A Complex of Small Minds and Lame Excuses

If we could only have another one of those Abba Eban style studies on the European mind, we could see just how simplistic and flawed the general reasoning is: a “modern” Paris Imam says that the Gaza conflict makes it hard for him to talk to French Jews, because he “differentiates them from Israelis?” No. Certainly not. The palpably lame Christian Science Monitor thinks it has to find a moral equivalency argument of its’ own to merely report the story saying:

Esther Benbassa, chair of Jewish studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, says one effect of the Gaza bombing already visible is "to remove the taboo of the Holocaust" in common speech, both among Arabs and ordinary French. "I don't agree that Gaza and the Holocaust can be compared, but I note a willingness to do so. I understand that, even if I don't agree with it. It's something new."

All those “venomous Jews” eh? As if opening up their mouths to incessantly apologize for something that they themselves haven’t done to people whose victimhood is limited to being offended that something is happening to SOME PEOPLE they want to identify with and not others.

But never mind that, these are the great minds of the conversational, intellectual society that Parisians continually claim to be. Their tender sensibilities and humanism require a tap-dance to even mention the fact that the French to compare the Israelis retuning fire at people who fire rockets at them as a Holocaust.

This doesn’t come as a novelty. That meme has been bouncing around in the Arab mind for the past 40 years when the Holocaust could no longer be plausibly denied. It is, however only been 20 years since this madness has dominated the majority of Europeans, who should know something of the Pagroms, Holocaust, etal., and reveals the ethnological bigotry and simplistic reasoning widespread in the population: that the nationalities, or more to the point their image of the nationalities forms comparisons by way of involvement. Jews figured as the biggest group of victims of the Holocaust, therefore the feel like you sound smart, one must find an inversion by which one can point a finger in the air at false surprise. “Those Jews” (as if the survivors of Auschwitz and Birkenau were the ones returning fire today) must be at fault as they are magically connected because they fit into the same simple category that that average european can understand: the tribal pigeon hole.

"Solidarity with Palestinians has at its roots a feeling of disenfranchisement in France," says Ms. Benbassa. "Migrants from North Africa are astounded to find that when something happens to Jews it is treated with great importance in the media, but when something happens to Arabs or blacks, it is not."

As though this was anyone’s fault but that of the paranoiac society that they live in, “in the heart of Europe”.