NO GROUP of people has so effectively utilized their own alleged hurt feelings for political goals as have Jews. You might even say Jews have conquered the modern world not with guns or armies, but with hurt feelings.
Holocaust propaganda, for one, is largely focused on hurt feelings. Holocaust history overwhelmingly involves emotional accounts of survivors and not physical evidence. A survivor recounts his experience with gut-wrenching details. Should anyone question the physical evidence of actual gas chambers or even make a simple request for physical evidence of them, battalions of combatants rise up and decry the “hurtfulness” of questioning history. These hurt feelings, we are told, are genetically inheritable.
Should anyone publicly or even privately criticize Jews, he is immediately accused of “hatred.” This puts the focus on the hurt feelings of the victims of hatred.
Reducing an issue to the emotional level can be very useful. It deflects attention from the facts.
Noah Feldman, writing on “The New Anti-Semitism” for Time magazine, resists tears:
Sitting in my office in leafy Cambridge, Mass., a proud citizen of the freest country in the world, in which Jews have been safer than in any other country in history, I am not free of emotion on the topic. Nor could I be.
Fortunately, his head is clear enough to call those who criticize Jews “neo-Nazis” — a term everyone knows is popularly synonymous with mass genocide — and to accuse them of being so many boobs who traffic “in us-vs.-them stereotypes,” as if using the term “neo-Nazi” is not trafficking in “us-vs.-them stereotypes.” How easily the emotionally sensitive traffic in defamation.
Criticism of Jews is always irrational or based in religious prejudice. So we are told. In reality, the “new anti-semitism” is not coming from mindless boobs or criminal personalities but from intelligent, informed and conscientious individuals who have thoughtfully studied the subject rather than engage in stereotypes and have courageously spoken out despite the threat of personal destruction. Though the victims of Jewish domination have always existed more abundantly in the lower classes and therefore a certain mindlessness was easily associated with their outrage, the fact is that the critics of Jewish strategies of domination throughout history include many artists, scientists, historians, philosophers and other intellectuals who did not traffic so much “in us-vs.-them stereotypes” as piercingly truthful insights into reality.
The “new-anti-semitism” is characterized by this informed truthfulness, which is precisely why it is raising such alarms.
Having insulted others, Feldman turns to the feelings of his compatriots: Read More »