Friday, February 9, 2007
James M. Wall of The Christian Century is in hog heaven over Jimmy Carter's book. Wall is the senior contributing editor who called Hamas and Hizballah "Nongovernmental Groups," and is a divestment supporter. His latest, Apartheid Denial, is predictable stuff, defending Carter and using quotations from Jewish voices to do so. You can read it yourself if you choose, but I did want to make a brief comment on one section, where Wall takes a shot at Holocaust scholar Deporah Lipstadt:
Stop right there. This is an inversion of fact. In fact, it is Irving who sued Lipstadt. Lipstadt conducted a successful defense. She certainly did not sue David Irving for being a "Holocaust denier" (in (scare?) quotes). What is going through Wall's head here?
What Lipstadt does not say is that Israel's manner of pursuing its "ideal of Jewish refuge" has brought enormous suffering to the Palestinian people...
On the contrary, over 60 years of Arab war against the region's Jews and each other has brought enormous suffering to the Palestinian Arabs, nothing else. A two-state solution was in the offing in 1947. They rejected it and launched a war. They lost, and have been losing ever since, thanks in large measure to their enablers in the West.
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What is going through Wall's head here?.
The same that is going through Dhimmi's head?
Wall is a majority-population American, not a Middle Eastern Christian, and I'd be willing to bet he is quite secure, even on a subconscious level, so I think what he's about is even worse than Dhimmi behavior, which at least has some mitigating implications attached to it. What Wall does is far more in the nature of an outright attack. This is how modern Christian anti-Semitism manifests itself.
James Wall is ensconced in his position, naive and secure; intellectually and morally a repulsive presence, a superfluity of superficial and ultimately injurious qualities. He invokes a sadness, a weariness and a revulsion in roughly equal quantities and he does so while being formidably unaware.
And no, it's not unkind to acknowledge his sundry deficits, he's not a mere couch-potato, he's positioned to influence others and he actively works to do so; he's a maladroit and is ultimately mendacious and malignant.