This is an effective rendering, posted on NRO's Phi Beta Cons website, of the core issue involved in the recent Natfhe boycott of Israeli scholars. It's drafted by the president of the National Association of Scholars:
The decision by the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, one of Britain's two professor unions, to call for a boycott against Israeli academics and universities unless they disavow its "apartheid policies", has been rightfully denounced as an affront to the free exchange of ideas, comity among scholarly truth-seekers and, not least of all, common decency. But it is also a most ugly instance of that habit of collective stigmatization now second nature in academe. White Guilt may not seem a very threatening concept when applied to cosseted, non-lacrosse playing, middle Americans, but when—with effortless mutation—it is visited upon a nation of Jews, things turn ominously dark. A demonized majority may, as a whole, seem safe from immediate danger, but it can be sliced and diced to isolate fragments for exemplary treatment. This is an especially inviting maneuver when victims can be cut out on the basis of thinly disguised prejudice.
A yellow-badge mentality shines through the justification given by boycott proponent Mona Baker for targeting Israel in a world filled with brutal oppression. It is valid to focus on Israel, she argues, because "Zionist influence (that is Israeli influence) spreads far beyond its own immediate areas of dominion, and now widely influences many key domestic agendas in the West." Yet it would be a mistake to attribute too much to the lingering influence of the Protocols. While it gathers what strength it can from historic antisemitism as an intellectual phenomenon, radical academe's hostility toward Israel is more a miniature of its general assault on free institutions and bourgeois civilization. Each makes an inviting target, immoderately successful, but easily attacked—rhetorically at least—without much cost or risk. Our campuses specialize in raising elites whose weapon of choice is moral aggression, climbing in status on the bent backs of those they can shame. Lacking the warrior ethos, they seek easy marks. Western Civilization, both wealthy and tolerant, is their immense target of choice. But Israel, a most conspicuous and successful outlier, gets lavish treatment as well. Needless to say, the danger is far greater and pressing for a small country poised on the knife's edge, but the issue of survival is shared. -- Stephen H. Balch
Mona Baker, again. Nothing new here, just a Sir Oswald Mosley for middle-class pussies.
And of course there's the timing, right after the Gaza pullout in which Israel has taken substantial risks and faces a Hamas government dedicated to the extermination of Jews as a matter of policy... is no accident.
The Religion of 100 million skulls is always happy to add more, as long as they're from designated class enemies. What has changed is their borrowing from neo-nazis when it comes to defining who that is.
The left has always been quite clear that it believes in collective "needs" and "responsibilities." Class struggle means precisely that -- class struggle. The left has never been about individuals, and it is silly to think it ever will be. Whether the guilty class is "capitalists," "whites," "males," or "straight people," each is responsible for the depredations of the others in his group, and whether the victim class is a racial minority, women, "workers," etc, each is entitled to benefit from the suffering of the others in the class. This is the defense of results-oriented affirmative action schemes, for example. It also explains the proposed boycott against Israeli academics. The latter is nothing but the logical extension of the former.
Great Britain has a long, lousy history of Jew-hatred/exclusion. There's a strain of anti-Semitism that crosses all political and class bounderies--even "sympathetic" papers like The Telegraph aren't above peppering their news with a little Jew-bashing (just read their review of 'I am Rachel Corrie'.) My UK Jewish friends have made it clear to me that the biggest problem in England is the media--the BBC (which US leftists like to praise for being unbiased) is atrociously anti-Israel. Really, if all of your newspapers and new programs are antisemitic, you're pretty much destined to be a bigot. Thanks BBC, Guardian, Independent, New Statesman, et. al. What a "progressive" legacy to pass on to the world.
TigerHawk:
Well, there's a libertarian or anarchistic strain within the American left, but it's not much in evidence at the moment. And a lot of those folks who began this strain back in the '60s ultimately became conservative or neo-con. (Even James Buchanan once said in a seminar that he started out as a "libertarian soc_ialist," until he became convinced the two weren't compatible.) But what you say is certainly true of both classical and western Marxism (as in the Frankfurt School). That also may be the force behind the preference for "diversity" in the academic left nowadays, over the older leftist watchword "equality." They just don't talk much about the latter any more. And "diversity" provides better cover.
This is an intriguing idea. Have you expanded on this somewhere? Except for the fact that it's based on a fantasy, it's not dissimilar to the Madisonian concept of "cross-cutting alliances,' except that the latter isn't about entitlements to extract, but the right to strive--together, and against "identity" if necessary. This may be why "identity" is so important to the Left. Having abandoned the self-interested motivation for cooperation the only way they can bind people is through some sort of shared "identity" that wins allegience in the face of self interest. Clearly you can't have Madisonian alliances and identity politics. The former will shred the latter.
#5,
What you are looking for is Gramscian Marxism.