Jewish Pathology: Mourning Sheikh Yassin

There's this great book by a professor at Bar Ilan named Barry Rubin, entitled Assimilation and its Discontents. Through a mixture of anecdotes, social and historical analysis, he brilliantly describes the pathology of Jewish assimilationism and self-hatred. It's a wonderful book and should be a required read. His upshot is that assimilationism is not just passive national suicide. It often manifests itself as support for the murder of Jews (or defending and assisting their murderers).

I was thinking about Rubin's book after I read an unbelievable piece that's been circulating around leftist websites. It's called We Are All Targets Now and it's by a professor who specializes (of all things) in medieval anti-Judaism and its artistic representation. She describes her shock, fear and rage at the killing of Sheikh Yassin. After hearing the news that Yassin had been taken out, she writes: My husband jumped out of bed and started to curse. Our visiting friend couldn't get over the evil of attacking an 80-year-old quadriplegic cleric. I'm afraid -- because I suppose it's a sign of how living here can deaden one's ethical senses -- that my husband and I were mostly overwhelmed by the sheer, massive, criminal, reckless stupidity of the thing.

I was so stunned by this that I had to read it three times before I believed it! Who are they kidding? This 80 year old quadriplegic ordered the murders of innocent people, including little children and people older abnd more infirm than he. As for being a cleric, need we recall who ordered the bombing on Seder Night of the Park Hotel in Netanya? Why even Yossi Sarid agreed that Yassin deserved to die for his crimes, and now we know that his liquidation, and that of Rantisi, have been partly responsible for the quiet we enjoyed until this week's bombings in Beer Sheva.

It's gotta be a pathology with some people. There's no other way to explain it. Rubin recalls one socialist theorist who believed that all nations and ethnic groups have a right to live except the Jews. They need to disappear, for the good of humanity. Hmmm...Dying for the salvation of mankind? As Rubin notes, wrong religion (though the idea originated with a Jew- Paul of Tarsus).

Oh, and if you want to read an amazing psychiatric study of this pathology, there's Sander Gillman's book, Jewish Self-Hatred: Anti-Semitism and the Hidden Language of the Jews.