On Wed, 24 Apr 2002, Gautam Mukunda wrote: > The author's not arguing or defending a point of view. He's shaking his > head and saying, "Tsk tsk! Bad Europeans!" in print. He's generating > heat but he's not shedding any light. He offers two rational reasons for > Europe to feel more sympathy for Palestinians than Americans do, and then > he obscures that with the implication that because Europe -- as though > "Europe" is a sufficiently precise synonym for Nazi Germany -- committed > a Holocaust once, "Europe" must be willing to commit another one now. > > He abandons the job of offering an explanation and just gives us libel. > Ugh. > > Marvin Long > Austin, Texas > > OK, this is absurd. This is the excuse that European bigots make.
No, because the author does not *explain* the points you've outlined below (which I've snipped for brevity's sake). I know them. You know them. If the author wants to explain something to somebody who's not immediately aware of them, he's failed and chosen to conclude that Europeans are bloody anti-Semites as though it were a tautology. As though it were a natural to assume that today's European is ideologically identical to Europeans 50-100 years ago. I'm not saying the nations of Europe weren't complicit in the Holocaust -- even America can be said to be complicit, since the warning signs were there for a long time before we joined the fight in Europe -- but I'm saying that the author hasn't made his point. He has not EXPLAINED anything. He has trusted his reader to make the implied inference for himself. It's bad journalism. The article can only make sense if you've already arrived at its conclusion before you've read it. If you haven't, it will read like slanderous innuendo. If you haven't, you will look in vain for an explanation of why things like colonial shame and superior press coverage of Palestinian issues -- which are surely not bad things in and of themselves -- aren't positive credits to the European view. If you're an American trying to figure out why Europeans seeing things differently, then the author IMO hasn't done his job. He begins to...and then concludes that, well, Europeans are just more evil than we are, case closed. As a person who supports Israel, who supports the idea that the nations of the west, especially Europe, should be very heavily invested in guaranteeing both the survival and safety of Israel *and* just compensation for Palestinians (why should Israel be forced to try to compensate them alone?), I find very little in the article to explain to me just why "Europe" -- which I optimistically think surely cannot be the monolith the article portrays -- appears so one-sided on the issue. "The Holocaust explains all," isn't sufficient for me. Marvin Long Austin, Texas
