“Moral Equivalency” vs. “Romantic Primitivism”

I demur from those friends of Israel whose favorite mantra is that western media is guilty of “moral equivalency” for putting premeditated deaths which Hamas imposes not only on Israelis but its own people (including scores executed as “traitors” and thousands used as human shields) with the actions of the Israeli military that produce unintended civilian deaths.

Of course, the “moral equivalency” argument is correct as far as it goes, but I believe it ignores a much more powerful underlying dynamic. Palestinian have become the latest poster boys for European and American “Romantic primitivism.”

This tradition has deep roots. European peasants, beginning in the Renaissance, had their image transformed from uncouth boors to innocent shepherds and cultivators living a pastoral ideal that counterpointed with the corruption of urban mercantile civilization. Then during the Enlightenment popular books like Aprha Behn’s “Guinea’s Captive Kings” and Montesquieu’s “Lettres Persanes” used stereotypes of noble savagery or exotic wisdom to advance their critique of the oppressiveness of Christian dogmatism and orthodoxy.

With the industrial revolution workers were glorified as the new incarnation of primitive nobility. But when their twentieth-century embourgeoisement made them too like the consumer-minded middle class, they were abandoned in favor supposedly oppressed students—“the new niggers”—whose mantle was assumed by sixties revolutionaries like Abbie Hoffman and Daniel Cohn-Bendit (who called himself “a Marxist a la Groucho”).

The Palestinians represented the latest international phase of this evolution. No matter that they are among the most commercially sophisticated and best educated people in the Arab and Muslim world. Western Romantic primitivists, most on the anti-capitalist left, ignore the religious fanaticism of Hamas while patronizing ordinary Palestinians for their uncorrupted natures which counterpoint, of course, which the crass materialism and intellectual manipulations attributed to the demonic Jews. Palestinian terrorists aren’t put on the same level of Jews fighting for survival; they are viewed as morally superior.

Here, “Romantic primitivism” and anti-Semitism—two anti-modern traditions at war with bourgeois civilization—cross-fertilize and reinforce in the campaign to help Hamas finish Hitler’s work.