The Ubiquitous Victim Card

Could someone please tell me who is not a victim in our world today?

We have to stop being victims so that we don't victimize others.

According to common knowledge, Israeli Jews are victims, always have been, always will be. We've all heard the mantra, "A tiny country surrounded by enemies".

Once believed there is an obligation to make it true. The more the mantra is repeated, the more Israelis come to expect trouble rather than peace and happiness. And it seems they get at least some of what they expect, even if takes a lot of provocation.

"Never trust an Arab" they tell their children. And those Jews who don't live in Israel tell their children, "Never trust a gentile".

In return, there's a tendency for "gentiles" to mistrust Jews, including the Evangelicals who've thrown their support behind Israel, and the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia who has recently cozied up to its former enemy, but only because they have a common enemy.

Could this lack of trust on the part of Israel's "friends" be caused by a subliminal sense that they themselves are not trusted by Israel?

Is the old adage, "what goes around comes around" not just a saying, but a reality? Does the subconscious mind feel obligated to make real what it's repeatedly been told is true? The Book of Job seems to uphold that idea: "The thing which I greatly feared has come upon me".

Feeling like a perpetual victim can deaden awareness of the sufferings of others. Many Jews who escaped death in WWII are for some reason unable to identify with the ghettoization, psychological and physical abuse, and daily routine harrassment of the Palestinians -- who had no hand whatsoever in the Jewish suffering that brought them to Palestine, and who had been living in harmony with long-time Jewish neighbours before the Zionists appeared in their midst.

Christians can be oblivious to their own cruelty as well. People of African heritage have suffered their own kind of "holocaust" since the first missionaries invaded their ancestral tribes, forcing them to wear clothes and believe in the love of Jesus -- then standing aloof as millions of them were hauled across the ocean, in unspeakable agony, to become the slaves and all-round abusees of good Christian families, who attended church on Sunday mornings and sang hymns about the love of Jesus.

At a deep level, it's probable that very few African-Americans feel they can fully trust anyone with "white" skin.

Meanwhile, a significant number of "whites" have begun to feel marginalized, believing that Blacks, Jews, and even the "terrorist" Muslims, are afforded better treatment than they in today's "leftist" environment.

Not surprisingly, some Muslims have begun to feel that there is, for them at least, no safe place in the world.

The most recent "victims" are evangelical "warriors" who allege discrimination from Facebook. So they complain to Pamela Geller, and she supports them because both she and they hate Islam.

Facebook is owned by a Jew; it's all very complicated.

Geller is young (she doesn't remember the 50's when western women were expected to wear long skirts and girdles, and hats in church, and white gloves at job interviews), and also a bit myopic (deliberately?) in that she disses Shariah as if it's strictly a Muslim kind of thing.

But Shariah looks a lot like Halacha, which is why you will see Jewish settler women wearing long skirts, long sleeves, and headscarves, not to mention the Orthodox Jewish women who wear wigs because they're not supposed to show their hair. Orthodox men in Israel have been known to throw stones at bare-armed women.

Women, in general, have always been an underclass, regardless of colour, religion, nationality, career, wealth or fame.

LGBT's are often treated badly, even - or sometimes especially - by their own families.

The Homeless can't get a break; shelters for them are not wanted in most "decent" neighbourhoods or near schools.

And let's not forget the Roma, who have been seriously overlooked, along with other people the Nazis considered undesirable, but who today struggle to be recognized as legitimate victims of the "Holocaust".

I'm sure there are some others I've forgotten. All memory jogs are welcome.

Was Suzuki right that humanity is like a roiling mass of maggots feeding on offal? (YouTube)

I personally have an atomic theory. I once tried to tell a couple of apparently poorly educated young women that everything is made up of atoms, and when it's cold the atoms cling closer together, and when it's hot, they move farther apart. They asked if this was just more of my "new age mumbo-jumbo".

But we're all made of the same basic element, and we all have the same colour of blood -- as even Trump sort of declared (YouTube) -- and when things heat up, or we're convinced that things are heating up, we avoid anything that we've been led to believe is the cause of the heat. Consequently, we are the ones abetting the consequences.

There are all kinds of studies regarding "Victim Mentality" - you could just Google that. It may be "pop" psychology, but taking responsibility for one's own fear of victimization may well be a good start to better mental health. Certainly, constantly picking at scabs is a self-defeating way to live.

I can hear your question and my answer is this: I don't know whether or in what way individual Jews, groups of Jews, or the collective unconscious of all Jews through their oft-told stories of persecution, may have contributed to the horror that came at the hands of the Nazis. But the perpetrators were driven by their own self-defeating self-image; a resentment that came from their own past as a nation; a need to be superior as a result of feeling inferior; an individual's need to belong to something greater than oneself, and a rage against the past that sought an outlet.

Unfortunately, all inner rage gets transferred to scapegoats, and the process then repeats itself.

I'm grateful to whatever gods there may be that I am of such mixed heritage that I have no discernible ethnic culture. I am visibly "white", however, which I realize has given me advantages, despite living in a "man's world" -- but there are many "whites" in the so-called "richest" countries in the world who need to see themselves as superior to all other races and ethnic cultures.

By the following, please be assured that I don't take anyone's suffering lightly, but there's a song from the 40's that runs through my head when I remember too vividly the childhood that I personally had to overcome, or when over the years I've felt unjustly treated by others. It goes: "You've got to accentuate the positive; Eliminate the negative; Latch on to the affirmative; Don't mess with Mr. Inbetween."

It was Bing Crosby who sang it back then, but Aretha Franklin does a better job of it.(YouTube)
Other sayings may seem similarly trite, such as: "What goes around comes around", and "Do unto others as you would that they should do unto you".

But I have to say it blows my mind when Christians turn to the Old Testament for permission to take "an eye for an eye" because the Jesus they insist resides in their hearts firmly counselled that you must "Love your enemies" and do good to those who mistreat you.

It wasn't just so that you would be seen outwardly to be a good person; it was because it has to be real in the deepest part of you in order to manifest in your own environment.

I find I have to avoid the Old Testament kind of Christian lest I get some of it on me. Luckily, forgiveness does not require association. It's not for their benefit that you forgive; it's for your own mental fitness.

Can you imagine if Netanyahu called up Hamas to say, "Let's do whatever we have to in order to quit all this nonsense and get on with enjoying what's left of life in this beautiful land"? One could only hope that Hamas would not tell him to shove it.

People who use their sad past experiences to justify current hateful behaviour are courting the very thing for themselves that they're inflicting on others. Below are some others of the same opinion:

• Self-pity is easily the most destructive of the non-pharmaceutical narcotics; it is addictive,gives momentary pleasure and separates the victim from reality. John Gardner
• If it’s never our fault, we can’t take responsibility for it.  If we can’t take responsibility for it, we’ll always be its victim. Richard Bach

And my personal favourite:

• Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame. Erica Jong

It may seem to the so-called Jewish Defence League that they are taking their lives in their own hands when they show that fist, but they actually demonstrate a desire to take into their own violent hands the lives of people they blame for their own self-fed hatred.

The term "self-hating" has been maliciously misdirected against Jews who strive to live in peace with their fellow humans.

Toronto's reputation as a breeding ground for anti-Muslim hate just got worse

• And it's the far-right Jewish Defence League leading the descent into paranoia as more hate crimes charges are laid against the Toronto group's members

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ADDENDUM: Jan 9: 11:15 AM
How could I have missed American/Canadian First Nations People?
In Parliament, there's furor over an alternate (or long hidden but now surfacing?) view of their situation:
In the Scheer versus Beyak battle, she got more right than he did
Scheer called her racist, she's called him a liar, and that, remarkably, is where it sits.

Image:Anarchist News

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