If you want to understand the rancid underpinnings of the secular, liberal culture of Palestinian victimhood and Israel's "oppressor" status, read on. This is one of the best brief analyses you will find. Remember, even when Arabs fire missiles on Israeli towns, it's somehow our fault. 'Cause we live here.
From Jewish Ideas Daily, by Aryeh Tepper
In a post-religious world, where traditional means of finding absolution and redemption no longer hold sway, "the powerful and inextinguishable need of human beings to feel morally justified" looks for other outlets, many of them problematic. One such outlet, writes McClay, is the sanctimonious cult of self-empowerment through "forgiveness" and "non-judgmentalism." Another and related one is the conferral of prestige on certain designated classes of "victims"; by identifying with such victims, modern men and women can therapeutically participate in a kind of "stolen suffering," thereby affirming their own innocence and discharging their moral burden.
But a perverse logic is in motion here, and it plays itself out in corrosive ways. Since there are no victims without victimizers, a corollary of identifying oneself with the victim is the projection of one's guilt onto a "designated oppressor" who "plays the role of the scapegoat." And it is by this logic that, step by inevitable step, the cult of non-judgmentalism and the pursuit of innocence have ended up hand in glove with the tyranny of political correctness, the vicious policing of discourse and the ostracizing of designated villains that are the ugly hallmark of so much of contemporary intellectual and academic life.
Read full post here.
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