What’s most interesting about the unsurprising news that the European Union is doubling their aid to the Palestinians at the very moment that civil war in Gaza seems imminent is what really motivates the Europeans in their continued largesse.
On the face of it, it is the most conventional liberalism. Have a problem? Throw some money at it and hope it will go away. Of course in this case untold billions have been going down the drain in this manner for decades and the Europeans surely know that. Not only that, anyone with the slightest psychological sophistication understands that aid in this kind of situation can often do more harm than good – and not just from the obvious corruption. In the larger sense it is like increasing the allowance to a child with a substance abuse problem. What do you expect to happen? Better to have cut the child’s allowance and made him go cold turkey – something that might shock the Palestinians into actually having to create their own functional state. Certainly the European method has not helped them.
So why are the Europeans doing this? Yes, there are many influences, but in the one that makes the most sense to me, the Palestinians are essentially irrelevant bystanders. They just happen to be the props in a longer, deeper struggle, which Ron Rosenbaum described so well in this 2002 article:
European politicians, European culture. The complacency about synagogue burnings, the preference for focusing on the Israeli response to suicide bombers blowing up families at prayer rather than on the mass murderers (as the suicide bombers should more properly be called) and those who subsidize them and throw parties for their families.
There is a horrid but obvious dynamic going on here: At some deep level, Europeans, European politicians, European culture are aware that almost without exception every European nation was complicit in Hitler’s genocide. Some manned the death camps, others stamped the orders for the transport of the Jews to the death camps, everyone knew what was going on – and yet the Nazis -didn’t have to use much if any force to make them accomplices. For the most part, Europeans volunteered. That is why “European civilization” will always be a kind of oxymoron for anyone who looks too closely at things, beginning with the foolish and unnecessary slaughters of World War I that paved the way for Hitler’s more focused effort.
And so there is a need to blame someone else for the shame of “European civilization.” To blame the victim. To blame the Jews. The more European nations can focus one-sidedly on the Israeli response to terror and not to the terror itself, the more they can portray the Jews as the real villains, the more salve to their collective conscience for their complicity in collective mass murder in the past. Hitler may have gone too far, and perhaps we shouldn’t have been so cowardly and slavish in assisting him, but look at what the Jews are doing.
UPDATE: Dept. of Blame Canada – Pieter Dorsman has some related pajama-clad original reporting from Vancouver.
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