Saturday, October 29, 2016

Israel and Contemporary Forms of Western-Left Racism

Michael Lumish

{Also published at the Elder of Ziyon and Jews Down Under.}

fist
A Symbol of the Pro-Palestinian Movement
As the progressive-left and Democratic Party fling around charges of racism like confetti, perhaps it is time to remind people of the forms of western-left racism.

Why, after all, should Republicans and independents get all the fun?

There are charges of racism to be flung with wild abandon on all sides!

The racism embedded in the progressive movement, and thus embedded in the Democratic Party, takes three interrelated forms.

These are humanitarian racism, anti-white racism, and anti-Semitic anti-Zionism.


Humanitarian Racism

The most prominent form of western-left racism is what scholar Manfred Gerstenfeld dubbed "humanitarian racism." 

Humanitarian racism is the primary form of racism practiced in the West, today, but it is a socially acceptable form of racism. It is a type of racism that currently flies under the radar of most Americans even as a form of racism. Humanitarian racists regard all minority groups, and all individuals within those minority groups, as perpetual victims of white racist imperialism, including minority students at elite American universities.

Western-left humanitaran racism acts as a sort-of umbrella racism that shields and nurtures hostility toward white people, malice toward the Jewish state of Israel, and demeaning condescension toward all peoples of non-European backgrounds.

As an underlying theme within the western progressive-left, humanitarian racism can be defined as a prominent form of discrimination typified by the tendency to see minority groups as mere pawns on a world stage dominated by malicious white people intent upon imperial dominance.

Wherever the humanitarian racist casts his eye he sees aggressive western imperialists intent on stealing the resources of non-white peoples in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. He sees aggressive western corporate marauders endeavoring to impose their vapid and inauthentic Playstation Culture on the peaceable indigenous peoples of the world. He sees People of Whiteness absconding with the cultural creations of indigenous cultures. 

And, of course, he sees the United States reeking havoc throughout the world in order to yank another filthy dollar out of other people's lands and labor.

Among the things that the humanitarian racist refuses to see, however - aside from the idea that white people are not evil - is the fact that non-white people have dignity, history, and agency. While those of us who are concerned about the rise of Political Islam respect that movement as an aggressive power in the world, humanitarian racists pity Jihadis as Victims of the White Man who can be sympathized with when they endeavor to kill non-Muslims. 

The Muslim worlds, in particular, represent ancient peoples with long histories of struggle and dominance that created highly influential works of science, art, architecture, religious innovation, and various other forms of cultural production. Islam, after all, is the most successful example of aggressive imperialism in world history. Of the great national powers, only Islamic imperialism to this day maintains far-flung colonies thousands of miles from the imperial bases of Mecca (for the Sunnis) and Tehran (for the Shia).

When humanitarian racists look at Muslim societies outside of the West they see little children in need of protection in a way suggestive of nineteenth-century European notions of "white man's burden." When non-racists, of any type, look at Muslim societies, outside of the West, they see the inheritors of a once great theocratically-based empire that fell into decline when faced with superior western technology, but now resurgent as the West loses confidence in itself.

Whatever the influence of white westerners in the world - good, bad, or otherwise - the humanitarian racist refuses to recognize that non-whites are not merely victims. This is due to the essential narcissism of the movement which insists that ultimately everything is about white people.

Here's a newsflash.

It isn't.

Anti-White Racism

It is not unfair to say that following the Vietnam War, within academia, post-structuralist theorists undermined the knowability of truth, while post-colonial theorists reduced the world to indigenous victims "of color" and their white, imperial victimizers.

It is for this reason that the well-meaning students at the University of Wisconsin sell "All White People are Racists" hoodies, which is an act that ultimately encourages violence by thugs upon ordinary Anglo-type nobodies walking home from work.

It is also for this reason that so many anti-white humanitarian racists believe that there is something inherently malicious within white Wonder Bread culture, particularly in the United States. It is not merely that the petite bourgeoisie support western imperialism through their very act of being - that and paying taxes - but that there is something deplorable and irredeemably awful in White Ways of Being.

The concept is entirely nonsensical, of course, yet it is fascinating.

Many anti-white bigots think that Whiteness is not merely about skin-color, but about ways of being (ontologies) and ways of knowing (epestimologies).  In this way Whiteness is essentialized into a form of evil that is directly embedded not only into white-European cultures, but into every aspect of white lives. White people are "white" not merely for coming out of the Euro-family of peoples, but as a matter of consciousness characterized by vapid inauthenticity, rapacious greed, and heartless militarism.

Like Ahab's Great White Whale, "whiteness" symbolizes a form of evil in the world and, therefore, irrepentant white people, much like Jewish-Israelis and their "Zionist" supporters, are fabricated as an enemy of "indigenous" people, everywhere.


Anti-Semitic Anti-Zionism

Humanitarian racism should be of particular interest to those of us concerned about the rise of anti-Semitic anti-Zionism and the well-being of the Jewish State of Israel.

Jewish-Israelis are surrounded by a hostile population in the Middle East that outnumbers them by a factor of 60 to 70 to 1. Many of those neighbors advocate for the destruction of those Jews given any real opportunity. The Long Arab War against the Jews of the Middle East is grounded in an irrational, Koranically-based rancor, but sold to the West as a matter of "social justice."

Following World War II, Nazi-flavored anti-Semitism met with (and married) traditional theocratically-based anti-Jewish Muslim bigotry which then heavily influenced the Palestinian Narrative. Within that narrative, the returning Jewish remnants, including Holocaust survivors, are portrayed as violent colonialist intruders intent on the ethnic-cleansing and exploitation of the Palestinian-Arabs. 

This, in a nutshell, is the so-called "Palestinian narrative" and western humanitarian racists gobble it up like cherry pie.

Jewish-Israelis, who want nothing so much as to be left the hell alone to create their medical and technological doo-dads and live their lives without friends and family blown to smithereens by Jihadis, are depicted as the very worst people on the planet.

The Muslim peoples of the Middle East have persecuted the dhimmi minorities in that part of the world since Muhammad started receiving astral visitations from the Archangel Gabriel in the seventh-century.

And every generation Jews are told by both Arabs and Europeans just why it is that we deserve a good beating.

This generation is no different.

9 comments:

  1. This was a great read. I wish I had some time to comment, but I am quite busy right now and it will take some time to digest it all. The West is indoctrinating its children with some really bad ideas.
    P.S. I put my wife on a plane yesterday and she will be spending the next week in your neck of the woods. Moraga, to be exact.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Moraga, eh?

      That puts her just on the other side of the hill.

      I could probably hit her roof with a tennis ball from here.

      In truth, tho, I missed an important type of progressive-left racism.

      It's the type of racism that is evident when people on the left criticize minority individuals from not being "authentic" examples of that particular ethnicity.

      I could just kick myself.

      They called people like Colin Powell, who supported Barack Obama, an Oreo Cookie.

      What's the name for this type of racism?

      Anybody?

      Delete
  2. I would challenge anyone to demonstrate where the left has been comfortable with Zionism or Jews generally beyond a fragile marriage of convenience. There was a brief period say during the civil rights movement where Orthodox/Masorti/Conservadox Jewish leaders like Abraham Heschel worked with the political left and center-left to foment civil rights thought leadership. But I've read Heschel about this and I see little religious Judaism there. That is, he speaks and writes as a man, a liberal, a philosopher and a generic clergyman who happened to be Jewish. And he never once asked his compatriots to get on board, embrace, endorse or welcome anything that was uniquely Jewish or Zionist. And he WAS a Zionist but it didn't enter into THIS equation.

    I'm afraid that the left has always had an arm's length relationship to the Jews and at THAT it's still reluctant. It's like their relationship to Christianity. Oh they pluck a person here and there who tells you what he thinks Jesus would do or say in this or that scenario in the terms of bland platitudes, but nothing about what faith and observance tell you to do. Nothing about belief and morality and ethics itself. Tim Kaine is a good example; a Sandinista Marxist Catholic Missionary who does not believe that the edicts and tenets of his own religion are anything more than suggestions for personal standards - that it serves no wider purpose for the world he himself purports to stand in service OF.

    I'm afraid that since the left is first, an ideology, it sees Judaism as a competing and dangerous ideology. That the left simultaneously embraces Islam says more about the moral and ethical flexibility of Islam than anything else.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Y'know, Trudy, it's not just a matter of comfortable or uncomfortable with Zionism or Jews.

      I know that you know this, but it’s something that I want to stress.

      By supporting anti-Semitic anti-Zionism it throws its own alleged values directly in the garbage.

      {Kapoot.}

      Delete
    2. Never under estimate the gleeful embrace of hypocrisy.

      Delete
  3. The left is bankrupt. It ran out of GOOD ideas and now needs to grasp at straws to continue being relevant. All there is left is ID politics.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hi Chrissy,

      It seems to me that American politics is stymied by the onrush of social-cultural trends and simply doesn’t know what to do with itself.

      The Republicans are a wreck and unless Trump somehow emerges from the brimstone and smoke victorious – which is highly unlikely – they may very well go into exile.

      If so, I won’t cry any tears.

      Delete
    2. To me the problem is the kneejerk assumption that government is the alpha and the omega. Government is not the culture, the society, the economy or the country. It's an aspect and a tool of them, not the other way around. We've been conned to think that anything we need a fix for is or will come from the government. That's nonsense.

      Delete
  4. As compared the the progressive antipathy toward Israel, which includes Clinton's advisors, comes this:

    Trump Campaign Unveils New Policy: Will Ask Justice Department to Probe Anti-Israel Intimidation on US College Campuses

    https://www.algemeiner.com/2016/11/01/trump-campaign-unveils-new-policy-will-ask-justice-department-to-probe-anti-israel-intimidation-on-us-college-campuses/

    ReplyDelete