Deep structure

Gabriel Ledeen, along with Michael Yon, tries to figure out why so many in the West cannot see the war between Israel and Hamas & Company except as Israel's moral problem. No matter what the jihadis do there, they get a pass. He rejects anti-Semitism as a complete answer.

No, the fundamental answer to this question is that we, as democratic and liberty-loving societies, are afraid to identify candidly the defining nature of our common enemies.

And his own point:

Why are we afraid of candor? I see two connected reasons: 1) an honest understanding would require decisive action; therefore 2) it would make us feel weak.

I think he's go a point, but my question is this: Why would we feel weak? My guess is that "we" would realize that our enemy is self-assured and utterly unapologetic and that we are apologetically self-obsessed and hesitant because we have been debilitated by our faux-guilt about racism, white racism (for highminded Westerners and those victims who profit from that paradigm, the only kind that counts).

Israel has the status of a white Western nation facing off against people who have both ethnic and religious status as brown. Muslims, regardless of race, have brown status in the progressive taxonomy. To stand with white Westerners against Muslim Arabs provokes the deepest anxiety a Western liberal can feel: racism. After you lay aside all the surface niceties, to take Israel's side means to look on a group of brown people as your enemy. Intolerable. Hence, it is crucial to paint Israel as the evil aggressor and oppressor, the racist Caucasian Cowboy who stole the land of the native Palestinian Indians.

Ask yourself this. In any conflict in the current world, or for quite some time in the past, ask yourself how often the Western elites have combined both passion AND action unless one of the parties to the conflict has been White.

Tibet and China. Tut-tutting, but no passion and no action. Where's the call for an academic boycott of Chinese professors or divestment of Chinese investments? The terrible civil war in Sri Lanka. Almost no interest at all. Darfur? Lots of handwringing, but no action. Remember the Hutu/Tutsi genocide? Same thing.*

The shadow racism and ironically Eurocentric narcissism in this pattern is that battles between people of color, where no whites are directly involved, are not important, not really.

*Afternoon update: Turkish PM upraids Israeli PM at Davos and asserts that Turks "know how to kill." Note world silence on Turkish treatment of Kurds:

One obvious point is that Turkey is hardly in a position to criticize Israel for responding firmly to terrorist attacks. Ankara frequently does the same thing, as exemplified by this December 2007 report in London's Daily Telegraph:

Turkey has launched its heaviest air strikes in years on positions in northern Iraq that it claims were occupied by its enemies from the Kurdish Workers' Party, the PKK.

After a series of bloody attacks by the PKK against the army in the south-east of Turkey, Ankara sent its warplanes to attack targets in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq yesterday.

The PKK said seven people, including two civilians, died in the strikes. In a statement on its website, it said the attacks wounded "many civilians, among them women and children."

_________________________