Victor Davis Hanson: The Western Disease
January 7, 2004

Every once in a while, it’s necessary to step back and put the Arab-Israeli conflict into the context of a larger pattern of political orientations and interests. The following article by the incomparable Victor Davis Hanson, a classics professor at Cal State Fresno, makes a noble effort at doing so. Hanson reflects on the massive shortcomings and garish hypocrisies of the global hate-America crowd. This is important to our listserv, because if an individual is hostile to the United States then it is more than likely that Israel too receives its measure of this wrath. Not only do the two hated nations share much in common as free, pluralistic and advanced nations created by immigrants fleeing persecution, they also face the same threats from frenzied Islamist madmen.

Conversely, those who despise America and Israel resemble each other. Consider the latest UN General Assembly vote on an Arab-sponsored resolution to refer Israel’s security barrier to the World Court for a decision. It passed with 90 in favor, eight against, with 74 abstentions. Of course, General Assembly rulings are non-binding and meaningless in most senses of the word, but what was interesting was how the vote broke down. It occurred almost exclusively along democracy/non-democracy lines. Dictators, generalissimos, thugocrats, Party officials, dear leaders, ayatollahs – these are the types that are unhappy with the wall. As if the advice of this gallery of corrupt rights abusers matters anyway, daring to tell Israel it isn’t allowed to build a barrier to defend itself from bloodthirsty terrorist killers after one hundred and five suicide bombings.

Above all, what anti-Americanism and anti-Israelism have in common is that they are not criticisms against a certain policy of either of the countries, for such criticisms are subject to reasoned explanation. Instead, they are irrational attitudes of undeviating hostility, both cut from the same illiberal ideological cloth. And they both owe their durability and prosperity to essential utility. They have necessary functions like explaining rapid and dislocating changes in a society, which many feel powerless to resist; shifting blame in order to foist personal, communal or national shortcomings and failures onto others in an act of collective unburdening; or, most commonly, serving as an outlet for built-up disaffection and resentment. Like all prejudices, their origins lie not in the object of prejudice but in the mind of the prejudiced; there is little the U.S. or Israel could do to mollify the unsettled psyches of these angry people.

Anti-Israel prejudice usually takes the form of an incandescent animus far in excess of what is appropriate or reasonable, at times to the point of outright frothing hatred. During the battle of Jenin – a fierce street fight in April 2002 – fifty-two Palestinians and twenty-three Israelis died, and all but a handful of the former were non-combatants. Yet, the hysterical denunciations not only falsely claimed a massacre of hundreds that wasn’t – to our credit, only American newspapers waited to independently confirm this before parroting PA officials – compare the Jenin outcry to the silence on behalf of the 40,000 Chechens or 250,000 Bosnians or 500,000 Iraqis – all Muslim groups that have been victims of unspeakable atrocity of sort Palestinians could never even imagine.

Read "The Western Disease," by Victor Davis Hanson, from National Review Online, December 30, 2003.