Fashionably Anti-Israel

"This may sound paranoid, but I think the whole world seems to have gone anti-Semitic."

So wrote a reader at Jihad Watch.

I responded:

As far as the West is concerned, Israelis suffer from two handicaps:

1) a residual antisemitism that lingered between the lines of post-Holocaust decades

2) the unofficial status conferred on Israelis as Honorary Whites, and upon Israel as an Honorary White Western Nation Oppressing a Brown People (shades of Apartheid South Africa).

In the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust, sympathy was with the Jews, and in the first three decades after Israel was founded, it was more supported generally throughout the West than not. However, a sociopolitical process was going on in the meantime: the strengthening of Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC), which favors non-Westerners over Westerners, and favors perceived Ethnic Minorities over Whites.

Then we add to the mix the increasingly bellicose irruption of Muslims onto the Western radar. Since Muslims are perceived by PC MC to be an Ethnic People (indeed, a wonderfully diverse Rainbow of Ethnic Peoples), they are automatically accorded privileges and benefits of every doubt. This second process has enjoyed a perversely paradoxical dynamic, which may be expressed succinctly:

The more that Muslims explode, the MORE -- not the less -- that the PC MC West bends over backward (and salams forward) to placate them.

As these two processes have intensified over the years -- with 911 and post-911 climate being the most dramatic for the second process -- the aforementioned handicaps against Israel have also intensified.

Back in the 1970s, a then popular actress (Vanessa Redgrave) was virtually blacklisted for her support of the "Palestinians" -- even though the winds of PC MC change were already in the air, reflected in that bulwark carrier of PC MC in the post-War West, the United Nations, through UN General Assembly Resolution 3377, voted on 10 November 1975, equating Zionism with Racism (source: the indefatigably meticulous David Littman). No doubt, the Communist bloc of influence at the U.N. at the time had not a little to do with that Resolution passing -- just as in our time, there has grown an "Islaminform" (the O.I.C. bloc of Islamic nations) to replace the "Comminform" of the heydays of Soviet and Chinese influence, equally malevolent and industriously so when it comes to trying to demonize Israel in the eyes of the global political community. Unfortunately, as we said, this current Islamic bloc enjoys far more sympathy for its causes now, with the solid ascendancy of the mainstream dominance of PC MC throughout the West; while back in the 1970s (let alone before that time), it may have had to struggle somewhat more.

By the 90s, however, and certainly the present Oughts -- and into the Teen Years of the 21st Century -- it has become fashionable if not positively de rigueur for our celebrities and intelligentsia to be pro-"Palestinian" and more or less anti-Israel.  And a grotesque twist to this cannot be ignored: namely, that many Jews themselves aid and abet this madness.

Further Reading:

The Muslim: The New Black and the New Jew

Israel and the Irrational Logic of PC MC