Why should America be any more concerned with Israel than with Taiwan or other outlying democracies surrounded by tyrants? I’m forgetting why it is in America’s strategic interest to make Israel central to its concerns. I’m Jewish and I support and I love the Jewish state just like I expect Polish-Americans love Poland and Taiwanese-Americans love Taiwan. I also love freedom and democracy and I love that Israel has them while its neighbors and enemies don’t, but why should America care?
To what extent did American Jewish intellectuals such as Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer support the invasion of Iraq because they thought it was in Israel’s best interests? Is there any difference between America’s interests and Israel’s interests or are they identical? To what extent do American Jewish intellectuals such as Bill Kristol and Charles Krauthammer support the bombing of Iran because they think it is in Israel’s best interests?
What are some common problems with America’s leading Jewish intellectuals? Steve Sailer suggests:
– Utopianism: Bombing Iraq into an America-loving democracy is only the latest disastrous project
– Cult-Worship- of- the-All-Knowing-Scholar-Sageism: Marxism, Freudianism, Randism, Straussianism, etc.
– Ethnocentric nostalgiaism: vividly seen in the current immigration debate, where Ellis Island-worship is substituted for facts and logic
– Be-Like-Meism: e.g., the common suggestion by Jewish pundits that all Mexican illegal immigrants have to do is act like the Jewish immigrants of 1906 and everything will turn out fine. Well, swell …
– Pseudo ethnic Humilityism: few Jews actually believe that Mexicans are just like Jews — they think Jews are much smarter — but they don’t want anybody else to notice that Jews are smarter so they advocate immigration policies that depend for their success upon Mexicans being just as smart as Jews. That this immigration policy is obviously bad for the country is less important than keeping up the charade that nobody mentions in the press that Jews are smarter than everybody else on average.
– Rube Goldbergism: overly complicated plans and analyses with too many moving parts to work reliably (e.g., the neocon plans for fixing the Middle East through invasion)
– Is-It-Good-for-the-Jewsism: I am a huge fan of enlightened self-interest, so I don’t object to this on principle
– Rube Goldbergian Is-It-Good-for-the-Jewsism: This could also be called He-Who-Says-A-Must-Say-B-C-D-E-Q-W-and-Zism. Jewish intellectuals have a tendency that on any topic related to Jews, they tend to think baroquely many steps down the line. Thus, the full panoply of the subjects that have been assumed to be bad-for-the-Jews and therefore ruled out of discussion in polite society is breathtakingly broad — for example, IQ has been driven out of the media in large part because it is feared that mentioning that Jews have higher average IQs would lead, many steps down the line, to pogroms.
– Missing-Piece-of-the-Puzzleism: One obvious problem with this tendency is that you can’t make a Rube Goldberg analysis work in the real world if you’ve banned the use of crucial moving parts, such as IQ
– Pay-No-Attention-to-that-Man-Behind-the-Curtainism: The biggest unmentionable, as the Mearsheimer-Walt brouhaha demonstrated once again, is also one of the biggest pieces of the puzzle for understanding how the modern world works: the influence of Jews.
– Enemy Nostalgiaism: Difficulty identifying current and future enemies because of emotional obsession with past enemies: e.g., the obsession with “The Passion of the Christ” combined with the inability to identify growing Latin American populism as a future threat due to immigration, etc.
– Faux Sabraism: as Francis Fukuyama pointed out to Charles Krauthammer, American neocon thinking about Iraq was motivated less by hardheaded is-it-good-for-Israel analysis — Sharon’s government was only modestly enthusiastic about the Iraq Attaq — than by What-Would-the-Israelis-Do emotions. Armchair warriors like Douglas Feith are particular susceptible to this kind of Let’s Pretend thinking.
