Sarkozy, Israel & The Neurotic Mind Some truths, proclaimed Thomas Jefferson, are "self-evident,” including the notion that people are "endowed by their Creator” with the right of self-defense.
Other truths have been so well established by empirical evidence that there is no need to offer further facts or explanations on their behalf. Such is the case with the following statement:
Since the birth of the modern state of Israel in 1948, a group of sovereign nations, acting directly or through terrorist surrogates, has subjected Israelis to a systematic campaign of murder and hate so mindlessly vicious that it leaves us astonished at the human capacity for evil.
Yes, because both of those aforementioned truths are self-evident, we need not repeat facts about the violence and detestation that has been and is being directed at Israelis.
Neither need we recount analogies that ask people to think about what the U.S. would do if every day, terrorists operating just beyond its borders would (among other despicable acts of aggression) attack American towns and cities.
Therefore, we may move on to the idea that in his condemnation of Israel’s legitimate act of self-defense in Gaza, President Nicolas Sarkozy is driven by a neurotic mind whose sickness is illuminated by the words of another Frenchman, Marcel Proust:
"The sensitiveness claimed by [neurotics] is matched by their egotism.”
So, what aspect of egotism applies to a man whose twisted notion of sensitivity allows him to denounce victim Israel as villain?
No surprise — it is the love of power, the perversity that is for most politicians their raison d'être.
(This is not to diminish, with respect to the "Mideast Problem,” the roles played by the neuroses called the love of oil money and the love of an irrational, ceaselessly gnawing guilt over Israel’s "persecution” of Palestinians.)
Returning to the president of France and his neurotic behavior, we find that he inundated us with the foul cheapness of classic French arrogance when he sought to push himself to the front of the line of the world’s power players by condemning Israel’s "disproportionate use of force.”
Appropriately, that foul grubbing succeeded only in revealing Sarkozy an insufferable megalomaniac who has neither addressed the world with a ceaseless passion in denouncing Hamas attacks upon Israel nor has admitted that his nation has never assumed the risk of fully involving itself in a genuine Mideast peace process.
Yet he deems himself morally qualified to demand (demand!) a stop to "Israeli bombardments of Gaza.”
(Though the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, Iran, et al. may outwardly applaud the "important” French leader, inwardly, they surely mock a pompous, though useful, jackass who helps them carry fuel for the fires of the hell they have in mind for Israeli Jews.)
Moreover — and like every self-absorbed neurotic — Sarkozy possesses not a bit of self-awareness that might save him the embarrassment of being exposed as a contemptible hypocrite.
Of course, he and his ilk will suppress the truth about the hypocrisy. But not the rest of us, who recall that in November of 2005, Interior Minister Sarkozy reacted to riots consuming Paris suburbs by denouncing the rioters as "scum” who ought to be blasted out of the neighborhoods "with a fire hose.”
(Such language from the quintessential European cosmopolite! Not to mention what hard words Nicolas might have used if the lawlessness in France had equaled one ten thousandth of the bloody, hateful violence suffered by Israelis since 1948.)
Neither will the rest of us forget that in a response to criticism from filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz, Sarkozy did not apologize for his language. Instead, he argued against those who behaved as if "the . . . crisis sprung up suddenly, like some unfortunate accident” and expressed his shock that some people "seem to clearly speak up for the minority, made of looters, rather than for the majority, made of families and young people who live in the suburbs too and who are sick of seeing the culture of violence . . .”
"Sick of seeing the culture of violence.” Too bad the man who claims to be the face of a new France didn’t recall those words before he began blubbering like a drug sodden fool who stuporously counsels Israelis they will have peace as soon as — a la John Lennon — they "imagine” it.
Making matters worse for Israelis is the fact that Sarkozy is not alone. Indeed, the same forbearance that eluded him has eluded others, including the feckless power lovers of the UN Security [sic] Council, who proposed an insulting and cowardly Gaza resolution that recognizes a moral equivalency between the "military assault” carried out "by Israel” and the bombing, murder, and abduction conducted not by Hamas and its sponsors but by "Palestinian armed groups from Gaza.”
In addition to UN types and others mainly on the left (Israel’s action in Gaza receives more than 60% approval among Republicans but only 32% among Democrats), we are also left to worry that Barack Obama — who promised to "change the world,” in part by speaking without preconditions with Islamist madmen devoted to the destruction of Israel — may turn out to be a full-blown French style neurotic.
Think of it; the president-elect cares not a bit about the nation’s having only "one president” when he lays out his economic plans or speaks on a variety of social issues; but regarding Gaza, he refuses to utter one word of support for Israel.
Finally, there is the fact that neurotics such as Sarkozy, UN diplomats, and a hope peddling, messianic U.S. president do not represent the entirety of the diplomatic/public opinion problem faced by the Israeli people; for the greater problem encompasses the fact that Proust’s neurotic "sensitiveness” has infected Western culture so much that large numbers of people agree that failures of every kind should be blamed not on individuals or groups of individuals but on "society.”
With respect to the Mideast Problem, these neurotics either blame Israeli society (i.e. Israel’s Jews) equally with Hamas et al. for failures in the peace process or, in an act that lies far beyond the boundaries of chutzpah, accuse Israeli "society” as being the prime impediment to peace.
The widespread nature of this neurosis, by the way, explains why Suzanne Fields can observe that in contemporary America, "The new [anti-Semite] carries petitions in Harvard Yard in the heart of the Ivy League decked out in running shoes with politically correct labels.”
More importantly, however, it calls upon every person of good will living outside of Israel, every person devoted to morality, good sense, common sense, and democracy, to recall JFK and proudly announce to the neurotics, "I am an Israeli” or, to be more precise about it, "I, too, am a Jew living in Israel.” |
