Why the white West and Israel are even guiltier than we thought

Below are three variations on Auster’s First Law of Majority-Minority Relations in Liberal Society: :

1. The worse a designated minority or non-Western group behave, the more they are praised and their sins covered up.

2. The worse a designated minority or non-Western group behave, the more racist it becomes to speak the truth about their behavior.

3. The worse a designated minority or non-Western group behave, the more their behavior must be blamed on white racism.

Each of these statements is valid, and I’ve used them all at various times. However, there is more to number 3 than is indicated. It’s not just that the attack on white racism must be redoubled to explain and excuse minority misbehavior, it’s that the very sins (the imaginary sins) of which whites are accused must be increased.

Take the European left’s bigotry against Israel. They blame all Muslim bad behavior on Israel and the U.S. The Arabs are mad and violent because of Israeli oppression. But if this is true, then the more violent the Muslims become against Israel, the worse must be the oppressions that Israel and the U.S. are inflicting on the Muslims. If Israel launches the Oslo “peace” process, and Arab suicide attacks against Israelis immediately begin, well, that’s because Israel has become exceptionally oppressive and cruel to the Palestinians.

If Israel then gives an unprecedented offer to the Palestinians, as Ehud Barak did in 1999 and 2000, and the Palestinians reject it and launch a terror uprising, that must be because Israel has been more oppressive than ever.

If Israel then allows free democratic elections including Hamas in 2006, and Hamas wins, it’s because of U.S. and Israeli imperialism, which must be even worse than it was before.

If Iran threatens Israel with nuclear extermination, as it has been doing for the last few years, that also must be due to the Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians, which must be even worse than it was before.

And if Iran launched a nuclear strike at Israel and killed 2,000,000 Israelis, that would prove that the Israeli oppression of the Palestinians was vastly worse than anyone had ever imagined before.

- end of initial entry -

Jonathan L. writes:

Ironically, an identical conclusion was reached by former-60’s radical/current-social democrat Paul Berman, who in his book of several years back, “Terror and Liberalism,” wrote: “There was, in short, the idea that each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive the Israelis were. Palestinian terror, in this view, was the measure of Israeli guilt. The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt. And, if unfathomable motives appeared to drive the suicide bombers forward, the oppressiveness of Israel was likewise deemed to be, by logical inference, unfathomable—a bottomless oppression, which had given rise to the maximum of violence, which is suicide murder.”

Berman, of course, has not nearly begun to tease out the implications of this insight and how it applies to other instances of Majority-Minority discord. You should therefore feel justifiably proud of yourself, as you are about five steps ahead of a MacArthur Fellowship “genius” awardee!:) On a more somber note, though, the idea that Israel will be more reviled than ever should it suffer a nuclear attack from a Muslim or Arab country is deeply sickening, but also unavoidable. You should therefore add the following corollary to Part 3 of Auster’s First Law: “The worse a designated minority or non-Western group victimizes a Western society, the more that Western society will be reviled after the fact, both by non-Westerners (on account of that society’s weakness) and by fellow-Westerners (on account of that society’s supposed guilt).”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 14, 2007 01:10 PM | Send