Speaking of Humiliation

By Jim Lobe

" After posting Mohammed Omer’s account of his treatment at the hands of Israel’s Shin Beth ten days ago, I was reminded of a passage I had just read in the New Yorker’s excellent profile by Connie Bruck of Freedom’s Watch’s co-founder and biggest financier, multi-billionaire and staunch Likudist, Sheldon Adelson.......

So, might humiliation — whether in the form of physical beatings by the “Other”, as experienced by Adelson and Podhoretz and their generation; or taunting and social exclusion, as experienced by Perle and his generation; or learning about (through watching old film strips and photos and other means) the mass murder of a collective group of which you are a member, even if two generations removed, or some combination of two of the three, or all three — produce a rage that would translate into extremely and even irrationally aggressive policy recommendations against a perceived threat? At the least, it would make such a result more likely. Yet, while hard-line neo-cons recognize that dynamic in other groups, particularly those they see as enemies, they never seem to see how it might apply to their own experience and outlook.

At the same time, rage and aggression is clearly not an inevitable outcome of humiliation, however it is incurred. Most Jewish Americans have been exposed to one, two, or even all three of these kinds of humiliations but, unlike the hard-line neo-cons like Adelson, Podhoretz, Perle, and Frum, they still oppose attacking Iran and favor withdrawal from Iraq; they still support territorial compromise a two-state solution with the Palestinians for whose plight they even express some sympathy; and they are not obsessed with “Islamofascism,” nor, in Buruma’s words, do they “[long] for power and being tough.” So, while humiliation may well be a necessary condition for the kind of extremism that hard-line neo-cons espouse, it may not be sufficient by itself........"