West's anti-Semitism is applied evenly to Jews, Arabs

The recent embrace of the Palestinian "cause" among self-proclaimed progressives in the West is not only a complete reversal of the Left's traditional support for Israel, but is morally troubling on several fronts. Lead among these is the growing anti-Semitism in the West – a racism not confined to a growing antipathy toward Israel's Jewish nature, but also displayed in the West's patronizing attitude toward the Palestinians themselves.

The racism toward the Jews is, of course, grounded in centuries of European custom and tradition. However, while the Jew was traditionally hated in Europe for being different – dismissed as the perennial Outsider right up through the Nazi regime – today the Jew is hated for being too much like us. Israel so resembles the Western democracies that we demand perfection from it, a perfection we never ask of any of its non-Western neighbors.

An outsider? No, my friends – in today's world of Western self-loathing, the Jew is hated for representing us, for being the uber-Westerner.

On the other hand, the West's racism toward the Arabs (a Semitic people like the Jews) can't really be said to be defined by the scattered attacks against mosques and Islamic community centers in Europe and the Americas. Those seem to be the sad work of isolated rednecks and yahoos – the same kind of idiots who formerly confined themselves to bombing synagogues and black churches.

Much more revealing of the deep-seated nature of our hatred of the Arabs are those who claim to speak on their behalf, those who most loudly and vociferously defend them. Or at least defend what we put forth as their "cause."

Evidence of this can be found both in the Kiplingesque paternalism of the Left toward the Arabs, and in the fact that it is only Arabs living under Israeli rule or occupation who are to be defended.

This smug patronization was most evident when conservative Israeli politician (now prime minister) Ariel Sharon visited a shrine revered by both Jews and Muslims. When anti-Israeli mobs took to the streets of the West Bank and Gaza and quickly resorted to violence, their apologists in the West tried to explain this away this by saying that Sharon had "provoked" them with his visit. A United Nations resolution even condemned not those who were rioting, but Sharon – the first time an individual has been condemned by the United Nations for freely expressing her or his religious beliefs.

But the U.N.'s resolution was more damaging to the Arabs it was supposedly backing than it was to Sharon. By refusing to hold Arabs to prevailing norms of acceptable behavior, by making weak excuses for violence, by putting forth the argument that Arabs cannot be expected to control themselves when "provoked," we perpetuate the Eurocentric and very racist viewpoint that Arabs are children, to be protected and punished as we see fit, but hardly our equals.

There is an ugly double standard at work here: Arabs can be "provoked" to violence by Israeli words or actions, but Israelis cannot be provoked by Arab words or actions. Why? Well, the Israelis are European, so we expect them to behave better.

Of course, when it comes to civil rights and representative government, the Israelis do behave better – to the enormous shame of the vast majority of Arabs, who do, after all, live under Arab rule.

For the truth is this: Nearly every Arab being denied her or his most basic civil liberties sees those rights crushed under the jackboot not of Israel, but of their fellow Arabs.

Outside of Bahrain, no Arab citizen exercises a free vote for her or his leaders – excepting only the Arab Israelis (which is how those Arabs living in Israel proper choose to identify themselves). No Arab living in the Middle East has a legal right to openly question her leaders – excepting only the Arab Israelis. And no Arab living in an Arab-ruled country has the basic right to convert from Islam to the religion of her choosing – unlike 2 million Arab citizens of Israel (many of whom are Catholic).

Where is the Left's protest of the Arab nations' abysmal record on human rights? Of their systematic repression of political dissent and religious freedom? Of their – if we're to be honest here – fascism?

The Left's response is a roaring silence.

Even the Palestinians – those Arabs living in non-Israeli territory presently occupied by Israel; i.e., the West Bank and Gaza Strip – are not granted the courtesy of a demand for the most basic civil rights we accept as a matter of course in our nations: the right to vote, to protest, to freely choose one's own religion.

Instead of democracy and freedom, all we offer the Palestinians is non-Jews to rule them.

The moral collapse of the Western Left has come to the point where we are now projecting our own domestic fixation with race onto the rest of the world. In this world view, the Palestinians don't need democracy and freedom – they simply need oppressors of their own ethnicity.

We saw the same situation during the 1980s and '90s in the West's attitude toward Africa. There were numerous highly organized, well-funded, and very visible campaigns to end minority white rule in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and South Africa. The inherently insupportable system of apartheid was regularly decried on college campuses across the United States and Europe, and shareholder meetings of Western corporations routinely turned into referenda on apartheid, with pressure to divest from white-ruled South Africa.

But once white rule was overthrown (peaceably in South Africa, less so in Rhodesia), Western interest in African affairs disappeared. While South Africa has managed to stick to a representative form of government that strives to serve its people's interests, however imperfectly, it is a rare exception on that troubled continent.

Where are the protests against the brutality and political repression in Zimbabwe today? In Congo? Rwanda?

We simply don't care. If blacks are being oppressed by blacks, we assume that must be how they like things. Or we assure ourselves that it's none of our business, that the blacks should sort it out ourselves, that our own racist history somehow precludes us from doing anything to stop black leaders from oppressing black citizens.

It is a sadly deluded form of racism, but it is just as virulent and harmful to the hundreds of millions of Africans without basic civil rights as the more overt forms responsible for apartheid.

We see the same reaction in the West toward the Middle East today. What we find offensive isn't Israel's denial of basic civil rights to Arabs in the occupied lands, what we find offensive is Jews being in charge of Arabs. This is made patently clear by our deadly silence in the face of Arabs being denied basic human rights throughout the Arab world – in most cases far more brutally than the Palestinians. When Arab leaders brutalize Arab citizens, we find no cause for concern. It is only when Jews brutalize Arabs that we manage to find our moral outrage and speak out.

Such a world view is clearly designed not to further the cause of justice for the Palestinian or Arab peoples, but to assuage Western consciences.

Should Israel pull out of the occupied territories, leaving the Palestinians to their own affairs, will we hear any protests against the right-wing dictatorial nature of the Palestinian Authority?

We can idealistically hope so. But a quick glance at the West's indifference to the plight of Arabs already being repressed by their fellow Arabs doesn't offer much in the way of realistic expectation.