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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

Jews just can't help themselves, they are a priestly people and seem to be afflicted with a terminal case of messianic utopianism.

Jews have given us the idea of God as Justice and Justice as God, and the prophetic tradition, which is at the root of our history of idealism and of perpetual social and moral renewal (they ask more questions than Socrates!), even if all these centuries later it's just devolved into an infantile instinct to denounce whoever has power at the moment.

But Jews just seem destined to saw off the branch they're sitting on and to create the golem that returns to kill them: first with Marxism and the Soviet Union and now with the reigning faith of Social Justice, which has Jewish fingerprints all over it, from the Frankfurters to Judith Butler to the rebbes of Whiteness Studies (another Jewish creation).

Here in America, for at least 50 years now, Jewish activists have used all their vast verbal and moral powers to denounce Christian society, values, beliefs, thinking that anything that undermined the goys would keep them safe from another pogrom. (Marcuse was given refuge here only to claim we were no different from the Nazis! Same for Adorno who claimed that all traditional families were breeding grounds for fascism.) And now, once again, just like with Moses in the desert, the flock they thought they were leading to the Promised Land has turned on them and decided that they're the real oppressors.

Jews seem to be both a blessed and cursed people, constantly restless and on edge, always looking to trade realism for idealism, essentially their own worst enemy. Or as the great (and highly underrated) writer Isaac Bashevis Singer said: "Jews remain forever Jews with their energy and their rage to mind everybody’s business."

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Richard Fulmer's avatar

It seems to me that Israel belongs to Israelis by right of conquest. A combined Arab army tried to conquer them in 1948 and were themselves conquered.

Why is the Jewish occupation of the region any less legitimate than the dozens that came before? All occurred before the United Nations outlawed conquest in 1949 (a law currently ignored by Russia, China, Iran, and various Islamist factions).

Muslims are happy to retain the lands their ancestors subdued and colonized. Being opposed to conquest only when one’s “tribe” is on the losing side is not a principled stand.

None of this is to argue that Jewish activists didn’t create a culture of victimhood to justify Israel’s existence. Perhaps they believed that simply stating the fact that the Jews won and the Arabs lost was too brutal for a world preparing to outlaw conquest. I suspect that the world would have been far better off, though, if Israel had been forthrightly justified by right of conquest rather than by right of victimhood.

As for Progressives’ performative horror of colonization, their brand of “decolonization” translates into recolonization. They have no intention of restoring the cultures of vanquished civilizations, rather they intend to “construct” societies that appeal to their own sensibilities.

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