Offend Jews? Why not?

Editorial

The Vancouver Sun columnist Barbara Yaffe, and numerous other commentators here and abroad, are warning that positions taken against Israel by Christians, like Canada’s United Church, could have deleterious effects on Christian relationships with the Jewish community.

The United Church of Canada last week endorsed a church-sponsored report that demonizes Israel, essentially beatifies Palestinians, and calls for a boycott of products from Israel’s disputed territories.

Coming a couple of weeks after the controversy over the International Olympic Committee’s refusal to hold a moment of silence for the Israeli and German victims of the 1972 Munich Olympic massacre, these two seemingly unrelated events speak to a serious problem. The fear of offending Jews – until recently a sin deemed so powerful that critics claimed it had the power to stifle free speech – is no longer a worry for groups like the IOC or the United Church. Indeed, it seems a welcome development.

The IOC seems to have concluded that offending Jews is a small price to pay for preventing offence to Arab and Muslim states and agencies. Among the regimes and extra-governmental organizations that might have been offended by a moment of silence are a handful with both a record and a raison d’être of mass murder. The last thing Olympic organizers would have wanted, while already under fire for dubious security preparations, was to disturb even one single individual who might have brought bloody mayhem to the Games. Perhaps Olympic officials made the cost-benefit analysis that permitting a moment of silence could have resulted in mortal catastrophe. Denying the moment of silence, on the other hand, had little practical consequence since, as the world knows well, the worst that disgruntled Jews do is kvetch.

Offending Jews is not something that most people or organizations find distasteful anymore. Real, crude antisemitism of the sort purveyed by extremist groups is limited to a fringe element, albeit, in places like Europe, a growing one. But the worldview it propagates – of powerful Jews controlling financial and political agencies in service of a The Jewish state stealing land and oppressing the powerless – thrives even in decent circles because of a different, but related, phenomenon.

Large numbers of apparently well-intentioned people harbor unconscious or barely conscious views of Jews as powerful and controlling. The Jewish dedication to learning (and the talmudic tradition of questioning and debating) has led to the success of individual Jews in a diversity of important sectors – media, (American) politics, the law, academia – there is no question. The largely unconscious corollary accepted by many people – even well-intentioned people – is that the success of Jewish individuals equals collective power. The end point of this game is that this collective power is used to perpetuate Jewish control. (The object of control differs: Hollywood, the banks, Washington, free speech, the list goes on and gets darker with the briefest Google search.)

Moreover, the general uncritical acceptance of a Marxian dialectic by Western society (and especially its enthusiastic adoption by the left) means that groups deemed oppressed and disadvantaged are determined largely by economic measures. By this criterion, Jews cannot be oppressed or disadvantaged because, statistically and, therefore, demonstrably, Jews as a group in Western societies are comparatively economically advantaged. The Marxian economic blinders worn by organizations like the United Church (let us now stop pretending that theology, rather than ideology, is that church’s North Star) prevent “progressive” people from seeing threats to Jews. Whatever genuine threats exist (from European hate groups, Islamists, lone gunmen or the nuclear program of an avowed genocidal antisemite) will be easily rebuffed by the infallibility of Jewish power. In the face of evidence that Jews and Israelis are under attack in Europe and the Middle East, much of the world can rest assured that the Jews will be just fine. We have friends in high places and, deny all you want, for all our kvetching, Jews are in the catbird seat. Jewish interests, feelings and fears can be comfortably disregarded by groups like the IOC and the United Church.

To an extent, their bigotry is unconscious. To employ their own vernacular: they know not what they do. Yet, however unconscious their prejudices, it manifests in a completely conscious eagerness to stand against Israel, Jewish relations be damned. One United Church official even warned several weeks ago that Jewish lobbying of church members could have the inverse of its intended effect, and it may have been precisely this sort of petulance that helped pass this report.

Offending Jews is not just an unfortunate side effect of the United Church’s and others’ defence of “social justice.” It is a deliberate, defiant and proud declaration of who they are.

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