The Exceptionality of Victimhood

"[Martin Luther King] framed our greatest moral failing as an opportunity for centripetal redemption."
"A funny thing happens when you take young human beings, whose minds evolved for tribal warfare and us/then thinking, and you fill those minds full of binary dimensions. You tell them that one side in each binary is good and the other is bad. You turn on their ancient tribal circuits, preparing them for battle. Many students find it thrilling; it floods them with a sense of meaning and purpose."
Jonathan Haidt, moral political psychologist, New York University

"[Modern individualism releases each person from social obligation, but] being guided only by the lantern of his own understanding, the individual loses all assurance of a place, an order a definition. He may have gained freedom, but he has lost security."
"Everyone must sell himself as a person in order to be accepted."
"What is moral order today? Not so much the reign of right-thinking people as that of right-suffering, the cult of everyday despair."
"I suffer, therefore I am worthy ... Suffering is analogous to baptism, a dubbing that inducts us into the order of a higher humanity, hoisting us above our peers."
Pascal Bruckner, French intellectual

#NoJusticeNoPride protests the Capital Pride parade in Washington, D.C. on June 10, 2017.(Photo: No Justice No Pride)

So what do First Nations groups, indigenous peoples, gays, transsexuals, former colonials, people of colour, the physically challenged have in common with Palestinians? They are all victims, clasping the unchanging, static state of their victimization close to their bosoms. And those not part of their particular tribal groups look on with the compassion of guilt, knowing themselves to have been the perpetrators of the condition of victimhood for the afflicted; they know this because their former victims tell them so.

Rueful guilt rules the emotions of those who are identified as the privileged, usually white, usually male, and they beg forgiveness of those whom they are informed they have wronged, placing them in this state of infantalized, perpetual victimhood. In the current social and political culture prevailing in the West, one must acknowledge one's guilt by catering to the needs of the victims. And no matter how sincere the apology and attempts at restoration, it is never stamped 'finis', instead demands grow, become shriller as do the accusations.

Pervading the minds of the victims is a sense of righteousness in their despair. And in the minds of the accused the understanding that there will never be a means acceptable to stem the tide of anguish caused to the victims, even if the events leading to victimization had nothing to do with them personally and occurred a hundred years earlier. There is no assuaging a convinced victim, their torment is ageless and ongoing. And while children who are aggrieved eventually mature and shed their predilection for dramatic wailing, the victimized remain mired in their adolescent victimhood.

Palestinians hurl stones at Israeli troops in East Jerusalem on Tuesday, March 16, 2010, as part of a protest in the holy city's eastern sector    Dan Balilty / AP

Our common humanity where everyone makes an effort to get along, valuing a pluralistic society and appreciating our differences has given way to accusations and demands and a widening separation between groups identifying themselves tribally. There are the oppressors and there are the sufferers. Black lives matter. Indigenous peoples demand their due and it will never be fully met. Gays require constant validation and admiration is never ill-advised. Transsexuals want to be recognized for the courage of their convictions.

And Palestinians revel in the understanding that nothing is demanded of them. They can lash out against their 'occupying oppressors' in fits of lethal violence, killing men, women and children, knowing that their sympathizers who view them as oppressed will never hold them to account and will support them when they lavish viciously false accusations of genocide and child-slaughter against the people they themselves attack with intent to kill.

Palestinians throw stones at Israeli border police in the Issawiya neighborhood.   Darren Whiteside / Reuters

No vicious, violent excesses of brutality in planning and executing mass murder, then blaming those you target for forcing it upon you can diminish the sympathy gained by the Palestinians by acting out their blighted fantasy of the world's longest-lasting refugee group for whom the United Nations set up a unique system of support ensuring their prolonged-to-eternity refugee status and with it victimhood will never end. Because they claim to have been wronged, they can be blamed for nothing they do; no violent excesses defying humanity are their fault.

And their self-described plight has resonance, as a tribe in need of sympathy and support against the forces of evil they claim have occupied land rightfully theirs. Social groups like student and labour unions, academia engrossed in appearing appreciably left-socialist gravitate to support of the Palestinian 'cause', for theirs is the tribal agony to which they can relate, along with the calls to arms in support of aboriginals, blacks and LGBTQ2.

The scene of the shooting attack at Har Adar in the West Bank, September 26, 2017.  Photo credit: Emil Salman