Right now, I'm praying for America - opinion

Many of us in Israel are wondering if America has gone mad. 

That there are people who can march with impunity in the greatest country on earth and have the sympathy and participation of others who claim they are “progressive” and fight for “human rights” is nothing short of an intellectual, moral, and psychological apocalypse. There should not be many doubts about the heartless and apparently mindless hordes in the US and Europe marching in solidarity with the barbarians that slaughtered our people in the most heinous way.

That people with the title “Doctor” or “Professor” in front of their names give intellectual cover to this madness shows how, just like with the Nazis, having a degree, loving Beethoven, and blithely sipping red wine, may make you appear “smart” and “cool,” even though you are morally and ethically as corrupt as one can be. These people may know the difference between a sonnet and a poem or an equation and a formula, but they sure do not know the difference between right and wrong, good and evil. 

This is not a “let’s look at both sides” moment. There are no “both sides” when it comes to intentionally torturing and killing babies, children, and the elderly, burning some alive, and then bragging about it. There are no “both sides” when you mechanically call to “free Palestine from the river to the sea” without apparently understanding what the people you are marching with have in mind when they say that. Yes, “both sides” have extremists, but only on one side are they tolerated and even glorified by the mainstream.

There is no moral balance today in holding signs declaring “Pro-Israel, Pro-Palestinian.” It is as if, at the end of World War II, we held up signs reading “Pro-Jewish, Pro-German.” Both suffered, but only one is responsible for the suffering.

While the terrorists are a constant threat against Israel, their enablers and sympathizers are marching on the streets and universities of the United States and Europe. Some may think they are marching for freedom, but if they really were able to think, they would be embarrassed and ashamed of what they have become. If these young people are the future of the United States and Europe, watch out.

The "woke" origins of this moral failure

AND WHERE does this attitude come fom?

For years, the progressively “woke” have failed to set morality and justice to an objective standard. Instead, they created an ideology based on disdain for those they consider powerful and sympathy for those they see as victims. In this distorted value system, everything is spuriously seen through the lens of “both sides” but the only side that ever counts is the one painted as the victim, and ultimately that is the side they feel they must stand with. 

For the victim, everything is permissible, everything is excused, everything is understood. For those on the other side who are automatically and dishonestly assigned “oppressor” status, well, nothing matters.

Jewish useful idiots have also joined others on the left, whose perhaps once well-meaning righteousness, has led to embracing twisted values of justice versus injustice, and created an intellectual rot that has emptied their brains of all sense and filled it with shallow-thinking and slogan-filled reality. 

They cannot condemn the atrocities of Palestinian terror without also parroting the accusations made against Israel of killing civilians. They cannot imagine that those they marched with in solidarity with Black lives, gender equality, LBGTQ+ rights, and identity pride do not care about Jewish lives, Jewish equality, Jewish rights, or Jewish pride. 

After all, in the nether world of postmodern intersectionality, Jews are at best “white-passing” and Israelis are “colonialists” and for both, no sympathy is possible, no matter what. All this while so many Jews in the United States fear or are ashamed to display an Israeli flag outside their homes and think twice before wearing a Jewish star around their necks.

Instead of supporting human rights and justice, those now marching with Palestine have enabled a counterfeit version that does the opposite. And worse, they excuse it all away with lame explanations that criticism of Israel is not really antisemitic. Well, perhaps it was not in the past, but it clearly is now. Those that naively enable Jew hatred are ultimately no less guilty than the haters themselves. And this is not 1930s Germany, it is the good old USA.

So do pray for Israel.

As for me, I’m praying for America.

The writer is a psychologist and senior fellow and researcher at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.