Democracy for the Middle East
February 22, 2004Witness
EuroPundits reminds us that Europe is a criminal continent working hard to bury its past:
Thus, after conquering and enslaving most of the world they can with a clean face proclaim themselves the inventors of the human rights and accuse others, particularly the Americans, of having commited massacres for which, strictly, when these actually happened, they were responsible. Helped by the typical American sense of perpetual guilt, this has been working just fine.
There has been a problem, however, for the Europeans as they strive to get a clean record: the Jews. No continent that has done to an ethnic minority what Europe did to the Jews, from the Crusades to the Pogroms to the Holocaust, can claim any kind of moral high ground, not for the next thousand years or so. Erecting memorials and museums for the Holocaust, teaching it at schools and so on are all a form of trying to put those nasty facts behind them. And maybe this would have worked were it not for the existence of Israel. Thanks to European exterminationist anti-Semitism, there's probably no more legitimate state on the face of the earth than Israel, a country that derives its legitimacy from the simple fact that the Jews needed it not to be killed to the last man, woman or child by the Europeans. Thus, it is Europe's history that legitimates Israel, but Israel's existence de-legitimates Europe's history and, consequently, Europe's role as universal granter of legitimacy. If Europe's history has to be whitewashed so that the continent may assume its new role of pure vestal, of the only universal judge that may decide on anybody else's guilt or innocence, Israel has to be de-legitimized, because it is the living proof of European mega-criminality.
That's a paradox the Europeans won't be able to solve not even enlisting the help of all the Muslim world. They got close to dismantling Israel through the Trojan Horse of the Oslo accords, but then came Durban and they lost control of the process to Arab-Islamic hysteria. They cannot control these partners and they, the partners, re-associate in American eyes Europe to the basest and most primitive forms of anti-Semitism.
European legitimacy has rested in large part on the Church and it's claim to having superseded the Jewish covenant with God. Whether you buy the tortured logic of supersessionism or not, it's clear that Rome's conquest of Judea opened the way for a much greater Jewish cultural victory albeit through the agency of the Church. As Sutcliffe has demonstrated, thousands of years after Judea's alleged defeat, when Voltaire and the philosophers of the European Enlightenment revolted against the religious worldview, it was the Jewish idea with which they were obsessed and against which they developed their attack. Today, despite the efforts of Voltaire's children the West still clings to Zion's world view if not its authentic practice. Much of this has to do with American preeminence and the centrality of the religious mode in American culture. Thus the Jew-hatred of socialists, Islamo-leftists, secularists and old world Christians derives as much from the fact that the world's most powerful nation (indeed the nation that supplanted European power) chose God and Zion over Sartre and cheese, as from the recognition that they failed in their efforts to supersede or cast off Zion.
Of course, if all of the exiled Judeans had bowed, Adolph Ochs-George Steiner style, to the European narrative, the Jews would be no less in vogue today than the American Indians. But Israel's establishment as a reservation for "Europe's Negroes" cast a bright spotlight upon the depraved nature of that continent, it's track record of international theft, and its slaughter of one million Judean children. In seeking to annihilate the largest Jewish reservation, Europe isn't being paranoid. As Victor Davis Hanson observed, it's pride and envy that make the world go around. Zion reborn and aligned with the democratic evangelism of the New World stands as a witness to European charlatanism and heralds the marginalization of a cruel, discredited and rapidly aging gang of impostors.
Home . Posted by Editor at February 22, 2004 03:10 AM . DFME's new internet address is www.dfme.org