• Why self-hatred largely afflicts Jews: Semitic Stockholm syndrome

    From NefeshBarYochai@void@invalid.noy to soc.culture.israel,can.politics,nz.politics,rec.arts.tv,alt.religion.christian.roman-catholic on Tue Jun 16 08:08:52 2026
    From Newsgroup: nz.politics

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/why-self-hatred-largely-afflicts-jews-semitic-stockholm-syndrome/ar-AA25Hsii?ocid=msedgntp&pc=HCTS&cvid=6a30c0418765455ea665e044ce6ff00d&ei=35

    In August 1973, a convict named Jan-Erik Olsson walked into a bank on Norrmalmstorg square in central Stockholm, fired a shot into the
    ceiling, and took four employees hostage. Six days later, when the
    police finally moved in, something strange had happened. The captives
    had come to fear their rescuers more than the man holding the gun. The criminologist Nils Bejerot, advising the police, gave the reaction a
    name. The world now knows it as Stockholm syndrome.

    The syndrome spares no one. When a power far greater than yourself
    takes you captive, the instinct for survival counsels appeasement:
    grow obedient, obliging, eager to please. oDeath before dishonoro
    makes a fine motto, but the prisoners who carried it to its logical
    end are no longer around to recite it. Every group is susceptible,
    every human being without exception. So why does the affliction settle
    on Jews more heavily than on anyone else?

    Because no people has been conquered, imprisoned, enslaved, hunted by
    pogroms, and marked for slaughter as relentlessly, for as many
    centuries. The captivity simply ran longer. When the cell is 2,000
    years deep, the reflexes harden into something close to inheritance.

    We have made this case before, and the diagnosis is older than either
    of us. In 1930, the German Jewish philosopher Theodor Lessing
    published a book whose title translates to oJewish self-hatred,o
    anatomizing brilliant Jews who tried to outrun antisemitism by
    becoming its most fluent voices. His grimmest case was Otto Weininger,
    the Viennese prodigy who pronounced Jews incapable of genius or
    morality, converted to Protestantism, and, at 23, shot himself in the
    house where Beethoven died. He changed his religion, his philosophy,
    even his self-image, and still could not change how the world saw him.
    Lessing was murdered by Nazi agents in 1933, proving his own thesis in
    the cruelest way: Understanding the disease confers no immunity from
    it.

    That this self-hatred is rampant today cannot be seriously disputed.
    Witness the mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani, an open antagonist of
    Zionism, propelled by conspicuous Jewish support, especially among
    voters under 40. Witness nearly the entire Reform movement, and far
    too many of the ultra-Orthodox, lined up as bitter opponents of
    Israel. Witness the prestige campus uprisings at Harvard and Columbia,
    many of them organized and fronted by Jews. In any free society, sharp criticism of a governmentAs conduct is healthy and necessary. This is
    something else. This is the captive insisting the cell was his own
    idea.

    How to read it, except as a bid to ingratiate oneself with oneAs
    enemies, in the tender hope that once they reign supreme, they will
    judge gently? The tactic fails. It always fails. The antisemite who
    applauds the performance does not embrace the performer. He pockets
    him as a weapon, oeven the Jews agree,o and discards him when the show
    is over.

    Consider how thoroughly the lesson has been ignored. Jews were
    indispensable to black Americans in their long struggle. The NAACP,
    founded in 1909, was built and bankrolled with conspicuous Jewish
    help: Henry Moskowitz among its founders, Rabbis Emil Hirsch and
    Stephen Wise and the reformer Lillian Wald in its early ranks, the philanthropists Jacob Schiff and Julius Rosenwald underwriting it,
    Joel Spingarn serving as chairman and later president, the family name
    still fixed to the organizationAs highest honor. How has that favor
    been repaid in IsraelAs hour of need? Poorly, and from some quarters
    worse than poorly.

    Ditto the Democratic Party. For decades, Jews have backed the donkey,
    never the elephant, and their reward has been Sen. Bernie Sanders
    (I-VT), Rep Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and the oSquad,o reliable adversaries every one of them. Sanders is the lesson in miniature.
    After years of branding IsraelAs war immoral and illegal, demanding
    ceasefires and moving to block its arms, he was still jeered as a
    ofascist and a genocide supportero by the very activists whose
    blessing he was chasing. The captive may polish his chains to a mirror
    shine. The jailer is not impressed.

    And still the pattern holds. New generations volunteer for it, certain
    that this time the bargain will be honored, this time the enemy will
    make an exception. He will not. There is no version of this trade in
    which the Jew who surrenders his own people is handed back his
    dignity. The exit he keeps reaching for was always painted on the
    wall.

    Stockholm syndrome, it seems, is lodged deep in the Jewish psyche. The
    first step out of any captivity is the refusal to thank the captor.

    Walter E. Block is the Harold E. Wirth eminent scholar endowed
    chairman and professor of economics at Loyola University New Orleans.
    Oded Kohn Faran holds degrees in law from ShaAarei Mishpat College in
    Israel. He is the general director of Faran & Co. International
    Translations and lives in Tbilisi, Georgia.


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