|
:: Sunday, August 01, 2004 ::
Europe's Repressed Guilt
This Swede gets it:
Extreme anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism are actually merging. The so-called peace poster "Hitler Had Two Sons: Bush and Sharon," displayed in European anti-war rallies, combines trivialization of Nazism with demonization of both the victims of Nazism and those who defeated Nazism.
Much of this grows from a subconscious European guilt related to the Holocaust. Now the Holocaust's victims - and their children and grandchildren - are supposedly doing to others what was done to them. By equating the murderer and the victim, we wash our hands.
This pattern of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism returns again and again. "The ugly Israeli" and "the ugly American" seem to be of the same family. "The ugly Jew" becomes the instrumental part of this defamation when so-called neoconservatives are blamed both for American militarism and Israeli brutalities and then selectively named: Wolfowitz, Perle, Abrams, Kristol, etc. This is a new version of the old myth that Jews rule the US.
Earlier this year, the editor of Die Zeit, Josef Joffe, put his finger on the issue: like Jews, Americans are said to be selfish and arrogant. Like Jews, they are in thrall to a fundamentalist religion that renders them self-righteous and dangerous. Like Jews, Americans are money-grabbing capitalists, for whom the highest value is the cash nexus. "America and Israel are the outsiders - just as Jews have been all the way into the 21st century," Joffe says.
The links between anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Americanism are all too real. Unless Europe's leaders roundly condemn this unholy triple alliance, it will poison Middle East politics and transatlantic relations alike.
Outstanding find via Photoncourier [>]
:: Max 12:32 PM [+] ::
...
|