Hating the Israelis and Jews even more after the October 7 attacks: why?
It may seem puzzling. Instead of increasing sympathy for the Israelis among Palestinian supporters in the West, the October 7 massacre seems to have done the opposite: increased the hatred, and not just for Israelis but for Jews. There are individual exceptions, of course, but in general the virulence and number of expressions of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment – especially on the Left – have increased.
What’s more, the Hamas and Iranian planners of the massacre probably knew it would have that effect, and that’s one reason why the atrocities were filmed and disseminated. There are many elements involved in this, and I probably won’t touch on all of them, but here are the ones that come to mind.
(1) I wrote an article for PJ Media back in 2007 that discussed some of this in depth and related it to, of all things, Romanticism. You can find the article here; I suggest you read it, but I’ll excerpt just a bit here:
[Romantics] believed in the necessity of fighting for your beliefs to the last breath in your body …they believed in the value of martyrdom as such, no matter what the martyrdom was for…. — Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism …
[Romanticism] informs our lives in many ways, including – surprisingly enough – our political lives: [The Romantics] sought regeneration — a regeneration we can liken to that of the medieval heretic or saint. They favored selfless enthusiasm, an enthusiasm which was an expression of faith and not as the product of utilitarian calculation. Emotion — unbridled emotion — was celebrated irrespective of its consequences.
If Romanticism glories powerful emotion “irrespective of its consequences,” it becomes easy to see why rage and nihilism are no strangers to the movement. …
The lengthier [Isaiah Berlin] excerpt includes Berlin’s assertion that the Romantics glorified those perceived as downtrodden: the failures and the minorities. Romantics didn’t just express empathy or sympathy for them, but actually elevated them to a place more worthy and more noble than the successes and the majorities. …
Romanticism (and Leftism) dictates not just sympathy for the Third World, but near-veneration of those there who combine a sense of victimhood (real or imagined) with what the poet Yeats called “passionate intensity,” which is the essence of Romanticism.
Anger is part of that passionate intensity, and it’s often a dominant part.
The more the Palestinians and Hamas rage and commit barbaric mayhem, the more terrible the Israeli offenses must be that sparked the rage – at least, that’s how the minds of the Left’s Romantics operate. And “Romantic” is not a compliment.
(2) Related to #1 is that cognitive dissonance is mentally painful and people ordinarily seek to resolve it not by changing their minds about something but figuring out a way to adjust to the new information and keep their old belief system. This article discusses the phenomenon:
“Western activists for Palestinians”, he added, “are dedicated to two nearly theological precepts: that Israel is evil, and that no Palestinian action is ever connected to any Palestinian outcome”. Hamas’s gruesome attack, he concluded, “poses a threat to this worldview, and the only way to resolve it is by heightening Israel’s imagined malevolence. The terrorist atrocities don’t trigger a recoiling from the cause in whose name they were carried out; they lead to an even greater revulsion at the victim.”
It’s as though there’s a balance scale in which the greater the Palestinian offense, the greater Israel’s crimes must have been in causing such a reaction. That way the person’s belief system is kept intact. The MSM leads the way on this.
(3) There is also the sad fact that a great many human beings get off on watching violence, including violent sex. The porn channels are filled with it, and the many people who watch violent sex around the world are both desensitized to milder version of it because they’re used to watching it, and titillated by stronger versions of it.
(4) When all else fails, there’s always denial. Many Palestinians and their supporters send out the message that the atrocity films aren’t real and that they are Israeli lies. It’s ironic, because such lies are the Palestinians’ stock in trade, but it’s a very effective approach because the denial also solves people’s cognitive dissonance because they can tell themselves it didn’t happen (or the worst of it didn’t happen).
(5) For the anti-Semitic True Believers, the films act as a releaser for expressions of hate, and they also see that they have many fellow-travelers when they watch similar demonstrations all over the world.
(6) In Europe, believing that the Israelis and Jews are Nazi-like, rather than that it is Hamas and many Palestinians who are Nazi-like, gets Europe off the hook for the Holocaust. There is truth to this saying (the linked article is from 2010):
As an Israeli psychoanalyst once noted with bitter irony, the Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz. The corollary to this observation is that Europeans will never forgive the Israelis and the Jews for Auschwitz. …
Of course, nothing Israel has ever done can even begin to compare to the crimes of the Shoah. But to help alleviate their feelings of guilt, Europeans delegitimize Israel, ignore modern anti-Semitism, and portray Muslims – who number over one billion and whom no one seeks to eradicate from the earth – as the new persecuted Jews of Europe.
Israel’s measures against the phony peace flotilla also provided Europeans an opportunity to demonstrate their hypocrisy when it comes to Jews flexing some muscle. Many of these same Europeans, after all, have attempted to shift at least some blame to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust for their own suffering, arguing that the Jews allowed themselves to be carted off to extermination camps without resistance. …
Europe is infatuated with passive Jews and memorial events for dead ones. When Jews actually strike back, Europeans cry that they have reacted disproportionately and failed to engage in diplomacy with the terrorist entities that seek their demise.
I have written several posts about this false – and pernicious – perception that Jews went meekly to the slaughter (see this, and there are others I don’t have time to find at the moment). Not only did the majority of Jews try to flee and had their escape blocked, but people minimize the amount of deception the Nazis used to keep people at least somewhat ignorant. For example, why were the victims told they were going to delousing showers – and why did the gas chambers even have fake shower heads? Deception. What were all those fierce guard dogs about, and are you aware that people who tried to get away were simply killed right then and there in front of the line of people? And if a person could escape prior to being sent to a camp (or even after), where would that person go when all doors were closed to them? And weren’t so many of the people who were gassed the old and infirm, and mothers with children? And are you aware that many many people “resisted” by killing themselves prior to the roundups? Or about the fact that Jews had been disarmed previously (see this for how it was accomplished)? Or about the actual cases of violent resistance against all odds?
The entire “they went meekly to the slaughter” narrative is a dangerous fiction, although it’s certainly true of some people. But it shows both a lack of understanding of the situation the Jews of Europe faced, and a desperate desire to believe that there was actually a way out that wasn’t taken by the Jews.
Anti-Semitism is a protean and flexible instrument, as well as an incredibly virulent and long-lived one. This has been clear for a long time, but it’s now even more clear.
Quick note Neo: the “See this” link winds up as a dead end for me.
But indeed it makes sense. Unfortunately Jews have been consistently hated, usually for things they as a whole and even their individual members are not responsible for (there have certainly been truly evil and infamous Jews, but nothing that can explain or justify this level of hatred). I even have to point out how it was the Arab Higher Committee and its precursors under Mufti Amin al-Husseini who introduced genocide and expulsion into the politics of the Levant after WWI, which says a lot about the “Balestinians” who would fly his flag, and which usually gets utterly skipped over by people who want to pretend the war dates back to 1948 at the earliest.
But there will always be those people that glamorize the violent revolutionary, and uncompromising ruthlessness. Unfortunately that dovetails very well with both totalitarian ideology and the dogma of Islam.
They can also act with a level of impunity knowing the “other side” will not act with anything like a fraction of the ruthlessness or hardness that they do. And indeed the few times they have gotten overconfident they have generally learned. It’s telling that while not totally nonexistent PLO terrorism has seriously declined in Jordan since Black September, when the Hashemites showed they were not Westerners with pesky ideas of human rights or democracy, and responded to the PLO trying to usurp their power with Syrian assistance by reacting decisively and brutally (and ironically probably saving more lives in the long run in Jordan). I’m no fan of the Hashemites but that should underline how the core of the PLO and Hamas is not responding to historical injustice.
I am appalled at the college idijts and their support of Hamas. So far, to my knowledge (limited) no real Neo-Nazi group has joined in calling for the elimination of Jews and Israel.
“in general the virulence and number of expressions of anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment – especially on the Left – have increased.”
I suspect part of this a gut response by people who know, deep down, that this puts the Palestinians (and their advocates) in a terrible light. Rather than admitting it, they just “double down,” because who wants to admit they’ve been wrong all along? A few have, but like many who have trouble apologizing or admitting guilt, they instinctively blame the victims or someone else.
And how about what happened at Cooper Union yesterday?
https://nypost.com/2023/10/25/news/cooper-union-barricades-jewish-students-inside-library/
Turtler:
I’m assuming you meant the link to the disarmament article? Thanks; fixed.
Excellent summary. I’ve bookmarked it.
I’m neither Jewish nor Israeli, but I’ve talked to plenty of Jew-haters in the Middle East. Some were Arabs, some Europeans, some Americans, even some Australians. If there’s life on Mars, I’m sure we’ll find some Jew-haters up there. I’m not religious, but the universality of Jew-hatred makes me suspect that God exists.
In my experience, all of the factors listed by Neo can come into play, but the malevolent balancing act seemed most common.
At 4:47, Jimmy called it “doubling down.” I think it’s related to Neo’s principal theme that a mind is a hard thing to change. Here’s the part I’m talking about:
“It’s as though there’s a balance scale in which the greater the Palestinian offense, the greater Israel’s crimes must have been in causing such a reaction. That way the person’s belief system is kept intact. The MSM leads the way on this.”
So what’s happening with all those progressive liberal/leftist Jews who support all the Democrat principles no matter how vile and antisemitic???
I hope that student at BU was the exception and not the rule, but I doubt it.
Hard for many Jews to accept that the conservative Christians are their best friends. Cognitive dissonance run amok.
re Romanticism, see ”Blame Biden for Entertainment-Industry Leftism’. This is from an Italian blogger who was only briefly active but was quite insightful.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/44763.html
The left has asserted for the last 60 years that they know how peace, prosperity and a civil society can be created. Their efforts can only be termed a colossal failure. But if you entire concept of self is caught up in that world view, you’re very loath to acknowledge you were mistaken. Thus the impulse to assert that just a little bit more of the same thing is all it would take.
How empty must be your life if CRT or climate hysteria is all you really have. It was remarked a couple of decades ago that if only married people voted, Bob Dole would have been President.
I think Jimmy is onto it.
If one has been romanticizing the Palestinians and other designated victim groups, it’s a heck of a thing to find out they’re actually worse, much worse, than you’ve been excusing them for.
Or, at least, being so public about it that your support starts to look freaky.
And, one of my go-to guesses; displacement. That anger has to go someplace and the designated victim group is obviously not the target. So the Jews are the demonstration pieces without whom this awfulness would have been on the QT, as would have been the support especially the vicarious thrills of obscene violence.,
I have wondered about the catastrophe that was the South immediately after the Civil War. Of all the things which were going wrong, what was the most obvious reminder of the whole thing? Black ex-slaves. Were race relations worse after the war?
Without the Jews, none of this would be happening? Thus, it’s their fault.
I’d add to (3), the role of violent porn in desensitizing people to violence in general, the increasing legalization and consumption of marijuana, “shrooms,” and other mind-altering drugs. A lot of people enjoy taking various substances (some legal, some not) in order to let what D.H. Lawrence called “the dark gods in the blood” have free reign. It’s not so much that alcohol and other drugs cause violence directly as that they remove inhibitions against it and provide excuses for it. Freud famously said that “the superego is readily soluble in alcohol,” and I think he would have said the same about hallucinogens and other types of psychoactive drugs. In general, we live in a culture that values Dionysus over Apollo.
physicsguy:
I think it’s important to remember that leftists are not ordinarily religious. Leftist Jews are no exception.
In fact, leftists – Jews or otherwise – often hate people who are religious (the exception being the left’s alliance with jihadi Muslims). Observant and especially Orthodox Jews tend to be on the right, and non-religious Jews on the left. So the latter are not predisposed to think kindly of religious Christians. Plus, there is a distrust based on a lengthy history of religious Christian anti-Semitism that was sometimes extraordinarily violent.
I was horrified when the details of what the jihadis did on Oct. 7 began to be reported, and the people in the US who are celebrating or trying to justify these acts make me ill. Thanks, Neo, for these explanations of how people might be excusing themselves for supporting barbarity. Their excuses don’t make me excuse them.
“Hating the Israelis and Jews even more…”
“Practically” speaking, in this latest round of the war to obliterate the Zionist Entity, the fake news—i.e., LIE—promoting Israel’s purported bombing of that Gaza hospital, resulting in at least 500 casualties, which was broadcast non-stop by almost if not ALL the major GLOBAL networks for many days, and which is still believed by multitudes, contributed mightily to a narrative that was already being enthusiastically pushed and which so many, given their own biases, ideology and ideas about “morality”, clearly WISHED, or at least were clearly prepared, to believe.
And so, “Fake but Accurate” once again raised—and continues to flaunt—its ugly, putrid head….
Neo, that is undoubtedly true, but what I can’t understand is how such secular Jews somehow think their world view makes them immune to antisemitic and the ethnic cleansing coming their way.
Physicsguy: “Hard for many Jews to accept that the conservative Christians are their best friends.”
Not for this Jew. Born and raised in New England, I’ve lived in the Deep South for almost 20 years among Southern Baptists, Methodists, and evangelical Christians. Never felt safer.
Most people down here own firearms and know how to use them. A gunsmith friend commented that if there’d been just a few Alabama rednecks with ARs and shotguns at that rave on the Gaza border, the paragliding terrorists would have had a very bad day.
@ David > “re Romanticism, see ”Blame Biden for Entertainment-Industry Leftism’.
I knew he was old, but not that ancient!
Thanks for the link, though; the writer’s observations from 2004 (practically antediluvian!) were indeed enlightening.
Things have only gotten worse since then.
After reading David’s post at CB, I took a look at this one from Sgt. Mom on October 19 and highly recommend it, as well as the associated comments.
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/70151.html
“A Double-Edged Sword”
Even if we are, the unholy cabal of the Left and Islam will do a lot of damage before it is vanquished, whether apocalyptically or on a lesser scale.
Sarah Hoyt’s blogposts discuss the various possibilities frequently, and in general I agree with her that in the end we win, they lose; but it will be a long hard road to get there.
Side note about the veterans with no illusions about the prevalence of Noble Muslims: another reason for Democrats to run them out of the DEI Forces?
One of the comments I mentioned drew attention to this perceptive, if pessimistic, post from Bayou Renaissance Man:
https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2023/10/organized-mayhem-on-american-streets.html
The Telegraph started a new podcast this week about the Hamas war on Israel and have had two episodes. I am struck how easily they have fallen into acceptance of Hamas propaganda first on the “Hospital Bombing” and then accentuating the “civilian” casualties resulting from IDF air strikes in Gaza. They also display an anti-Bibi attitude.
Today their correspondent Daniela reported about seeing the unedited video from the massacres and how she was shocked, shaken, but soon talked about those who in their grief blame the Israeli government and military.
Another correspondent, Natalia, spoke about a leftist peace activist family living in a kibutz on the border who went out if they way to help the Gazamites, but were slaughtered by the Hamashites on 10/7/2023. She spoke to a surviving son who wasn’t there, and how, approvingly it seems, he blames the Israeli govermmment. How much more difficult to face reality that the leftist/peace mindset regarding Hamashites is and was deadly to Israel, Jews, and his own family.
There were other segments about Turkey (Erdogan good mostly) no mention of the Turkish flotilla incident that Hamas did ~ 10 years ago, but mentioning that Erdogan has been very soft about the massacre.
Another segment mentioned Xi and the CCP accepting anti-semetic and anti-Israeli propaganda on the CCP interwebs.
It was disappointing to see the spin “Israel bad” be promoted so soon after the massacre.
The podcast is called “Battle Lines” it may get better, so far it is in purgatory.
Ace of Spades HQ has a lengthy Morning Rant, eventually getting to a poll which suggests ten percent, give or take, of American Jews support Hamas.
He has some…words for that.
Why? Far as I can tell, there is a school of thought which thinks America is bad, no facts needed, and the same for the West. Thus, our enemies, no matter how foul, are better and must be supported. Besides, only the knuckle-dragging “Patriots” think the US is a good idea, all things considered. We intelligent folks know better and that’s why we’re in the minority. The virtuous minority.
I feel that in various conversations when stuff like facts come up. Might be wrong…but what else?
From Neo’s 1st factor — Romanticism —
“Berlin’s assertion that the Romantics glorified those perceived as downtrodden: the failures and the minorities. Romantics didn’t just express empathy or sympathy for them, but actually elevated them to a place more worthy and more noble than the successes and the majorities. …”
This immediately brought George Floyd to mind, for me.
Of course, there are others. The left are really good at elevating non-white criminals.
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Note that the currently fashionable catchphrase for everything the Left hates is no longer “white supremacy” (aka Western civilization) but “settler colonists,” a term equally applicable to Israel and the Americas (though I expect there’s a carveout for Hispanics).
I remember walter mead in his crazy youthful era, making those points about the us and israel and australia, in mortal splendor, then he settled down
“Anti-Semitism is a protean and flexible instrument, as well as an incredibly virulent and long-lived one. ”
That is true, because Jew-hatred’s university basis is long-lived, in the association people in academia have between Jews and Markets. A University was first chartered (in 1088A.D.) as a place to train up men to a standard of literacy that enabled them to be government clerks. As the continuing industrial revolution proceeds, the market for government clerk jobs is ever-more imperiled, alongside the university market for training those clerks. This is visible in the most competent published definition of the continuing industrial revolution:
“When a society moves from allocating resources by custom and tradition [moderns read here, by politics] to allocating resources by markets, they may be said to have undergone an industrial revolution” Arnold Toynbee-1884
It is no oddity that the place people go to hook into the government power hierarchies, the Ivy League, is currently a cesspool of both anti-market hatred, and of Jew-hatred. In particular, this hatred swelled over the past 50 years, as the Jews were no longer downtrodden, but victorious in war, and, as they ceased their socialist rejection of markets in Israel, increasingly the richest nation in the Middle East.
The University, as a social artifact, is, by its purpose, inherently hateful of markets, and of those groups associated with successful market participation. As long as the Jews were downtrodden and under mortal threat, they could be praised, without worry. But powerful and victorious Jews, participating in markets around the world, are a threat, and are not a threat to be tolerated.
IMHO, it is the universities, and their Administrators, that hate Jews more than any other power block in Industrializing societies.