The BLOG: Politics and Law

Jewish political ineptitude and its root cause

Charles Jacobs | May 25, 2016

(AP photo)

Many of my Christian friends are baffled by what they see as Jewish political ineptitude. How is it, they ask, that the Jews, admired as talented practitioners in so many fields, seem quite – they recoil at using the word — “stupid” when it comes to defending Israel?

My Christian friends are baffled by the ineffectual Jewish response to rhetorical attacks on the world’s only Jewish state. Instead of pointing out how unfair, untrue, out of context, and hypocritical these criticisms — and those who make them — are, many Jews act as though these attacks are nothing but legitimate criticisms, and then try to respond as though to reasonable objections to some aspect of Israeli behavior. “How dumb can they be,” ask my Christian friends.

Why is it not relatively easy to point out that this is a campaign of falsehood aimed at Jews? “Criticism” of Israel appears almost daily in the mainstream press and college classrooms. Most of it does not fairly describe the facts at hand. More telling, the disproportionate focus on the Jewish state is hard to square with the critics’ comparative silence about actual, horrid human rights abuses in the world — especially in the Arab/Muslim world. How can it be that Jews don’t comprehend that the barrage of negativity are but bullets aimed at wounding Israel and tainting its supporters?

Can they really think that the estimated 40-50,000 Arab/Muslims who were killed by Israelis from 1948 until now are legitimately more revered by the left than the 1.5 million Muslims killed by the Iran-Iraq war? Or the 250,000 killed in Syria? Or the 600,000 killed by the perpetually hectoring French in Algeria? Don’t they know that the “human rights” movement is a hoax whose only aim is to exclaim “I’m not a bad white person — see how I pick on ‘white crimes’ — like Israel?” To the “progressives,” Arab Lives Matter — but only if Jews kill them.

And how can it be, they ask, that Jewish leaders have not taught their people that there is a new anti-Semitism — that Nazis or unreconstructed Christian anti-Semites are not today’s threats, but that those who put the Yellow Star on the State of Israel are the biggest danger?

Some have proposed the term “Jew flu” to describe this infirmity. I propose an alternative description of the Jewish cognitive disease — “Jupus.”

Lupus is an auto-immune disease where the antibodies that are normally produced to fight off external infections, have their function somehow inverted, and begin to attack the host body itself.

In Jupus, the special inborn Jewish intelligence provided by the Lord to help Jews survive on a hostile planet, especially perhaps to ward off dangerous anti-Semitic assaults, reverses its function and attacks instead the host Jewish community. It appears that the more advanced the intellectual gifts, the more extreme the disease, as in the Chomskyite strain.

In its more common form, Jupus is associated with simple leftism — a Jewish adaptation to a centuries-long persistent assault in which the attacked Jewish identity is submerged and a posture of universalism, sometimes also expressed as a soft socialism, adopted in its stead. The resultant universalist-minded Jews ostentatiously demonstrate an exaggerated concern for “the other” — for “everyone” (at the same time becoming hypercritical of their own). This ostensibly serves the double purpose of achieving some protection from the dangers and burdens of the Jewish identity, without actually having to publicly renounce it and risk charges of disloyalty. Indeed, the universalized Jews make the claim that it is their very Judaism that makes them more concerned with the “other.” In doing this, they can project a status more elevated and virtuous than their un-reformed, “parochial” brethren.

On the religious plane, this is clearly observable in the growing phalanx of those Jews who seek to substitute leftist universalism for Torah Judaism, the “we’re here to help the world” dodge. Among the Universalist Jews, those who adopt a religious tonality are known as “Tikkunistas.”

So when Christians ask about Jewish political idiocy, and when Muslims complain that their religion has been hijacked by radicals, tell them about Jupus.