The juvenile Left

Why the Canadian Left's new bad guy is Israel

At some point in his first or second year, the average undergraduate comes to a dreadful, shocking, thrilling, intoxicating realization: Everything I was taught to believe until now is a lie. We're not the good guys. We're the bad guys: the West, white people, my parents, whatever. Grasping this insight is the key to enlightenment, and enlightenment is the key to, among other things, pulling chicks. As time passes, most of us move on to a more balanced understanding of life...

The reflexive oppositionism of so much of the left, its instant identification with whoever or whatever is most hostile to the society of which it is a part, most closely resembles that of the undergraduate. It is a badge, a pose, a lifestyle, an arrangement of reality that is pleasing to believe, a reminder to the believer of the third eye of enlightenment that is his gift.

Yet in this country [Canada] it can take on a rather uglier form, insofar as the object of its loathing can be displaced onto another society, quite apart from our own. Until now, the locus of this disaffection was the United States. Lately, disturbingly, it has centred more and more on Israel. Anti-Americanism has mutated into something that might at best be called anti-Israelism, and at times looks alarmingly like anti-Semitism. Which brings us to the present wretched state of the Liberal party.

That the party's left wing has long been a hotbed of anti-Americanism is news to no one. Indeed, so entrenched was this attitude among certain sections of the ruling party that it resembled something of a state religion... ... perhaps there is a link between them: between the pseudo-neutrality that is one strain of recent Liberal foreign policy, and the anti-Americanism, shading into anti-Israelism, that is the other. An unwillingness to take sides was, of course, one of the ways in which we were supposed to distinguish ourselves from the Americans: They were warlike and ideological, we were peacekeeping ecumenicals.

But perhaps there was something else at work. A refusal to make moral judgments, to distinguish between the merely flawed and the truly evil, may in time lead to an inability to do so. Having gotten out of the habit of judgment, the muscles can atrophy: If "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter," then it is all too easy to forget, not only who the terrorists are, but who are the freedom fighters. If anti-Semitism is the "socialism of fools," perhaps anti-Israelism is the pacifism of knaves.

(Excerpt via Damian Penny. Full article Here)

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