The taboo on Israeli chauvinism

Sarah Honig
Another Tack/JPost
26 March '10

Those Israelis not shunned in the media and on campuses abroad are predominantly left-wing trashers of their own country.

Truth is often an unwelcome guest. Truth can be unpopular. Truth can disconcert. Truth can be bad for business. Truth can be counterproductive for certain reputations – even for the reputation of professionals whose status is ostensibly derived from their dedication to seeking truth.

Truth can be denied even when solidly backed by history. In our postmodern moral-relativist environment no truths exist, only self-serving narratives, claims and counterclaims. Hence truth can be spurned as a biased assertion aimed at furthering someone’s narrow interests. This is all the more insidious because it’s so fashionable.

It’s simplistic to dismiss any fact as an expedient and calculated misrepresentation. This isn’t just intellectual indolence. It’s also intellectual anarchy. Everything can be willy-nilly turned upside down. With nothing rooted to actual sequences of events, liars are liberated. Falsehoods are granted equal standing with truth. Frequently they even gain ascendency and are paraded as unquestionable. Values are devalued. Good and evil are interchangeable. Anything goes.

MY ABOVE ruminations were inspired by twin events. An opinion piece I wrote for an Australian newspaper elicited a deluge of noxious e-mails sent to my private mailbox. In these my ancestors and I were dispatched to the lowest levels of hell and my offspring and I were threatened with torture and death.

Yet somehow worse, because it didn’t come from the loony fringe, was a very polite letter sent by a highly respectable German magazine editor to an acquaintance (also German) who suggested the periodical print his translated version of my column “A good cop goes to Auschwitz” (January 20). The column revisited the World War II avid Arab collaboration with the Nazis (in the wake of MK Muhammad Barakei’s provocative participation at the Auschwitz liberation memorial).

It was flatly rejected on the grounds that it’s “too pro-Israel” and “too massively partisan.” The editor judged it unsuitable, saying it raises “the specter of chauvinism” (in its original sense of ultra-nationalism, before it was hijacked by gender polemics).

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