[goldstategop]

The Jews are now blamed for being "too European," "too cosmopolitan," "too Western" - in a word, uppity. Uppity for having their own state and having the temerity to insist on behaving like every other nation on earth. There's the irony in the current view of the Jew: once despised as outsiders, they're now despised as the ultimate insiders. Damn them for their pushiness! Theodor Herzl, the founder of Zionism, though eliminating Jewish homelessness would win the Jews more acceptance and esteem. If anything, it earned them more hatred and scorn now that they do have a nationality. No matter what Jews do, it never quite seems to be enough to change their condition as the Pepe Le Pew of mankind. For me personally, Czernowitz is a place that has ancestral echoes. I see my father's family refracted back to that place where they once in lived in Mark Steyn's brilliant essay on how the Jew now extinct there, now in Israel with an independent nationality is still perceived as a subject the world talks about either in drunken rants or hushed whispers and not at all in a sense meant to be complimentary.

(Go Israel, Go! Slap 'Em Down Hezbullies.)

[Lurker]

With hindsight, even the artful invention of the hitherto unknown ethnicity of "Palestinian"

I see that the inestimable Mr. Steyn got my letter.

L

[prov1813man]

I am sure I have asked this before. So please be patient, since I still don't have the answer.

Why are American Jews predominantly democrat/liberal when the American right in general and President Bush in particular are the best friends Israel has ever had ?

[Mr Ramsbotham]

In Moab on a mountain once,
I took my stave in hand,
And gazed out wistfully upon
The hoped-for promised land.
Then bade me Death my eyes to close,
And drew me far away,
Behind a rampant stallion,
In heaven’s formless dray.
When here I stopped, in bonds of flesh,
I bound myself to earth,
Again (who have with Pharaoh walked)
To know the dread of birth.
And have I come thus, far in time,
My bootless rod in hand,
To sigh upon a mountain-top,
For you, my Promised Land?

[Lorianne]

Interesting. Thanks for posting this.

[okie01]

Once again, Steyn has made a profound point with grace and wit.

This piece was like the movie which leaves the audience stunned and speechless at the end, resulting in a palpable pause before the audience starts to file out...silently.

Thanks for the post.

[AZLiberty]

The situation has flipped. It's now the stateless Muslims who are insinuating their way into European countries. The real threat of Islamism has replaced the imagined threat of Zionism.

[syriacus]

For me, it comes down to these three facts...
1. Israelis make good neighbors
2. Members of Hizb'allah don't make good neighbors
3. It's a small, small world.

[garbanzo]

This isn't about who's right and who's wrong: there are regional flare-ups all over the map and, regardless of the rights and wrongs, for the most part the world just sits back and lets them get on with it.

You can pretty much throw a dart blindfolded at a map of subsaharan Africa and find a spot in crisis or warfare or upheaval but that's no crisis, as far as Europe or the rest of the world is concerned. No UN-sponsored cease-fire agreements, no wall-to-wall coverage on CNN. It's apparantly just the Israel question that needs to be decided by outsiders.

[Alouette]

FRmail me to be added or removed from this Judaic/pro-Israel/Russian Jewry ping list.

Warning! This is a high-volume ping list.

[Malesherbes]

This much is true: Israel is a besieged outpost of Western Civilization, and if that outpost falls, the rest of Western Civilization will be besieged next. The sooner Europeans figure that out, the safer they will be - if it is not already too late.

[Frank_2001]

Excellent article!

[Zionist Conspirator]

Mark Steyn lays it on the line, as always.

[Esther Ruth]

It's a very strange feeling to read 19th century novels and travelogues and recognize the old psychoses currently reemerging in even more preposterous forms.

***

Zechariah 12:2 Behold, I will make Jerusalem a cup of trembling unto all the people round about, when they shall be in the siege both against Judah and against Jerusalem.

Zec 12:3 And in that day will I make Jerusalem a burdensome stone for all people: all that burden themselves with it shall be cut in pieces, though ALL the people of the EARTH be gathered together AGAINST IT.

[trisham]

the Jew is tolerated as a current leaseholder but, as in Anthony Hope's Ruritania, he can never truly own the land.

************

Very well said.

[Rummyfan]

Ping!

[metesky]

Steyn bump.

Pokey78, thanks for the ping.

[knighthawk]

Ping

[Gritty]

Steyn nails it once again.

Is there anything this man can't deeply analyze?

[Billthedrill]

A beautifully written essay, and thanks for posting it. There is a very strange dynamic in Europe with respect to popular opinion on the topic - it isn't crude anti-Semitism but something a little subtler and even more alarming. What is being rejected in the popular stigmatization of Israel is as much European as Jewish. Steyn alludes to this in the article above.

One of the features of the neo-Marxist influence on European popular culture is a rejection of Europe's own colonial past as oppressive and immoral - this, however valid, has been projected onto Israel and Israel's European roots dismissed as a relic of a bygone age. That's a problem, because resistance to an aggressive, militant Islam was also one of those roots that is being marginalized in the same fashion. The result is the sort of sticky multiculturalism that has proven so vulnerable to Islamist incursion, blameless because it rejects its own history, virtuous because it blames its vices on the past, and triumphant because it has yet to fight.

I do not see how Europe can resist being absorbed if this particular political and cultural fad persists. And a U.S. equally under its sway will be equally vulnerable.

[Blind Eye Jones]

"Once again the Jews are rootless transients, though, in one of history's blacker jests, they're now bemoaned in the salons of London and Paris as an outrageous imposition of an alien European population on the Middle East."

Salons of London and Paris? I don't know if there are salons these days, and if there are, don't they know that the Europeans set the Jews up in the middle east to begin with! European fascists can't, for the love of Hitler, find a final solution quick enough. Maybe the North Pole would do as a temporary staging area for quick entry into the igloo furnaces. Or would the Illuminati, in its supercilious, less-than-lisping tone of modern culture, suggest sending them off into deep space on board rocketships? Yiddish Galactica and the escape from the Pharaohs' of Egypt Earth? Regardless, it's a resounding "YES" to technology: furnaces or rockets! Let Mars or the dustman deal with the Jewish problem.