The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Jews and Israel: Death by Relativism

Posted on | July 19, 2010 | 13 Comments

Frank Luntz quoted by Evelyn Gordon at Commentary:

“The problem that I see is that so many parents in the Jewish community taught their kids not to judge. I’m going to say something that’s a little bit ideological, but I find that kids on the right are far more likely to stand up for Israel than kids on the left. Because kids on the right believe that there is an absolute right and wrong; this is how they’ve been raised.
“Kids on the left have been taught not to judge. Therefore those on the left will not judge between Israel and the Palestinians; those on the right will.”

I’m reminded of the old joke that a liberal is a man who considers it unfair to take his own side in an argument. And liberalism is still a quasi-religion for many Jews, producing a reflexive reaction: If conservatives are pro-Israel and anti-jihad, isn’t it incumbent on liberals to take the opposite stance? Melissa Clouthier writes:

Many Jews in particular have misidentified the problem of the Holocaust as a problem with beliefs themselves. A problem of believing anything too intensely is bad, they reason. So too much patriotism, too much nationalism, Zionism, too much religiosity, too much intensity around any idea is objectively destructive. 

Since Luntz’s comments were the result of his discussion with a group of Harvard undergrads, it’s important to point out that young people don’t know history and are thus easily propagandized, as I explained last month:

There are today in America many thousands of impressionable young liberals who, like Rachel Corrie, are predisposed to buy into the deadly lies that justify the “armed struggle.” They don’t remember the wars of 1967 and ‘73, and they know nothing of the real origins and history of modern Middle Eastern terrorism. They don’t know, for example, that Arafat was allied with Moscow during the Cold War and that the PLO (as well as the Assad regime in Syria) endorsed the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.
Having been propagandized in their schools to accept the twisted Hamas/Fatah version of Middle Eastern history, young liberals swallow the Zionism-is-racism anti-colonial claptrap . . . and easily imagine the Palestinian cause as the moral equivalent of the U.S. civil-rights movement.

“Confirmation bias” is a basic problem in this context: If you have a liberal worldview, you will tend to believe information that confirms that worldview, while ignoring or discounting contradictory information. And here is the point that Luntz’s audience of Harvard students has probably never considered: Intelligence does not inoculate you against error.

This is the self-flattering syllogism of the intellectual elite:

  • I am extremely intelligent;
  • I believe X; therefore
  • Anyone who doesn’t believe X is stupid.

Intelligence is not the same thing as knowledge, a commodity of which all young people have a meager supply, and even very intelligent young people can be easily seduced into error by providing them with carefully selected facts (and factoids) that prejudice their opinions. William F. Buckley Jr. once observed:

In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think . . . but is altogether positive that he has arrived at his position by independent intellectual exertion. This man is outraged by the suggestion that he is the flesh-and-blood tribute to the success of his indoctrinators . . .

You see this phenomenon in action, for example, in the global warming debate. Many young people have been carefully indoctrinated — e.g., shown Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth in science classes — and therefore refuse to credit any evidence that contradicts the bogus “hockey stick” alarmism.

As with global warming, so too with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The three-decade ascendancy of the Edward Said cult in Mideast studies has poisoned the academic well to such a degree that one can scarcely find an “expert” on the subject who is not tainted by it. Meanwhile, the veterans of the ’60s New Left have penetrated organized liberalism to such a degree that, vis-à-vis the Middle East, the Democratic Party is now more aligned with Sirhan Sirhan than with RFK.

Even the most intelligent young people are apt to be impressed with the enormous prestige of those numerous academic experts who present the Middle East conflict in the context of Arab victimhood. And if those young people have been raised within a liberal Democrat environment — remember that John Kerry got 74% of the Jewish vote in 2004 — their partisan and ideological allegiances will naturally make them sympathetic to the “Blame Israel First” crowd, who were among the most outspoken voices in the anti-Bush chorus during the past decade.

Thus we behold the astonishing spectacle of young Jews who eagerly align themselves with the Sirhan Sirhan wing of the Democratic Party.

Category: Education, Israel

Comments

13 Responses to “Jews and Israel: Death by Relativism”

  1. The most important story of the day is not what you would expect: « DaTechguy's Blog
    July 19th, 2010 @ 10:31 am

    […] Stacy handles this in depth emphasis mine. As with global warming, so too with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The […]

  2. Dave C
    July 19th, 2010 @ 3:03 pm

    I see this with the comments of the latest troll here, dumb dumb.

  3. Dave C
    July 19th, 2010 @ 11:03 am

    I see this with the comments of the latest troll here, dumb dumb.

  4. young4eyes
    July 19th, 2010 @ 4:55 pm

    “In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think”
    Hence the success of a Rush Limbaugh and the mass stupidity he’s accountable for.
    Stacy, haven’t you tried this before, not too long ago?
    It delights me to see Cons at pains to explain why, despite the Israel pandering,the American diaspora has not and will not shift to the Right.
    Frank Luntz tries in vain to explain away the “problem” with silly fantasies about “right and wrong” as perceived by Conservatives.
    The Jewish community stood arm in arm with African-Americans during the Civil Rights movement.There was a clear notion of “right and wrong” here and unlike Cons the Jewish community knew which side to take.
    Meanwhile, you have Tea Party leader Mark Williams still referring to Affrican-Americans as “coloreds”.
    No Stacy, Cons will never get it. But it is fun to watch you try…

  5. young4eyes
    July 19th, 2010 @ 12:55 pm

    “In the hands of a skillful indoctrinator, the average student not only thinks what the indoctrinator wants him to think”
    Hence the success of a Rush Limbaugh and the mass stupidity he’s accountable for.
    Stacy, haven’t you tried this before, not too long ago?
    It delights me to see Cons at pains to explain why, despite the Israel pandering,the American diaspora has not and will not shift to the Right.
    Frank Luntz tries in vain to explain away the “problem” with silly fantasies about “right and wrong” as perceived by Conservatives.
    The Jewish community stood arm in arm with African-Americans during the Civil Rights movement.There was a clear notion of “right and wrong” here and unlike Cons the Jewish community knew which side to take.
    Meanwhile, you have Tea Party leader Mark Williams still referring to Affrican-Americans as “coloreds”.
    No Stacy, Cons will never get it. But it is fun to watch you try…

  6. Wondering Jew
    July 19th, 2010 @ 6:37 pm

    This is all true, but (speaking from firsthand experience) the political cognitive dissonance is even more severe than Stacy lets on here. Truly, for most Jews, liberalism is a religion, and when you attempt to point out their religion’s flaws you can expect to be attacked mercilessly for it.

  7. Wondering Jew
    July 19th, 2010 @ 2:37 pm

    This is all true, but (speaking from firsthand experience) the political cognitive dissonance is even more severe than Stacy lets on here. Truly, for most Jews, liberalism is a religion, and when you attempt to point out their religion’s flaws you can expect to be attacked mercilessly for it.

  8. Israel — Winds Of Jihad By SheikYerMami
    July 20th, 2010 @ 3:20 pm

    […] MoreWhy do young Jews blame Israel for the world’s problems?Robert Stacy McCain explains.As with global warming, so too with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The three-decade ascendancy […]

  9. TLOS
    July 20th, 2010 @ 9:24 pm

    Don’t generalize about all young American Jews. There are many young Jews that are educated about their own history and support Israel, despite the left-wing indoctrination in public schools and in the media.

  10. TLOS
    July 20th, 2010 @ 5:24 pm

    Don’t generalize about all young American Jews. There are many young Jews that are educated about their own history and support Israel, despite the left-wing indoctrination in public schools and in the media.

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    July 21st, 2010 @ 10:50 am

    […] Other McCain – Jews and Israel: Death by Relativism submitted by […]

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