The so-called “peace and human rights crowd” marches alongside those who carry signs screaming “Kill the Jews,” “Jews to the Gas,” or even “Kill the Juices,” literacy not being a well-entrenched skill among the underclass.
The intelligentsia finds an alliance with radical Islam that parallel’s its 1930s counterparts’ affinity for totalitarianism. So entrenched is this irrational rejection of fundamental self-interest that Muslim feminists can find few allies among the feminists in the West. Ayan Hirsi Ali stands as a hero to the right, but among the left she is an embarrassment that threatens their fictional reality and poses a confrontation with common sense that they seek to avoid.
The intelligentsia militates for boycotting Israel but is silent on boycotting China over Tibet, Sudan over Darfur, or the eight Muslim states that punish homosexuals with death. Human rights groups will flock to Durban II to once again stand shoulder to shoulder with states that kill homosexuals, coerce women into apartheid, and think that civil liberties are an abomination against God. Like Durban I, the one source for all of the world’s evils will be the Jew, this time demonized as the Jewish state.
A professor I know who considered himself a champion of human rights viewed his participation in Durban I as one of the few high points in an otherwise aggressively mediocre career. It was as if those responsible for bringing German Ambassador Hans Luther to Columbia University in 1933 to justify Nazism’s war on the Jews considered the endeavor to be the high point of their careers. Such is the way in which the perverted selflessness of the intellectuals of the 1930s is emulated by today’s intellectuals.
Former President Jimmy Carter can unapologetically characterize Israel as an apartheid state, distort the history of the Middle East, apologize for the murderous charter of Hamas, and commit plagiarism, only to stand in front of a packed auditorium on the Berkeley campus and receive a standing ovation and not one question from the audience worthy of anyone with a meaningful education. Had Carter written similar screeds about any other ethnic group, there would not be sufficient security to protect him from the wrath of intellectuals capable of manifesting their outrage by readily descending to the depths of mob violence.
Andre Gide in the Nouvelle Revue Francaise could not contain his excitement over Celine’s ripping away the so-called “Jewish question” from the circumlocution of polite society and casting it into the vulgarity of the street. Even at a time when the Nazis were persecuting the Jews and characterizing them as subhuman, Gide felt no restraint in his pleasure over Celine’s vitiating the barrier of morality that isolates racism in its most odious manifestations. So too, contemporary intellectuals have crossed a similar line. So too has the Obama administration. This time, however, it is all the worse, for the consequences of this behavior have already been written in the banal accounting of death-camp statistics.