Your attitude toward Jews decides whether you love or hate freedom... and mankind
David Pryce-Jones reviews George Gilder's The Israel Test (Gilder was apparently a passenger on National Review Online's cruise). I particularly liked this: Nobody but Gilder could have written this book. Israel of course has its defenders, but they use arguments based on nationalism, territory, ethnicity, defence of minorities, rights, historicism, and so on. Gilder sees Jews since their emancipation as the vanguard of human achievement. They may be few in numbers, but their creativity has brought prosperity to themselves and those around them, and that prosperity in turn has brought freedom. Thus Jews spearhead capitalism and the democracy indispensable to its proper functioning. Marxists, Nazis, and now Muslims and their apologists envy Jews because they cannot emulate them, and so set out to destroy the success that shows up their failure. The attitude you take towards Israel and Jews decides whether you love or hate freedom, and beyond that, mankind — that’s the test he is proposing in the book’s title. And just in case the reader risks failing this test by jumping to a false conclusion, Gilder has a portrait of his very non-Jewish ancestry, saying, “We were classic WASPS all.”Read it all.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 8:15 AM
2 Comments:
David Pryce-Jones wrote a classic work on the honor-shame motif central to Arab culture twenty years ago. Its remains unsurpassed as a study of how Arabs really think and behave to this very day.
It was titled, "The Closed Circle."
"Closed circle" is excellent. Pryce-Jones also wrote "Betrayal," a study of French policy toward Jews/Israel and the Arabs since the 19th century. Recommended.
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