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What happens when our beliefs are shredded by reality?
One such moral crisis affects millions of Diaspora Jews who have been taught to believe that Jews are safer in Western democracies.
Perhaps.
Today, many Jews are beginning to understand that, because of the fault lines in democracy, the sociopolitical landscape can suddenly change.
A democracy is, in many ways, a house divided against itself. The U.S. “Founding Father” James Madison called this phenomenon factionalism. Free people get to associate with whomever they want.
Hence, the task of government, Madison contended, is not “to impose lofty standards of justice and morality” but to control and de-escalate the tensions that result from these socio-political clashes.
Madison defined a faction as any number of citizens who are united by some common passion or interest; remaining indifferent to “the rights of other citizens or to the permanent interests of the community.”
Sounds to me like the West these days.
There is a new political coalition between Muslims and almost every other troubled and hyperbolic segment of humanity. These people have almost nothing in common other than their own discontent. Such inner frustration is often projected.
Let us look at two elements in this coalition of chaos.
First, Muslims have been committed to a theology of violence that has perpetuated national despair throughout the Middle East. Westerners suffering from a kind of anomie that has left them abandoned by, say, “The American Dream” have become their allies in a war against the Jews.
One would have imagined that, by now, Jewish leaders instructed by history would recognize the signs of such “danger ahead.” The sociologist Daniel Bell, almost 60 years ago, warned us. He described changes in America’s power structure that were foreboding.
For example, America has been transformed from a class society into a “color society.” Race always served as the bedrock of tension either between Whites and Blacks or between Aryans and Jews.
I can empathize with the notion that Black Americans resent what has been done to them. But, it was not done by Jews. Neither was Germany’s defeat in World War One the nefarious accomplishment of the Jews.
Yet, as James Madison pointed out, the task of governments and power structures is to unite hopelessly contentious social aggregates to find a suitable and functional explanation of their common plight; a perfect scapegoat.
Is this why the media distorts the truth about the war against Hamas? Is this why U.S. President Joe Biden’s administration is effectively trying to save Hamas and further isolate Israel?
Having been persecuted all over Europe and the Middle East, Jews were desperate to believe that they were safe in the West. British author Israel Zangwill wrote about this hope in a grandiose manner. His play “God’s Crucible” describes “the great Melting-Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!”
Yet, as Daniel Moynihan (former U.S. ambassador to the UN) and sociologist Nathan Glazer wrote, the great melting pot has redistilled ethnic and racial identities.
In their study, “Beyond the Melting Pot,” Moynihan and Glazer, reiterated Bell’s warning. It seems that the changing demographics of class and color have significantly impacted upon the political process. In this new “crucible” unity, “out of many, one” has broken down into a more dangerous racially based factionalism threatening not only the Jews but the very character of the West.
The political sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset pointed out that the divisions in a democracy between groups with differing political interests lead to political conflict among these groups. Social or cultural cleavages thus become political cleavages which threaten the Western order that once provided Jews with a sense of security.
Once these cleavages were regional (for example, North versus South in the U.S.) or agrarian versus industrial, conservative versus liberal, Church versus State. In the West today, these traditional cleavages have become less important and new conflict lines have emerged, such as conflicts over integration and multiculturalism, or environmental issues.
In this atmosphere of great social chaos, new coalitions were formed. Even the old Marxist dichotomy of “oppressor” and “oppressed” have been reinvigorated. Who could have imagined that prestigious university elites would join with Muslim fundamentalists in chanting death to Israel?
These new alignments have replaced the traditional ones resulting in drastic changes in organizations. Once a bastion of support for Israel, leftist parties have now become more antagonistic.
In “The Republic,” ancient Greek philosopher Plato offered an analogy between a person and the city (or state) because he understood that human nature always impacts upon political values. Just as humans are conflicted and often make bad decisions for themselves, self-government, too, becomes self-destructive. The human factor illustrates the essential weaknesses of political organization.
Today, in Western liberal democracy, this human element has become even more of a concern as personal freedom has become the new “ism” (i.e. individualism). This is the freedom gone amok that worried Plato and the great danger to “The Republic” that kept many Westerners, like the U.S. Founding Fathers, up at night.
Free societies exist because individuals compromise for the good of the collective. Now our world and well-being has been profoundly disturbed by those who claim that individual rights are more important than individual responsibility.
The laws that have guided Israel and the Jewish People over centuries begins in laying out our obligations — rather than our privileges — in order to protect the property and rights of our neighbors.
Those ancient values have been upended by a new world order that ultimately could very well destroy us all.
You nailed it, and I keep beating the drum that Islam is the greatest threat to humanity and climate change is only a woke distraction to the Muslim threat, to not only Jews but all western nations
Jew are no longer safe in western democracies, that is true. Neither are Christians nor true conservatives. I am sure it has been said before, but we--the West--do not need an outside enemy to destroy us. We are destroying ourselves and inviting others to help us.