Tuesday, November 22, 2011

The Unspeakable in Pursuit of the Uneatable: Explained

I'm so glad that Ruth Wisse has articulated something that I have thought and said for a long time, i.e. that Judenhass/Zionhass is more about the haters--their fears, their delusions--than it is about the objects of their hatred (H/T: SL):
Anti-Semitism, or the organization of politics against the Jews, is at once the most protean and the most misunderstood force in modern politics. Because it works through misdirection, most people associate it with Jews who are its target, rather than with anti-Semites who are its perpetrators. But whether aimed at the Jews in their dispersion or in their homeland, anti-Semitism and its offshoot anti-Zionism are about the Jews only in the way that fox hunting is about foxes. Those who organize their hunt around the fox consider it the best animal to hunt. Important as it may be to identify those features in the swift little animal that make it the chosen target of those giving chase, any analysis of fox hunting must concentrate on the hunters—their motivations, strategies, implements, goals, and perceived gains. Fox hunting stops when there is a change in hunters, not in foxes. So, too, with anti-Semitism. Only changes in the implicated countries can arrest the political process their leadership promotes.
A brilliant analysis! And the real reason why it matters not how Jews change (from being, say rootless cosmopolitans to being rooted nationalists; from being insular and disinclined to fraternize with the outside world to being outward-looking and assimilated into the mainstream, etc., etc., etc.), because no matter what the new permutation/configuration is, the "fox hunters," being "fox hunters," will always want to off the "foxes".

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