews to be bad.
It's as if both Stalin and Hitler are being afforded a posthumous victory
melaniephillips.substack.com
www.haaretz.com
