Friday, May 15, 2009

Lefty Colonialists

Max Julius in Haaretz puts the Guardianistas in a context I hadn't thought of: the snotty Englishmen who can't really be cajoled to take the natives seriously when they act out:
These modern-day British imperialists, the vast majority of whom are on the
left, by the way, see Palestinian terror as a sort of ineffectual
temper-tantrum; much as their forebears in African and the subcontinent saw
their subjects' occasional acts of hostility toward them as childlike bouts of
rage. The fact that Hamas' plots are so regularly thwarted by Israel, which
often responds with far greater force, only goes to further the sense these
Britons have of the group as something that only seems malignant to those
without a true understanding of the Arab: Their poor American cousins and, of
course, the hysterical, persecution-obsessed Eastern European Jews who now call
themselves Israelis.
The fun of his explanation lies, of course, in that there's no crime greater for a Guardianista than being colonial. Delicious.

2 comments:

amicus said...

I wish it was that facile English, left-anti-semitism (among the so called "cognitive elite"), exhibits a nastiness and hostility that goes far beyond simple condescension based on colonial attitudes. This "new" political anti-semitism, as Bernard Harrison, shows, is based in an attempt to defend a moralistic worldview that can no longer be supported by historical materialism with the collapse of socialism/marxism.

Anonymous said...

I agree - I have always thought that the reason for the double standard is that the world does not treat Palestinians as adults, but rather as 5-year old kids with attention deficit disorder throwing a tantrum, and then the look to the adults in the neighborhood to find blame.