Are Jews to Christians as liberals are to conservatives?

Liberals’ bigoted reactiveness against conservatives, particularly as manifested in the Terri Schiavo affair, is capsulized in the comment by a liberal professor, already quoted twice by me in recent blog entries: “Anything Tom DeLay and those conservatives are for, I’m against.”

But now I come upon this, in an article by David Klinghoffer on the attitudes of “Conservative” (i.e. Liberal) Jewry toward Terri Schiavo:

So, Jews would freely permit a woman who did nothing wrong to be diminished to the condition of a death-camp victim, while they could never do so to a person who committed a grievous crime. Call in the psychologists.

By way of explanation, a theory recommends itself, one that I have heard before from radio commentator Dennis Prager among others.

It is that Jewish liberals are misshapen by centuries of being humiliated by Christians. Today, though we live in the most Jewish-friendly country in history, it’s as if we’re still back in medieval France or Germany. Whatever Christians favor—the death penalty, saving Terri Schiavo, curbing abortion, whatever—we must reject out of self-respect.

Klinghoffer speaks of Jewish “self-respect.” But the syndrome described by him and Prager seems to be motivated less by self-respect than by the same knee-jerk reactiveness I identified in the previous example. If Jews, whether liberal or “conservative,” oppose whatever Christians favor, simply because Christians favor it, and regardless of the merits of the case, the word for that Jewish attitude is not self-respect; it is bigotry.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 29, 2005 03:37 PM | Send