Pro-Palestinian Hysteria - Anti-Semitism And Feel-Good Victimhood In An Intellectual Void

In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had'

Bob Muzelle's father, a minister and a good man read these lines from The Great Gatsby to his young son, hoping that he would follow suit.  The Muzelles were not wealthy, nor even well-to-do, but they were descended well.  A Muzelle had been one of John Davenport's associates in the Massachusetts Bay Colony and later in New Haven where he founded the New Haven Plantations as a more doctrinally pure settlement far from the growing apostasy of Boston.  A Palmer on Bob's mother's side had come with the second English ship to sail to Jamestown.

Neither side of the family had ever lost a sense of duty and responsibility instilled in them for over three hundred years.  They had a moral compass, unerringly pointed along the path of service, honor, and respect.  The elder Muzelle had gone ashore at Normandy, and his father, Bob's grandfather had fought at the Marne.

 

All of which is to say that any errancy on the part of Bob would never have been expected; but as a young man, first at Yale and then in Washington, he became isolated and indignantly righteous.  The causes he was fighting for - civil rights, peace, and the environment - were simply too important to give ground.  There was, he found, such a thing as absolute right; and once in one's grasp should never be let go. 

Of course most people have never believed in such absolutes.  The world has always been one of moral, self-justifying ups and downs. The Crusades, often condemned for their Christian imperialism and geopolitical intolerance, have turned out to be, at least for the time being, right.  Muhammed unleashed a virulent, obsessive, implacable expansionist force on the world and he should have been stopped in his tracks in Palestine just as his armies were at Roncesvalles. Would have saved the world a whole lot of trouble.

Views on everything from favorite colors to abortion have their indicators, justifications, and history. There is no absolute, indelible, ineradicable right to abortion, and the very conception of life will soon change as the human genome will be engineered to offer infinite possibilities for the human design of creation. 

So why was it that Bob, child of centered, morally certain, Christian parents could have fallen so far off the rails?  How was it that no analysis of antebellum, Civil War, and Reconstruction history could persuade him that the whole affair was not just about slavery but about the nature and value of labor and, the unique indivisibility of capital and labor in the system.

Nothing could change his mind that despite the tribal, primitive nature of the African slave and the economic vetting system which valued reproductivity and physicality over any other trait, the black man should be at the very pinnacle of human society. 

 

The answer comes from the idea of victimhood, the conviction that anyone who has been a victim of racism, misogyny, homophobia or any one of a hundred other common prejudices, has a right not only to be heard, but to be raised to prominence.  The black man simply because he was the victim of slavery is ipso facto superior to the white man who enslaved him. 

Conditionality - the millennia-old history of slavery, the burgeoning inter-tribal African slave trade, the cultural dominance of Western civilization, the trial and error of economic systems (viz Communism, slavery, socialism, Utopianism et. al.) - must be discounted in a universe of absolute right and wrong. 

How victimhood came about is not a tough puzzle to solve.  The sedate, stable, primly conservative Fifties - pinafores, cocktail dresses, church, and Sunday dinners - and the demographic bulge of privileged post-war babies with few concerns about well-being, caused a restiveness, an unsettled sense of ill-defined purpose.  So, borne out of social history, demographics, and boredom came the Sixties.  Victims were its heroes - the little men in black pajamas and a bowl of cold rice bombed by Nixon's B-52s; the black man beaten, clubbed, and bitten by Bull Connor, George Wallace, and their thugs; women, suffering under the persistent legacy of patriarchy and male prejudice. 

By time the Sixties were over and done with, the ethos of victimhood was now in place, and everything was to be observed through its lens. 

Bob swallowed all this hook, line, and sinker. Victimhood was the only way to look at human crises.  Jesus Christ himself dedicated his ministry to the poor, after all.  Compassion for the downtrodden was ordained, not invented. 

Of course, Jesus aside, the world since the amoeba has been ruled by tooth and claw, competition, territorialism and every other hardwired, innate trait of human nature.  A human history of victors and vanquished, winners and losers, never oppressors and victims.  

'Bullshit', said Bob in a moment of pique and frustration.  For years he had perfected a calm, professorial demeanor, one meant to hide the screeching, howling anger seething inside him.  Reason, he said, was the way to compromise.  Of course he meant nothing of the sort.  Reason would lead his adversaries to the truth, his truth.  He was just a big, pompous windbag. 

After decades in the trenches fighting for peace, civil rights, and the restoration of the black man to his rightful place atop the human pyramid, Bob was now an older man; but the fire of righteous anger still burned brightly.  Yet there were no real causes he could sink his teeth into.  No Freedom Rides, no Pettis Bridge, no Selma, Hanoi, or the Castro.  

He was at loose ends until Hamas struck Israel and Israel responded in a once and for all, never again assault to rid the region of a genocidal, anti-Semitic hateful regime.  Victimhood now had a name, a place, and a cause. 

Bob was the first at the barricades, first in solidarity with Yale, Columbia, and Harvard students spewing long pent-up hatred for the Jews.  Now, they could be as violently anti-Semitic as they pleased because they were condemning the State of Israel, not Jews themselves; although anyone on campus could see the seething rage at any Jewish student in their way. 

The Palestinians for no other reason than their supposed victimhood were heroes to be championed, defended, and honored.  It mattered not that Hamas and its mentor Iran have called for the elimination of Israel and the eradication of the Jews; or that Muslim states have called for the destruction of Israel since its founding; or that the billions of international foreign assistance has been spent on tunnels and armaments to attack Israel; or that Islam itself has within its code, an implacable righteousness and Jewish mistrust. 

Bob was ecstatic, blissful, as happy as he had ever been.  Entering surely the last decades of his life, he had found his real calling. 'Death to Israel' was his mantra and he shouted it at the top of his lungs with the throngs of young people around him.  Victimhood had never been more satisfying, the self-purifying, self-actualizing hatred of the Jewish oppressor epiphanic. 'Death to Israel', he shouted over and over again. 

Anything less would have meant a chaise lounge on a Florida beach, but this....this! was more than Bob could have ever hoped for.  He was young again, vital and vibrant again.  He was whole. 

Goin' Cracker - Yale Just Ain't Worth It

Jonas Philby had all it took to get into Yale - top of his class, student athlete, artist, and bon vivant of the modern, justice-first generation.  St. Albans, an elite private school for Washington's elite had always been a feeder for the Ivy League and had groomed generations of young men for a life of privilege, wealth, and importance. 

 

Jonas' father and grandfather had gone to Yale, both members of Fence Club, captains of the baseball team, and Merit Scholars.  They had spent weekends at the Plaza, summers on the Vineyard, and winters in Gstaad.  It was indeed an Old Boys' Club, one of special breeding, taste, and gentrified living, and no one of either generation had any interest in living beyond its walls. 

When Inslee Clark came to Yale and became the Dean of Studies and got it into his head to dip into an 'alternate' gene pool for a newly qualified 'best and brightest', the Old Yale disappeared like a wisp of smoke.  It was never the same place and gone was the oak and mahogany, Revere silver, Townsend chairs, and solid, unflinching Calvinism. Yale quickly and inexorably had become a redoubt of the unwashed. 

 

Jonas' father had attended Yale on the cusp of the Clark revolution - an interregnum with a few Jews and random Italians - but he could see the end of one of America's last bastions of white privilege.  He and his classmates wondered exactly what exactly these Himmelfarbs, Bernsteins, and Palumbos were doing at Yale, but were courteous and respectful to them.  It was one thing to take Bloom's Romantic Poetry course with them, another thing altogether to spend time with them on Nantucket. 

Once the floodgates were opened Yale became no different from any hodge-podge public university of the Midwest - a plebian East, first come first serve campground for anyone with high SATs and an application essay which highlighted their personal courage. 

The university changed colors within a few years.  Bladderball, weekends at Smith and Vassar, tailgate parties, and courses taught by by Scully, Bloom, and Marshall were gone in a flash.  The Sixties began the descent into academic populism, the Seventies accelerated the fall, and the last recent decades completed it.  The Yale of today resembles nada of the past. 

Jonas had of course applied to Yale and gotten early acceptance.  The university was always glad to have legacy students even though under the current rubric inheritance mattered less in the selection process.  After all, the Philbys had donated thousands to Yale, and no administrator would want to shut off that particular spigot. 

Jonas arrived for a look one May Saturday, accompanied by one of the soon-to-graduate senior class volunteers who took him around; but the Harkness and Beinecke libraries were idle distractions to what the guide wanted to explain to the new recruit. 'Yale is not your grandfather's university', he said. 'Gone is the old boy, privileged elitism of the past.  The university has become a diverse, activist, engaged place of excellence'. 

 

The Old Campus was chock-a-block with tents and temporary shelters for student protestors who demanded disinvestment from child-killing, Jewish genocidal occupying Israelis.  Drag queens, Folsom Street Fair-ready transvestites, tough chick Bernal Heights dykes, and butch bikers were at the ready, waiting to tear down the palaces of privilege unless the university capitulated to their demands. 

Where was Wordsworth, Shelley, Blake, and Coleridge in all this, Jonas wondered, remembering his father's stories of Harold Bloom, only thirty-five but intriguing and engaging to his crop of ingenue Yalies in his fabric of mythical Romanticism?  Where was Vince Scully and his thrusting, potent, masculine peaks of Crete?  The lambent, metaphorical verses of Shakespeare? 

The Old Campus was as littered and outhouse-smelling as the streets of San Francisco, a disgusting mélange of castoffs, academic derelicts, and Goodnight Moon idealists.

This, said Jonas' guide, was the new Yale; and so it was that Jonas Philby went South and unapologetically applied to the Universities of Mississippi and Alabama. 

'What on earth are you doing?', asked his father. 'I know that Yale has changed, and it is not the same place I and your grandfather went to, but it is still Yale after all'.  Mory's, Fence Club, Skull and Bones were still extant and viable, the old man said, so don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. 

Yet Jonas had his mind made up. South it was, and not just to any Southern university, but the motherlode of all cheerleading, girly-girl, white fraternity party land  - Tuscaloosa. 

'We don't get many Yankees down here' observed the blonde, blue-eyed co-ed in his welcoming committee; but that was the whole purpose of his fugue from New Haven. He wanted to be in a white place, an old-fashioned comfortable place. No woke bullshit. Just cunt, bass boats, and football weekends.  

'Heretic, apostate', shouted the elder Philby when he heard of his grandson's decision; but there was a certain epiphanic delight in not only reversing the course of family history but in saying fuck you to the bottom-feeding woke nonsense of Yale and the Old Campus. 

Jonas loved 'Bama, never looked back, had the time of his life, graduated with honors and was engaged to a prom queen. 

He couldn't help checking in on the news to see how Yale kept disassembling, becoming a caricature of its former self - trannies on the Yale Fence, Upper West Side Jews  and Brooklyn Italians elbowing aside patrician Lowells and Lodges, and shaming the legacy of John Davenport who centuries before came to found the New Haven plantations and to form a new, more God-fearing Puritan colony. 

'Disgusting, revolting', he said to his wife. 

'What's wrong, Daddy?' his two young children asked. 

'Nothing, my dears', Jonas replied from the verandah of Bridges, his 1840 antebellum, fully restored, plantation home in Chretien Point.  The live oaks needed trimming and the magnolia cut back, but life was good as a modern Southern grandee. Yale? What was that?

Can Space Aliens Be Saved? Christians And Muslims At It Again

The Reverend Barkley Peters, pastor of the Westover United Church of Christ began to think about Jesus, God, and his Creation, and it bothered him.  Would Jesus be Lord and Savior for all beings in the universe? Did he die on a hundred million crosses on a hundred million Calvaries? And if so, what if these alien civilizations were without earthly form, but simply emanations of a highly developed, formless intelligence. Who would be talking to whom?  Would Jesus once again be spat upon, tortured, and crucified by whatever means this civilization had? Or would he be ignored as a bit of space detritus that happened on Alpha Centauri?

 

Not idle speculation, the Reverend told himself, because if God was the universal, all-powerful, being that Christians said he was, he would have to be the God of all beings not just human ones.  He stopped for a moment, deleted an irrelevant paragraph from his Sunday sermon written because of his distraction, and prayed, hoping the answer would come to him. 

Reverend Peters was of course not the first or only cleric to have thought about first contact and the religious implications thereof, and the range of reactions among the religious communities of the world was not surprising.  His evangelical brethren had already organized conferences on the subject - how and by what means would the word of the Lord be passed on to an alien race? 

Who would be chosen to meet the new arrivals with which version of the Bible, and in what language. It might be a kind of reverse exorcism wherein the Devil is repelled and cast out by the cross and the Holy Book - shown a crucifix and the King James the spirit of the Lord might be passed to the aliens only through the miracle of divine enlightenment. 

A hundred scenarios were broached at the most important ecumenical conference to discuss the subject. Perhaps there was an infinite number of Jesus doppelgangers in the universe, each one bringing the same message of redemption and salvation in a different form, different language, different state of being.  

If aliens were to visit Earth, the Muslims would be sure to horn in, push to the head of the line, promise vestal virgins and paradisal bliss with the threat of the sword transparent, a thinly-veiled exhortation to Christians to be ready. 

 

Of all the interactions possible between an alien race and our own especially if the visitors were more intelligent and more advanced, God should be first and foremost.  Whereas curing cancer, enabling an indefinite life span, or revealing the mysteries of the boson might be of interest to some, the only inquiry or exchange worth the effort would be the nature of the divine. And horribile dictu if the visitors were formless but universal, extant, influential, and all powerful, then they would have to be considered godlike or perish the thought, be God himself.  And by the way where would Jesus fit in this extraterrestrial scheme?

The debate went on for days and through many iterations, not unlike the many deliberations of the Early Church Fathers who debated the nature of Christ, the Trinity, and the relationship between and among the three expressions of God for three centuries until Constantine put a stop to the bickering and said this is it, no more and at the final Council of Nicaea all debate was put to rest 

But Athanasius and his colleagues didn't have Muslims to deal with.  The heretics were bad enough with all their challenges and postulations about this or that, but Muhammed really stirred things up and look at the world today.  No, it was time to assure Christianity's place first in line. 

'Maybe there was an infinite number of Muhammeds', said a deacon from Chillicothe, 'performing the same evangelism as our Jesuses'.  Then the aliens might already be Muslim, perish the thought. 

Not possible, retorted the chairman of the session.  Since Christianity is the only true religion here on earth and Islam only a Johnny-come-lately derivative fake, then how in God's name could anyone believe in an uncountable number of Muhammed incarnations in the universe?

'We are forgetting our Jewish brothers', said another conferee; but although they might well have gotten Christianity started, they had long given up any mantel of authority given their....Here Pastor Unsworth was about to launch into one of his famous Christ-killer screeds but held back for once. His colleague wondered how the Jews would react to an alien arrival.  'They are not evangelical, they do not believe in the risen Lord, and they have other business to attend to. We won't have to worry about them' 

And so it went.  What if the aliens were on a space crusade to spread their religion whatever that might be, not unlike the armies of Muhammed slashing and burning their way out of Arabia and across North Africa, pushing their way into Spain and finally, thanks to Charlemagne and God's grace, defeated at Roncesvalles?  Or the Papist conquistadors who tortured, cheated, and burned the heathens of the Americas until they professed allegiance to Rome?

 

Onward Christian Soldiers was played at every one of these conferences.  Militancy not compassion or understanding was the meme.  It was bad enough that Christ and his disciples had to fight and claw there way among godless heathens and Jews in order to establish God's Kingdom on Earth; it was another to cede ground to pointless, well-armed religions. 

Not a few of the conferees, thanks to the lurid comic books of their youth, were afraid of what the aliens might do to Earth.  Images of The War of the Worlds were never far, and the idea of soulless, predatory, ghoulish creatures from outer space was always on their minds.  ET, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Cocoon were incidental distractions to what they knew was coming. Intergalactic war. 

Yet, no matter how intelligent the alien foe, nor in what form he might appear, the Word of God would be sufficient to drive him back to the outer reaches from which he came.  One could only hope that he carried the Word with him when he went. 

The Reverend Peters finished his Sunday sermon, 'Diversity and the Love Of Jesus', a theme far more important to his socially aware congregants than the obviously peripheral issue he was contemplating. If aliens did come to earth the secularists in his pews would only be ashamed of the Earth that they would find - a racist, homophobic, misogynist, predatory capitalist world of hate - and if anything would ask...beg....the aliens for some anodyne, some panacea to injustice. 

Of course they would just be whistlin' Dixie. Seriously, what alien coming such a long way just to be here, would be interested in such frippery?  They're either coming for our rice or our women, so forget the rest, the Reverend Peters thought.