OPINION:
In contemporary American society, the status of “victim” is one for which so many clamor. Countless groups and individuals seek out that status because it has been decided that with this status, the alleged victim is entitled to special recognition, together with an array of accompanying privileges and rewards.
Attaining the lofty appellation of “victim” can be as simple as merely affirming having suffered some kind of supposed offense, having incurred a modicum of purported suffering, or even having been in some manner “disrespected.”
Of course, not every person or group is held in sufficient esteem by those sanctimonious progressive elites in our society who have arrogated to themselves the right to bestow the designation of victim. In fact, any person or group whose background or ideology does not fit into the progressive definition of someone who has allegedly been discriminated against or oppressed by the “white majority” cannot, today, aspire to victimhood status regardless of the extent of that person’s or group’s suffering. If anyone would have doubted the accuracy of that proposition, the last few weeks should have removed such doubts.
On Oct. 7, Hamas terrorists wrought the most brutal slaughter of women, children and the elderly that the world had witnessed in decades. Without warning or provocation, thousands of young men entered the State of Israel and began a massacre of unparalleled contemporary cruelty and depravity. They killed their victims with remorseless persistence, indiscriminately murdering babies, raping young women, killing mothers in front of their children, torturing the elderly and even mutilating their victims when their lives had already been taken.
The Hamas terrorists’ brutality, which focused primarily on Jewish victims, created echoes of the kind of violence that we find in the history of ancient times, medieval Europe and of Nazi Germany. In America, in light of our so-called enlightened Western ethos, born of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition and of the Enlightenment, which elevated the individual and acknowledged the unique value of each human life, we supposedly eschew such gratuitous violence, and we purportedly seek to protect all those who would be victimized by reason of their immutable characteristics.
Today, in our society, anyone claiming to have suffered discrimination or to have been subjected to a perceived injustice can assert a right to protection, with its special privileges. But this right appears to have an important limitation. It does not seem to apply to Jews.
Jews are the only group in Western societies who, in spite of recurrent oppression and discrimination, are seemingly deprived of the right to be viewed as victims, even when they very clearly have incurred all of the indignities and suffering that should be more than adequate for being bestowed that status.
Throughout the decade of the 1930s and the first half of the 1940s, as the Nazis made no secret of their desire to exterminate the Jews of Germany and of any other territory where they were dominant and then proceeded to do so, there was little clamor to assist the Jewish victims. Instead of providing safe havens for Jews, with the rarest of exceptions, the sophisticated societies of the West, including our own nation, closed their doors and Jews were left to fend for themselves. Six million were slaughtered.
It would later be asserted that there simply had not been time to deal with victims or even to acknowledge victims. A war had to be won, that was the moral imperative, and Jewish victims be damned. For a short time after the full horrors of the Holocaust were made public, there was a brief moment of compassion for the decimated Jewish community. Clearly, it has not lasted.
Now, we are beginning to watch a repeat performance of the flagrant denial of the suffering to which Jews are being subjected. The Jewish individuals so brutally murdered by Hamas terrorists are being transformed into oppressors. The self-appointed designators of those meriting the label of “victims,” the most progressive and enlightened amongst us, have determined that the barbarians who murder Jews are more meritorious of that label than those whom they mercilessly slaughtered.
In the name of an alleged but non-existent occupation, in the name of a supposed colonialism (a positively Orwellian misuse of that word, with respect to a people returning to their original homeland), and in the name of a non-existent “apartheid,” the progressives in our midst have decided that murdered and mutilated Jews are not victims, nor are Jewish children and the elderly held hostage to be considered victims. In some circles, it even seems acceptable to call for the annihilation of the victimized Jewish people.
Indeed, anyone who can promote the agenda of left-wing idealogues has a better chance of being considered a victim than Jews – even as horrific images of the Hamas slaughter have been made available and as antisemitic propaganda is being disseminated on our streets and on our college campuses, with increasing levels of violence and intimidation against Jews.
Just to be clear: Jews do not consider themselves victims, nor do they wish to be considered by others to be victims. But they are entitled to be treated like everyone else and, when victimized, to be viewed as such. Simply put, if the current selective approach to the notion of victimhood is permitted to prevail and to be weaponized in support of a progressive or Islamist agenda, the ultimate victim will not be Jews but Western civilization itself.
• Gerard Leval is a partner in the Washington, D.C., office of a national law firm. He is the author of Lobbying For Equality, Jacques Godard and the Struggle for Jewish Civil Rights during the French Revolution, published by HUC Press.
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