Unprincipled Exceptionalism

Vox Day writes:

[U]nderstand that the resurgence of anti-semitism is happening for a reason. What that reason may be is up for discussion, but not that logic dictates its existence. Anti-semitism can be irrational but it is not always so, and pretending otherwise is both disingenuous and futile. The world knows what Ben Bernanke did last summer, so to speak. The world knows who is funding President Goldman Sachs and it understands why the head of a petty state in the Middle East can tell him off and expect him to fall in line. The world knows that the U.S. Congress is Israeli-occupied territory. The world knows who owns Hollywood, the U.S. media, and the bailed-out banks. The world knows who has been flooding its nations with third-world barbarians who don't even understand the concept of indoor plumbing.

Would that the anti-Israel protests really were some kind of double-bankshot opposition to third-world immigration. But there is every reason to be skeptical that this is the case.

For instance, as a counter-example to VD's assertion, I offer the story of Steve Salaita (via Legal Insurrection):

Many faculty job offers (which are well-vetted by college officials before they go out) contain language stating that the offer is pending approval by the institution’s board of trustees. It’s just a formality, since many college bylaws require such approval.

Not so with a job offer made to Steven G. Salaita, who was to have joined the American Indian studies program at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign this month. The appointment was made public, and Salaita resigned from his position as associate professor of English at Virginia Tech. But he was recently informed by Chancellor Phyllis Wise that the appointment would not go to the university’s board, and that he did not have a job to come to in Illinois, according to two sources with knowledge of the situation.

Read the Legal Insurrection article for a sample of the tweets.

With the caveat that it's really hard to sound smart in 64 characters, these remarks reveal a vulgar and puerile mind, more appropriate to the bathroom scrawls of 14 year old boys than the output of a college professor. But really, who among you believes that, if these had been directed towards white South Africa rather than Israel, anyone would have bothered to do anything other than applaud?

My point here is not to compare Israel's policies with Apartheid. My point is that Salaita, and Bardem and Cruz and most other Leftist gentiles, are running the same playbook against Israel as was run against South Africa a generation ago. They see European settlers, under the cover of Imperial power, colonize a non-European continent at the expense of the existing non-European inhabitants. At some threshold of strength, the colonists obtain their independence from their former patrons and proceed to gain territory through armed conquest, coincidentally expanding their jurisdiction over the natives.

By forthrightly stating this paradigm, I do not intend it to be judgmental of European settlement. On the contrary, I recognize it as the story of my own country, and I support Israel (and old South Africa) for that very reason: we are (or were) outposts of civilization against barbarism. But because of this understanding, I also understand that to Salaita and Cruz and Bardem, being "anti-Semitic" is at most only incidental to being anti-White, and I predict (although I cannot prove in every case) that this is the animating spirit of "anti-Semitic" anti-Zionism in Europe as well. It is not, contra Vox, an expression of skepticism against Jewish cultural and political influence with regard to immigration and banking.

What is striking about the current conflict is that whereas the full weight of American economic, diplomatic, and cultural power was eventually brought to bear against South Africa, this isn't happening to Israel. And the reason isn't hard to understand: "Hollywood power brokers", as the Hollywood Reporter so artfully calls them, simply decline to apply to their co-ethnics the same rules they happily apply to other European-descended people.

As non-Americans, Bardem and Cruz likely don't have as intuitive a grasp of how American victimology is applied in practice; as an "American Indian Studies" professor, Salaita is probably only experienced in playing the diversity card himself, not in having it played against him. Their error lies only in their intellectual consistency and fidelity to the full implications of their hatred towards European civilization.