Outrage Formula: 2
Dethe Elza of Living Code comments in an email on The Outrage Formula in which I agreed with a column by Charles Jacobs in the Boston Globe that says the predictor for which acts of oppression outrage us isn’t the plight of the victims but our sense of identity with the oppressors.
Dethe insists on making a complex matter complex:
There’s another axis to the question of outrage (at least one). The US government is not directly (or overtly) providing aid to the Sudanese government, but they are providing several billion dollars, mostly in military “aid,” to Israel. When Palestinian homes are being destroyed, it’s American bombs at work, and all the future terrorists who are created by the rubble are aware of this.
…Of course, this doesn’t replace any of your theories, just overlaps with them. The old canard about one kidnapped American being worth 10 dead Europeans or a million dead Africans still applies to news coverage. There is also the small detail of the news companies being owned (or heavily invested in) by the same mega-companies financing a lot of the suffering around the world in their quest for oil, pharmaceutical markets, or whatever.
I totally agree that there are multiple factors at play. The question is whether the sense of identity is actually the predictor. For example, there are lots of repressive regimes that my government gives aid to, yet we aren’t as angry at them as many of us are at Israel.
I probably lost an argument about this on Saturday because as you try to test the hypothesis with historical examples, matters get pretty durn fuzzy: How outraged were we at what point about the killing fields of Cambodia? How angry were we about Franco and how repressive do we count him as being? We’re furious about Castro but seem not to give a sweet fig about murderous right-wing regimes in Latin/South America. It’s a tough hypothesis to test because — as Delthe makes clear — it’s a messy, complex world.
Nevertheless, I like the original op-ed piece because it tries to explain what I believe is a fact: most thoughtful anti-Israel actions in the US are not motivated by anti-Semitism despite what so many of my fellow Jews believe. And if you can’t tell the difference between someone who thinks Israel’s reaction to 40 years of aggression is disproportionate and unwise and someone who just hates Jews, then you’ve lost an important moral distinction.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
“Disproportionate”! People who claim that Israel uses disproportionate force against Palestinians reveal a severe deficiency in their moral standards, and here is why… No side in any conflict at any time in history has ever attempted to ‘precisely match’ the force being used against themselves, and in turn inflict ‘proportionate’ damages on their enemy. This far-from ideal strategy, would simply prolong such conflicts. Please correct me if I am wrong with examples. For other nations, racial or religious groups to demand that Israel hold itself to standards which no people/religion/culture/nation/etc. have ever held in practice themselves (again, I beg for someone to contradict this argument with real examples) is racism (aka antisemitism in the case of Israel)… That is not to say that Israel has no moral standards guiding when a violent action against their enemies is justifiable. In fact, Israeli democratic processes have often held the military in check, and have on occasion persecuted those found guilty of abusing the situation of war to commit war crimes (Jewish extremist groups known to have used violence, such as Kach, have been outlawed and are continually pursued and punished by Israel).
My suggestion to those with passionate views on this topic is to look back at their own ethnic history to see if they can find any instance in which ‘proportionate’ use of force was the survival strategy of their people. How was ‘proportionality’ defined? (ie. by viciousness of attacks/human death toll/injury toll/economic toll/some arbitrary arithmetic summation of these factors) How was ‘proportionality’ administered in practice? (eg. are holy day attacks deserving of more holy day attacks? which holidays in one religion would be equivalent to those in other religions? remember…’proportionality’ (it seems like we might need to involve ‘holy’ people in these decisions on proportionality…hmmmm. In my opinion it is ludicrous and arrogant for one to claim the ability to make such judgements during a conflict in which one is inextricably linked, let alone the ability of an ‘outsider’ to make these arbitrary judgements.
Israel, the only Jewish state, acts as it does, because it has few true allies in the world, and is surrounded by ideological enemies which seek its destruction in order to bring glory to their beliefs. If you claim that Israel is using disproportionate force, chances are you are holding Israel to a double standard which your own historical background can confirm, and double standards are at the heart of all racist attitudes.