Strenger on Carter

Strenger on Carter

Jimmy Carter apologized recently for his harsh anti-Israel position of recent years. The JTA smells politics. Goldblog is guarded, and working on it with his readers. Yourish is dismissive. There's a lot more of that out there if you care to look for it.

Carlo Strenger looks at some of the longer-term aspects. He says nothing new, but most of us generally don't. I"m linking not for the novelty but because he's right.

Israel and the Christian world have been locked in a very complex relationship that has deep historical and theological roots. The theologically based hatred of Christianity towards Jews was transformed in the 19th century, and received its racial formulation from 1873 onwards, when the Austrian journalist Wilhelm Marr coined the term anti-Semitism. This form of hatred of Jews led to the horrors of the Holocaust, and the Western world has yet to come to terms with its refusal to do anything to stop the genocide.

Jews have been the bad conscience of the West for a long time - and even more so since the Holocaust. French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy has pointed out that many in the West have never come to terms with the fact that Jews, the perpetual victims, now have a powerful army, and are no longer in the position of having to beg for protection and recognition. But most of all, for many there was relief: now that Jews had become the victimizers rather than the victims, the guilt of the history of persecution ending in the Holocaust could finally left behind. Many in the West used a ubiquitous defense mechanism: humans tend to hate those who induce guilt in them - and finally guilt against Jews could be transformed into hatred against Israel.

Originally posted by Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

Love of the Land: How the West Rejuvenated Pan-Islamism and the Global Jihad

How the West Rejuvenated Pan-Islamism and the Global Jihad

Daniel Greenfield
Sultan Knish
23 December 09

The seeming suddenness with which Islamic terrorism went from a problem happening "out there" in the hinterlands to a problem happening across the street can be credited as much to the Islamists themselves, as to their enablers. What the backwardness of the Muslim world and the collapse of its empires of conquered regions into colonies themselves, ruled over by European powers achieved to break down Pan-Islamism, seemingly for good, was swiftly undone. And it was undone by the fact that virtually every major power in the 20th century fostered Pan-Islamism as a tool against its enemies.


Certainly the worst example of this phenomenon was the Cold War during which the US and the USSR helped create modern Islamic terrorism, by alternately training, arming and turning Muslim guerrillas and terrorists into weapons against each other. While the USSR helped create the modern Middle Eastern terrorist, the US helped create the Asian Muslim terrorist. And together, from the PLO to the Mujadeen, from Al Queda to the PFLP, from the Madrassas to the Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University, the beast grew and swelled to fill a vacuum that the end of the Cold War created.

And as the modern Muslim terrorist was created out of the Cold War, so were the two major arguments used by conservative and liberal Westerners for supporting or tolerating Islamic terrorism. The Soviet Union crafted the core argument used by liberals who defend the sort of headchopping Islamist barbarians who would be happy enough to nail them to a wall simply for not having a beard, when it differentiated between "ancient" Pan-Islamism as a tool of religious repression and "modern" Pan-Islamism as a means by which oppressed people revolt against imperialist tyranny.

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Love of the Land: How the West Rejuvenated Pan-Islamism and the Global Jihad