On Progressive Jewish Dhimmitude

Mike L.

{Cross-Posted at Geoffff's Joint, Bar and Grill.}

Let me start by affirming that not all Jewish progressives are dhimmis and that Jewish dhimmitude is, largely, a matter of degree.  It is, however, the case that Jewish dhimmitude is a phenomenon that is far more prevalent on the progressive-left than it is on the conservative right.  While dhimmitude was (and is) an historically racist social arrangement that kept non-Muslims as oppressed minorities within Muslim societies over the last 1,400 years, it is also a state of mind.  Sometimes we talk about Jewish Stockholm Syndrome, but Jewish dhimmitude is the same thing.

Psychologist Kenneth Levin, author of the groundbreaking work, The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege, put it like this:

Almost invariably there are parts of the population that accept the indictments of the besiegers in the hope that they can win relief and peace. This is a psychological response to being besieged, and Jews have been besieged for 2000 years. As Max Nordau wrote over a hundred years ago, the greatest success of the anti-Semites was that they had gotten the Jews to see themselves through anti-Semitic eyes.

The essence of Jewish dhimmitude is the acceptance of ferocious and unjust Muslim indictments against the Jewish people.  The behavior of the dhimmi, which is usually characterized by an overt hostility toward those of their fellow Jews who refuse to succumb to the condition of dhimmitude, flows from that premise.   In today's world it takes various forms including, most prominently, the tendency to blame one's fellow Jews for the failure of Arab and Muslim societies to make peace with their formerly oppressed Jewish subjects.

Instead of acknowledging the obvious, which is that the Palestinians do not want a state for themselves in peace next to the Jewish one, progressive-left Jewish dhimmis blame Arab intransigence on their fellow Jews in Israel.  Instead of acknowledging that the Palestinians have rejected offer after offer for statehood, going all the way back to the Peel Commission of 1937, they instead blame the Likud or the "settlers" or Avigdor Lieberman or Benjamin Netanyahu for Palestinian rejectionism.

In this way, Jewish dhimmis see the conflict through the eyes of Palestinians.  It is what I have referred to as The Palestinian Colonization of the Jewish Mind.  Instead of recognizing that there is no peace because the Palestinians do not want peace, but eventual victory over a previously subjugated Jewish minority, Jewish dhimmis accept Arab and Muslim and Palestinian racism against Jews as normative. Because they do so they thereby accept the Palestinian premise that it is the Jewish presence in Judea which represents the primary obstacle to peace.  Thus Jewish dhimmis affirm Arab racism against their fellow Jews and end up, unwittingly to be sure, justifying Arab violence against us.

One can only consider the presence of Jews in Judea as an obstacle to peace if one accepts the racist Palestinian notion that any future state of Palestine must be Judenrein.  Just as Barack Obama has accepted this violently anti-Semitic premise, so have Jewish dhimmis.

Another consequence of Jewish dhimmitude, however, is the chronic racism towards Muslims that is a direct consequence of the dhimmis' stance.  Because Jewish dhimmis tend to blame Arab and Muslim hostility toward the Jewish people on some subset of their fellow Jews, they also tend to attack and vilify and marginalize Jews who push back against Muslim Supremacism.  Islam, like all religions, has a supremacist side to it.  The differences are that, because Muslims outnumber Jews by a factor of 100 to 1, Muslim Supremacists represent a very significant number of people.  They are, in fact, the primary force behind the rise of radical Islam throughout the Middle East and even though they only represent some portion of Islam they still well outnumber the Jews whom they seek to oppress or kill.

When Jews who are not dhimmis speak out against radical Islam they are typically called "racists" or "Islamophobes" by Jewish dhimmis on the progressive-left.  In this way, Jewish dhimmis conflate regular Muslims with radical Jihadis.  When a Jewish person points toward Hamas or Islamic Jihad or the Muslim Brotherhood and claims that these movements are genocidal and seek the oppression of women and the slaughter of Gays, they are pointing to a wide ranging, diverse, and international political movement.  What they are not pointing toward are Muslims as a whole.  They may wonder aloud if the supremacist trend within Islam is inherent to Islam, but they certainly recognize that many, many millions of ordinary Muslims are not involved in the Muslim Supremacist movement, which is the movement of radical Islam and the basis of the Muslim Brotherhood.

To suggest otherwise is to suggest that Muslims, as a group, are Jihadis.

And that, my friends, truly is racist.

Furthermore, of course, objecting to Muslim Supremacism, like objecting to White Supremacism, should be sacrosanct among people who care about universal human rights and if the progressive-left wishes to maintain anything that resembles moral credibility they must stop making apologies for this widespread racist and misogynistic movement.

Why is it that in today's world it is the left as much, if not more so, than the right that is standing in opposition to social justice?