The "self-hating Jew"

Giulio Meotti, in a recent op-ed published by Arutz Sheva, an Israeli news site (hat tip to Ruthfully Yours), has some interesting observations to make amid the disquieting trend he and others have noticed of what rather glibly is referred to as the "self-hating Jew".

"Self-hating Jews” is a wrong expression, writes Meotti. The right term is Jewish anti-Semitism.

Meotti then goes on to recount a disturbing exchange he had with a fellow Jew, whom he counts among those who think of themselves as:

...“better Jews” who like to depict Israel as “the new ghetto", setting themselves apart from the Israeli masses and posturing as the possessors of greater liberal wisdom.

Meotti refers to George Steiner -- "famous cultural critic, Jewish intellectual and professor, based in Cambridge" -- with whom he has corresponded for the last ten years.

On the occasion of his new book -- A New Shoah. The Untold Story of Israel’s Victims of Terrorism -- Meotti writes that he sent Steiner a copy and solicited his response.  According to Meotti, Steiner wrote back, saying that “the world is Juden müde” -- which, Meotti explains, translates as "tired of Jews” -- and Steiner went on to say Jews "should disappear". 

Meotti recounts that he was astonished, as he should be.  The sentiment that “the world is Juden müde” has a disquietingly eery ring to it, in its resemblance to Nazi propaganda, and to pre-Nazi European anti-Semitic rants.  It's all the eerier coming from an intelligent and erudite Jew.  And Meotti goes on to imply that, unfortunately, such a sentiment is not all that remarkably uncommon these days.

And his reply to Steiner is worth reading, which the reader can find in the link I provided.

But I don't think the phenomenon of the "self-hating Jew" -- or, pace Meotti, the "anti-Semitic Semite" -- is unique.  The entire West is, in a sense, afflicted with this disease.  We have -- by the bushelfull -- the anti-Catholic Catholic, the anti-Christian Christian, the anti-American American, the anti-British Brit, the anti-European European, the anti-white white, and finally, the anti-Western Westerner.

Now, the antipathy denoted by all these "anti-" designations does not necessarily have to be perfect or complete: it can be a tendency, ranging in degree from mild -- as with the comfortably and affably doltish self-criticism of a Brian Williams, for example -- to severe, as with the disturbing pathology of a Noam Chomsky or a Sean Penn or Marlon Brando or George Clooney.

This is not to say that the Jewish version of this phenomenon may not have peculiar flavors of its own; we only wish to point out that the broader phenomenon is not unique to Judaism.

One would never, in a million years -- except of course from an apostate (or a slyly oily Better Cop Muslim) -- see or hear a Muslim speak or write that  “the world is Moslem müde”...!  So, this points to the simultaneous health, and disease, of the West, typical of its deformation of its Graeco-Roman Judaeo-Christian virtues: Self-criticism is a virtue, but it can morph into a morbidly irrational excess, as it indeed has, with the dominant and mainstream PC MC worldview of the more recently modern West.  

Thus now in the 21st century we have the strange, monstrously ironic, almost comical if it weren't so horrifically tragic, spectacle of an astronomically superior civilization crippled by its own excess of self-criticism, which renders it unable to rouse itself to adequate self-defense from the ongoing violent attacks and plots of members of an abysmally inferior culture who are afflicted with a mirror image opposite disease -- an inability to think or feel self-critically.  

And for the perverse pièce de résistance, as a major symptom of its disease, the astronomically superior civilization goes out of its way to "respect" and excuse and court and invite into its living room by the millions the members of that violently hateful, dangerously retrograde culture.  Not a few members of the anti-Islam movement (such as it is) like to blame the Jews for this problem; but I think the problem is far deeper and broader than that, and such an explanation, like the proverbial scapegoat, is not only unsatisfactory (even if it appeals to those who need simpler solutions), but ultimately will put us in more danger, by diverting our attention from the actual problem.