Soccer Dad

So Obvious But ...

Why is it that defenders of Israel and the United States have to spend so much time defending themselves against charges of illegitimacy? Caroline Glick found in a recent lecture at Tel Aviv University and described in "Of Intellectual Bondage" that the denizens of academia are amazingly blind:

When the show was over, and the students began shuffling out of the lecture hall, a young woman approached me.

"Excuse me," she said with a heavy Russian accent.
"How can you say that democracy is better than dictatorial rule?"

"Because it is better to be free than to be a slave," I answered.

Undeterred, she pressed on, "How can you support America when the US is a totalitarian state?"
"Did you learn that in Russia?" I asked.
"No, here," she said.

"Here at Tel Aviv University?"
"Yes, that is what my professors say," she said.
In the weeks that have passed since I gave that lecture, I have not been able to get those students out of my mind.

While campuses throughout the Western world are known as hotbeds for radicalism, it is still hard to believe that Israeli students, who themselves served in the IDF, and who as civilians have experienced more than three years of unrelenting terrorist attacks on their cafes, night clubs, campuses, highways and public buses, could subscribe to such views.

(Fred Lapides noted this article earlier.
Victor Davis Hanson, in a typically elegant essay "The Western Disease" notes that this blindness is quite prevelant outside the ivy walls of academia too:

To sum up the Arab street: It appears to care not a whit that a native psychopath butchered hundreds of thousands of its own — only that his anti-American braggadocio was revealed to be a sham to millions and that Americans of all people had to free Iraqis from such a menace. Honor and shame — the stuff of tribal societies — matter more than the lives of innocents. If a pundit from Paris was riled that Saddam was not yet advised by an international human-rights lawyer, the masses on the West Bank trumped that concern by lamenting that he had not even machine-gunned an American on his way out — or indeed done anything to restore Arab tribal pride. Lost between the shared loony sympathies of the first-world elite and the third-world clan, between refined postmodern and uncouth premodern societies, was an iota of lamentation for the dead, those rotting and dried-out bones that appear in the thousands in desert sands outside Baghdad.

I wish I could write like that!
But read both articles, in their entireties!
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.

Posted by SoccerDad at December 31, 2003 01:25 PM | TrackBack