The bizarre transition in the West

By Howard Rotberg

Over the last twenty years in four books and dozens of essays, I have sought to understand the bizarre transition in the West from supporting the goodness of liberty, non-violence, justice and other Judeo-Christian values to what I now realize is an almost complete submission to evil values and ideologies, including those of the so-called Palestinians.

I have looked at the problem in a variety of ways.   First, we have adopted an ideology of Tolerism (see my book, Tolerism:  The Ideology Revealed and its sequel, The Ideological Path to Submission… and what we can do about it.) wherein I discuss how the adoption of various ideological perversions have caused us to submit to the Palestinians and other Islamists.   I concluded that in a world where the media and the university have adopted ideologies based on excessive tolerance, inappropriate respect, compassion, postmodernism, moral equivalency, inclusive diversity, empathy, denialism, masochism, and Islamophilia, our fate is submission.

America is casting off its historical morality to embrace transgenderism, critical race theory and other ideologies which should be considered as evil. I argue that the embrace of evil shown in empathy for the so-called Palestinians is what has paved the way for the current immoralities.

I wrote that

“Tolerism is an excessive tolerance, in fact a leniency, for the intolerant and unsupportable views that threaten our very freedoms.  It has become an ideology for those who hold tolerance to be a higher virtue than Justice and Human Rights.  Tolerism is the skill in consuming massive quantities of political correctness, and moral and cultural relativism, without displaying the obvious signs of the drunken leniency toward, and even taking pleasure in, the slow ascendancy of Islamist values of terrorism, breach of human rights, and attempted reversals of the wonderful liberties and advances made in western societies, where church and state have been successfully separated, and an enormous degree of freedom reigns.”

Why should we reward the murder of civilians and the unwillingness to have the Jews in any part of the Middle East with support based on respect and empathy?

 I discussed ideology in this way:

“Ideology in its most powerful form is hidden from the view of the person who submits to it. Once it can be clearly perceived it effectively loses its power of social control; obversely, to believe oneself to be non-ideological is actually equivalent to being driven primarily by ideology.”

The implications of a new American ideology worried me:

The vile Hillary Clinton gave a speech advocating “Smart Power” which she defined as “using every possible tool…leaving no one on the sidelines, showing respect even for one’s enemies, trying to understand, and insofar as is psychologically possible, empathize with their perspective and point of view, helping to define the problems [and] determine a solution, that is what we believe in the 21st century will change the prospect for peace,” she said.

What does it mean for a possible future President to seek to show “respect” for one’s enemies?

Respect, according to the Oxford Dictionary is defined as “a feeling of deep admiration for someone or something elicited by their abilities, qualities, or achievements.”

And here is where we begin to climb down into a terrible ethical hole.  Palestinians are part of the  Islamist immorality, with a history of murders targeting children and other civilians, torture, persecution of ethnic and religious minorities, and gays, and Islamist forced genital mutilation of young girls, their abuse of women and their general disregard for individual human rights, do not deserve our “deep admiration” and do not show any great “qualities” or “achievements” – unless your idea of an achievement is the murder of Jews.and grabbing vast areas of land from non-Muslims..

Let’s dig a little deeper also into the whole concept of “empathy” for one’s enemy.   The idea of empathizing with the enemy was first popularized by the film, Fog of War, about former Defense Secretary in the Johnson administration, Robert McNamara, who made it one of the eleven lessons he learned. The concept of empathy is also something that has received the study of humanist psychologists, who are well-meaning in their attempts to aid interpersonal relationships and help people understand and therefore overcome misunderstandings in difficult relationships.

Carl Rogers, an important American academic psychologist of the twentieth century promoted the concept of empathy, or being empathetic as a process leading one to perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the “as if” condition. Thus it means to sense the hurt or the pleasure of another as he senses it and to perceive the causes thereof as he perceives them, but without ever losing the recognition that it is “as if I were hurt or pleased and so forth.  If this “as if” quality is lost, then the state is one of identification.

Rogers reasoned that:

“An empathic way of being with another person means entering the private perceptual world of the other and becoming thoroughly at home in it. It involves being sensitive, moment by moment, to the changing felt meanings which flow in this other person, to the fear or rage or tenderness or confusion or whatever that he or she is experiencing. It means temporarily living in the other’s life, moving about in it delicately without making judgements;  …It means frequently checking with the person as to the accuracy of your sensings, and being guided by the responses you receive. You are a confident companion to the person in his or her inner world.

“To be with another in this way means that for the time being, you lay aside your own views and values in order to enter another’s world without prejudice. In some sense it means that you lay aside your self; this can only be done by persons who are secure enough in themselves that they know they will not get lost in what may turn out to be the strange or bizarre world of the other, and that they can comfortably return to their own world when they wish.”

One can only conclude that real “political” empathy is for only the strongest, most intelligent intellectuals and politicians of our time, who are most secure in their liberal values and their constitutional limits and duties.  If the person is not so strong, this journey into what can be “a strange or bizarre world” may result in the person feeling more comfortable in that world or identifying with that world.

Feeling more comfortable in that world may result in something way more than tolerant empathy, and may result in conversion or submission.   This is not a job for postmodernists, but only for those with the clearest and most certain confidence in American values.  Without clear values, and a fixed sense of right and wrong, and good versus evil, postmodernist empathy will make it harder and harder for the empathizer to return to their own world, especially since President Obama said that America is no more tolerant than Islam, that American standards of justice are no better than Islam’s and that countries that have banished all Jews and most Christians share the same view of dignity of all persons.

And so, when President Obama stated that America and the Muslim world share mutual respect (i.e. admiration); and that they share the same principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings; then one wonders if empathy will more likely lead to submission.

Because Hillary Clinton called for more respect and empathy for the enemy, she was a poor choice to lead a country as important as America is to the notion of individual freedoms and human rights based on Judeo-Christian values.   Trump understood these dangers and moved the Israeli embassy to Jerusalem and cut off certain funding of the Palestinian terrorists and the indoctrination to murder of Palestinian schools funded by the West, together with the astute Abraham Accords.   But since the election of Biden, all progress has been reversed.

After the election of Joe Biden, and his appointment of Jewish anti-Israelists like Blinken and Nides to key roles,we have a very large problem on our hands.   The moral and cultural relativism and postmodernism of our pro-Palestinian university campuses entered the White House under Obama and has now returned.  Some 70% of American Jews voted for Biden and anti-Israelism has become the ideology of submission and this affects the long term security of Israel .  We all must understand the current ideologies which started with tolerist thoughts and now are moving along a path of ideologies, set out at the beginning of this essay which all pave the way for a submission to the so-callled Palestistinians and the ideologies promoting radical Islamism and what we might term  Palestinianization.

To the extent that the West refuses to drive a wedge between ordinary Muslim immigrants to the West and the Islamist political and religious and terrorist leaders, is the extent to which we shall fall into submission.  And so Muslims who respect the Islamism of their fellows, whether they are in the universities, the media or in politics will hasten Western submission, including, but not limited to, the submission to the so-called Palestinians.   We are allready seeing the Palestinian Rashida Tlaib and the Somalian Ilhan Omar successfully turnng American policies of the Left against Israel.

All of this is not good for the Jews.