here’s an op-ed i sent to the local paper:

Greg Norman (Letters, 7/9) is correct to object to Arthur Mokin’s (Guest Viewpoint, 7/5) assertion that criticism of Israel is almost exclusively an expression of “Jew-hatred”, but he fails to properly rebut the substance of Mr. Mokin’s reasoning.

Mokin proposes underlying Jew-hatred to explain a disparity in the coverage of two somewhat similar recent events involving the murder of Turkish nationals: in one case, a number of civilians killed by Kurdish separatists within Turkey; in the other, a similar number killed by Israeli defense forces off the coast of Gaza. Accepting Mr. Mokin’s research into the volume of relevant coverage, the first incident “died on the day it was born”, while the second “had legs.” The question he proposes is, why? In deciding on secret, perhaps even unconscious, Jew-hatred as an answer, Mr. Mokin overlooks more obvious grounds.

It is clear that Mr. Mokin begins from a supposition of hidden racism, calling Jew-hatred “the oldest prejudice in the world.” A nonsensical assertion given the long history of humanity predating the origin of Judaism, but revealing as to the partisan mindset of the author. I propose an alternative explanation based upon a proper distinction arising from a specific difference between the two cases.

Though the victims were in both instances killed and in both instances Turks, the killers were in one instance soldiers and in the other insurgents. Because of this, while the tragedy of the deaths in both cases is equal, the meaning of their murders is not. Simply put, the legitimacy of statehood brings with it a higher standard of conduct. Not only is this a fact of how people do think, it is a statement of how they ought to think. Thus the disparity of outrage in response to the two cases can be understood as an expression not of Jew-hatred, but of an appropriate prejudice that holds lawful states to a different standard than terrorists.

This appropriate double standard might be observed in the extensive coverage accorded a recent gunsight video showing American soldiers killing unarmed Iraqi civilians – including two journalists – from an Apache gunship. Compare that flurry of coverage and outrage to the daily accounts of car bombings that kill similar, if not greater, numbers of Iraqis, yet similarly die on the day they are born. This difference has nothing to do with hatred of Americans and everything to do with the fact that America, as a lawful nation, is rightly held to a higher standard as regards the use of lethal force than shadowy militants who grant themselves a license to kill.

Consider also two fictional examples, one in which a man is murdered by a criminal and another in which a man is murdered by a police officer. While both victims are equally dead, the latter is certain to generate more press and outrage than the former, as the issue is ultimately not murder but the violation of trust inherent to the abuse of power.

In making the argument he does, Mr Mokin implicitly proposes Israel be regarded as a legitimate state yet held only to the low standard applied to insurgents.  He attempts to blur this distinction by claiming that both Israel – nuclear-armed and by far the most powerful military in the region – and Kurds in Turkey – a people so oppressed that even their name has been declared illegal – are “struggling for survival” in a hostile mid-east. We are by now well-familiar with this attempt to reframe standards of civilized behavior by invocation of constant, if fraudulent, existential threat, having lived through the first eight years of what we are told will be a generational war on terror.

Such thinking destroys the very principle of statehood, reducing legitimate authority to mere force. Herein lies a grave and hidden danger of the reflexive recourse to charges of anti-semitism, and likewise, anti-Americanism: by failing to hold recognized authority to a higher standard we undermine the justification, and hence the meaning and value, of such authority. By defending the actions of sovereign authorities by comparison to the worst actions of self-elected militias we invite and enable the degeneration of sovereignty into a tyranny.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 5:51 pm and is filed under Letters to the editor, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.