Racism or Verbal Voodoo

 

Racism or Verbal Voodoo

 

Prof. Paul Eidelberg

 

The word "racist" has become a shibboleth by which to denounce and destroy a person or proposal one dislikes. In former times, such a person or proposal might be called "wicked" or "unjust," and some sort of explanation or discussion would follow.  No more.  Today, politicians and intellectuals typically use the canard "racist" or "racism" to short-circuit public discussion or debate.  Calling an opponent or proposal "racist" frees them from the intellectual discipline required to refute a person's political views on rational grounds.  Thus, when the draft of a constitution for Israel was proposed in 1948, its provision that the president of the State be Jewish was decried by socialist parties as "racism," and that was enough to bury it!

 

 

The fact that democratic politics now substitutes catchwords for criticism testifies to the Marxist mentality that modulates Israel. Marx is very much alive, especially on the campuses of the democratic world, where the minds of countless students are being corrupted by their crypto-Marxist mentors (who also short-circuit the mentality of students who become the mandarins of the media.  

 

 

Marx wrote:  "Criticism is not the passion of the head, but the head of a passion.  It is not a lancet, it is a weapon.  Its object is an enemy it wants not to refute but to destroy.  It is no longer an end in itself, but simply a means.  Its essential pathos is indignation, its essential task denunciation."

 

 

The term "criticism," as used in the nineteenth century, and as used by Marx, signifies philosophic analysis or refutation. With Marxism, philosophy ceased to be a dispassionate quest for truth and became philosophically-armed propaganda—the essence of contemporary democratic discourse.

 

 

Tainting your adversary a "racist" (with its Nazi connotations) is an argumentum ad hominem, a cheap ploy symptomatic of a dishonest mind. Similarly, saying anything negative about Arab culture makes the critic a "bigot" or an "Islamophobe." With a single word you kill your enemy. This is "verbal voodoo." Verbal voodoo has replaced reason on college campuses to demonize Israel as "apartheid."

 

 

The leftists or crypto-Marxists in Israel use verbal voodoo to denigrate as "racists" anyone who would revoke the citizenship of disloyal Israeli Arabs. Rather than apply verbal voodoo, I apply the term "disloyal" to denote the following citizens of Israel:

 

 

1) Arabs who are members of a terrorist organization defined as such by Israeli law.

 

 

2) Arabs who commit acts of violence against the State of Israel, its citizens or property—which acts are taking place today with impunity thanks to a feckless government more concerned about a fraudulent peace process than the protection of Israeli citizens.

 

 

3) Arabs who aid and abet terrorist acts. 

 

 

4) Arabs who support any foreign or domestic entity committed to Israel's destruction.

 

 

5) Arabs who incite other Arabs to kill Jews.  (For example, Arab Knesset Member Talib a-Sana, in an interview on Abu-Dhabi TV, praised a suicide bombing attack in Israel and called for more of the same.  Although a-Sana was indicted by the Attorney General for incitement, the indictment was quashed by Israel's Supreme Court, which poses as the guardian of "democracy." Never mind that Arabs like a-Sana abhor democracy as hostile to the top-down leadership of Islam. Besides, the judges of Israel's Supreme Court went to universities where their minds were conditioned by post-modern liberalism, which knows only of rights, not duties.

 

 

That one has to stress the maxim that rights involve reciprocal duties is testimony of democracy's moral decay. But that liberal judges, guardians of the law, fail to apply this civilized maxim to Arabs is ironic, since it unwittingly attributes to these descendents of Ishmael a low standard of morality. Are said judges "crypto-racists"?

 

 

In this era of post-modern democracy, we need to revive and enforce the principle that those who enjoy the political rights of citizenship in the Jewish State of Israel forfeit those rights when they commit acts of disloyalty such as those enumerated above.  Authority to revoke their citizenship will be found in the 1952 Citizenship Law. Revoking the citizenship of Arabs who commit such acts is simply a matter of justice, and has nothing to do with racism. To implement the law requires not voodoo or verbosity but a Prime Minister with testosterone.☼