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NY Times and the Ghetto Mentality

Reader comment on item: Give Up on the Two-State Solution? Other Ideas

Submitted by Dave (Canada), Sep 22, 2013 at 08:19

For 2000 years Jews had no political power and were at everyone else's tender mercies. Appeasement was used as a survival strategy. In extreme cases, some Jews take on their adversaries' viewpoints, a psychological phenomenon known as the Stockholm Syndrome. Examples abound among secular and religious Jews; Noam Chomsky and the Naturei Karta sect come to mind. In addition, not having political power means that one avoids all the messiness and inevitable abuses that come with statehood, and so the discomfort with Israel. I would sum up these attitudes as part of the Ghetto Mentality, since they are a legacy of powerlessness, as when Jews were confined to ghettos.

The NY Times fits this profile. It has had a history of appeasement as a foreign policy slant from the days of Stalin, when it whitewashed the Ukrainian famine, through to the Second World War, when it downplayed the Holocaust, right up to today, with its moral prissiness in regard to Israel and Islam.

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