When Victims Rule (pdf)

THE ACCUSATION OF ANTI-SEMITISM (PT. 2)
illusionary definition of the self, the identification with the reference
group’s mirage of the Other, is contaminated by protean variables existing
within what seems to the outsider to be the homogeneous group in
power.” [GILMAN]
This leads inexorably to the conclusion that Jews need accept no blame for
anything, even their own concepts of themselves. This “Alien Gentile in Jewish
Brain” is stock-in-trade in Jewish circles. Michael Lerner, editor of the leftist
Jewish journal, Tikkun, claims that “Jews have been victims of ‘internalized
oppression,’ taking the viewpoint of those who disdain them and making it
their own.” [LERNER, p. 5] Based on a foundation of Freudian psycho-babble,
Barbara Breitman blames non-Jews for endemic Jewish neurosis, outrageously
lifting blame from Jews for even their own thinking. The following is a classic
example of twisted Jewish “Victimspeak,” a system of complete irresponsibility
by which all blame for individual thought and action is surrendered to exterior
forces:
“For Jews, the masculine and feminine archetypes in the collective unconscious
have been reversed by the anti-Semitism of the dominant,
white, male Christian culture. Jewish men may well experience themselves,
and be experienced by Jewish women as somehow less masculine
than men of the dominant culture; Jewish women may well experience
themselves and be experienced by Jewish men as somehow less feminine
than women of the dominant culture. Although Jewish men and women
may blame each other for this phenomenon, the insidious process has
its roots in anti-Semitism.” [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 112-113]
Breitman even blames non-Jewish culture for “interfer[ing] in relationships
between Jewish fathers and sons, preventing a critically important identification
between the generations of men.” [BREITMAN, B., 1988, p. 104]
In this kind of “everything’s your fault/we don’t control our own private
lives” context, Norman Cantor can thereby excuse Jews en masse and blame
Muslim mind control (while slurring Islamic society) for Jewish immorality in
southwestern Europe in medieval times:
“Rabbinical court records of the fourteenth century show a Jewish
propensity to adapt to the lifestyle of Muslim society. Among the
Sephardim [Jews of Spain and Portugal], polygamy, concubinage, adultery,
and wife-beating were common.” [CANTOR, p. 186]
Sander Gilman never admits the obvious, that an important reason for
Jewish apostasy and disenchantment (“self-hatred”) over history has been the
inevitable rejection by some Jews of the elitist and seclusionist tenets of the
“Chosen People” mythos, or even to escape Jewish self-hate itself as an indigenously
oppressive outcrop of traditional Jewish religious belief. It is irrefutable
that some people just don’t like where they came from, whether it’s Judaism or
Christianity, Kansas or New York. Centuries ago Christianity and its idealized
teachings of Christ offered (however unfulfilled) anyone a step closer to the
dream of human universalism, a concept intrinsically foreign to seminal Jewish
beliefs. The people who led this movement were also Jewish, and, hence, to
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