The power of victimhood

By Ted Belman

A few weeks ago, I posted an article Palestinians are perceived as the underdog together with a video. The message was that the Palestinians get great support from the common man and even elites because of this perception.

Shelby Steele calls it The Narrative of Perpetual Palestinian Victimhood in an article he wrote on HudsonNY.

Shelby Steele, Robert J and Marion E. Oster Senior Fellow, Hoover Institute, are member of the Working Group on Islamism and the International Order. He advises,

    The following is excerpted from a speech delivered September 22, 2011 in New York City at the conference “The Perils of Global Intolerance: The UN and Durban III,” sponsored by the Touro Institute on Human Rights and the Holocaust and the Hudson Institute.

Here is a key paragraph,

    Why not? These narratives, these poetic truths, are the source of their power. Focusing on the case of the Palestinians, who would they be if they were not victims of white supremacy? They would just be poor people in the Middle East. They would be backwards. They would be behind Israel in every way. So this narrative is the source of their power. It is the source of their money. Money comes from around the world. It is the source of their self-esteem. Without it, would they be able to compete with Israeli society? They would have to confront in themselves a certain inferiority with regard to Israel – as most other Arab nations would have to confront an inferiority in themselves and be responsible for it.

    The idea that the problem is Israel, that the problem is the Jews, protects Palestinians from having to confront that inferiority or do anything about it or overcome it. The idea among Palestinians that they are victims means more to them than anything else. It is everything. It is the centerpiece of their very identity and it is the way they define themselves as human beings in the world. It is not an idle thing. Our facts and our reason are not going to penetrate easily that definition or make any progress.

    The question is, how do they get away with a poetic truth, based on such an obvious series of falsehoods? One reason why they get away with it in the Middle East is that the Western world lacks the moral authority to call them on it. The Western world has not said “your real problem is inferiority. Your real problem is underdevelopment.” That has not been said, nor will ever be said – because the Western world was once colonial, was once racist, did practice white supremacy, and is so ashamed of itself and so vulnerable to those charges, that they are not going to say a word. They are not going to say what they really think and feel about what is so obvious about the circumstances among the Palestinians. So the poetic truth that Palestinians live by carries on.

    International media also do not feel that they have the moral authority to report what they see. On the contrary, they feed this poetic truth and give it a kind of gravitas that it would never otherwise have.

    Consequently, we need to develop a narrative that is not poetic, but literal and that is based on the truth. What would such a narrative look like?

He goes on to develope our narrative. It is a long article but well worth the time.

November 14, 2011 | 1 Comment »

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  1. Focusing on the case of the Palestinians, who would they be if they were not victims of white supremacy?

    I calculated that colonialism had its heyday between about 1756 (Clive’s campaigns in India) and 1956 (the Suez debacle, and independence for Ghana) — 200 years, in all. While it was with us, colonialism was not the media circus it is today; it was simply the way things were. With its demise, it has been the talk of the town, inspiring comedies and tragedies on the telly and providing slogans for protestors around the world.

    In the meantime, while the UN and the Pals milk all the nostalgia they can out of the long-dead cow of European colonialism, the United States — under an African Moslem President, no less — rules the world through its NATO and quasi-NATO surrogates while the dialogue of the world focusses on the rather insignifcant country of Israel: a country which, because of the “Big Lie” absurdity of it all, is portrayed as the veritable fountainhead of raging colonialism against a nonexistent entity called “Palestine”.

    As Josephus said in Mel Brookes’s “History of the World, Part I” (There is no Part II),

    MOVIES IS MAGIC!