[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] We never, never learn

[rfmcdonald]

From the Jerusalem Post article "US Jews: Israel losing PR war in high schools", by Hilary Leila Krieger and Sam Ser:

[C]onference chairman James Tisch, however, reported good news from a recent tour of Bulgaria and Romania, which his visited on their way to Israel and where they reported strong support for Israel and the United States.

Despite tightening their relationship with the European Union, which was generally less friendly towards Israel and the US, leaders from the two Eastern European countries reassured the delegation that they would maintain their current stances towards both countries, Hoenlein said.

Tisch explained the support, in contrast to Western Europe's more pro-Arab stand, as stemming from the lack of sizable Muslim populations in Eastern Europe and their desire to move away from the Cold War's Arab-Russian alliances which controlled their foreign policy.

This article provides another data point in support of my contention that "Eurabia" is the same sort of construct as "Jew York City." Curiously, the Jerusalem Post provides a lot of these data points. I've two points of contention in particular.

• Romania has a small Muslim population, true. Bulgaria, though, has one of the proportionally largest Muslim populations in Europe, composed of ethnic Turks and Pomaks. Despite a vicious campaign of forced assimilation and emigration in the 1980s, since the end of Communism, Bulgaria's Muslim community--amounting to perhaps a tenth (Word format) of the country's total population--has flourished. The Movement for Rights and Freedoms, founded in 1990 to represent Bulgaria's ethnic Turks, is one of the largest political parties in Bulgaria and a member of the ruling coalition government, while its leader was identified by the Financial Times as Europe's most successful Muslim politician. Bulgarian support of Israel stems from its small Muslim population, does it?


• Tisch, in linking western European criticism of Israeli policies to the presence of a considerable Muslim population in western Europe, commits exactly the same sort of bigotry as those who link American support of Israeli policies to the presence of a considerable Jewish population in the United States. If we were to accept either bigoted view, we'd have to conclude that it's impossible for democracy to function. How can it, if disproportionately powerful ethnoreligious groups are capable of completely dominating populations dozens of times their size? No, in order for Americans to know the truth about Israeli cruelty, they will have to cast out their Jews; in order for western Europeans to know the truth about Israeli benevolence, they will have to cast out their Muslims.

The ultimate, worrying, consequence of the intimately intertwined "Eurabia" and "Jew York City" lines of argument is that it delegitmizes any kind of nuance, any kind of critical sympathy, any kind of mixed feeling. The only thing that protagonists of either argument can let themselves feel is their pride in their own incomparable rectitude and their hatred for their enemy's inhumanity, only the most complete and glitteringly sterile purity of thought and deed.