[TheNewNeo] Here’s Douglas Murray:
"Maybe if we come up with a perfect argument," he said. "Maybe if we inform people about the history, and broadly speaking, you’re talking about trying to educate or inform people who are not educated or informed."
Most anti-Israel people aren’t informed about the Peel Commission or the Balfour Declaration, according to Murray. "You’re talking about people who have never heard of any of these things," he said.
The Peel Commission and Balfour Declaration are esoteric knowledge compared to what most people are ignorant about. I’ve previously told the story of a well-educated person I talked to around 2005, a woman a few years older than I am, who did not know that immediately after the state of Israel was created, the Arab world declared war on it and Israel won that war. She knew literally nothing about how Israel was created, and yet she bought every bit of Palestinian propaganda. In her case, she was a follower and admirer of Edward Said. In the case of many other people I know, ignorance is also usually involved, although they’re not all quite as ignorant as she was.
It’s also significant that when I discovered how little that acquaintance of mine knew, I offered to send her a link or two on the subject. She readily acquiesced. But I never heard back from her and I doubt she read what I sent, even though it wasn’t long. People are usually quite dug in in their beliefs.
Murray also says:
Asked why there is so much antisemitism in Europe, Murray replied that many are "working out to have some kind of guilt complex, which ends up attacking the victim."
"It is a desire so deep down, they probably could never identify it even after years of therapy—to blame the Jews and accuse them of the same thing done to the Jews," Murray said.
Much more at the link.
This idea of lies and propaganda filling in the gaps created by ignorance is something I’ve pondered many, many times. In the twenty years since I had that conversation with that acquaintance of mine, the education system and the left have made sure that the young people coming up are even more ignorant than before, and the MSM helps to fill their heads with leftist-approved lies. Anti-semitism is only one aspect of this, because the ignorance affects an enormous number of topics and creates an enormous amount of opportunity for the left.
Personally I believe anti-semitism serves a deep emotional need. Falling societies need scapegoats. And since one is not allowed to be "racist", or "Islamophobic", or "male chauvinist pig"...
| Except that Jew-hate precedes modern hypersensibility by 2.5 millennia, going back to the ancient Greeks, who could not abide challenge of the equally universalist but centrally monotheistic worldview of the Jews. |
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