We live in an age of hypersensitivity, where individuals and corporations are expected to go out of their way to avoid giving offense. It doesn’t matter, incoherent, or hypocritical someone’s “identity” is – in our multicultural age, boycotts can be called and threats can be made on the most absurd pretexts. This isn’t just about the world exploding when the Pope gave a dry speech about Biblical hermeneutics. It’s about Burger King changing the design on their ice cream cones because the swirl looked too much like the word Allah – and someone darkly dropped the word “sacreligious”. It’s also about Air New Zealand proactively bleeping out the word God from the movie The Queen so Muslims wouldn’t get offended.
And in this age of hypersensitivity toward everything and everyone, the Apple retailer in Korea’s biggest mall is showing off their tasteful collection of Nazi soldiers::
You can click through for more pics. It’s predictably sickening.
Obviously, the most noticeable thing is how this is another point on the graph labeled “the world’s increasing and disturbing indifference to anti-Semitism”. Jewish sensibilities have become increasingly expendable as quotidian global anti-Semitism becomes more pervasive. But if you don’t know that indifference to anti-Semitism is back – well, then you haven’t been following the Carter travesty.
But there’s another issue that should be raised – the flip side of the world’s indifference to Jewish sensitivity is the absurd deference that they give to even the most absurd Muslim claims of intolerance. And the logical conclusion of that is… that the walking on eggshells approach that the West takes to Islam is not driven by anything like “tolerance” or “multiculturalism”. It can’t be – if that was really what was going on, then all religions would get the same sensitivity. Hell, there’s even an argument to be made that Jewish claims of discrimination should be getting more credit: “Nazi displays are anti-Semitic” is a lot more credible than “that ice cream swirl design is sacreligious”.
But when Apple resellers are showing displays of Nazis, it makes a mockery of the claim that museums are removing pictures of Allah because of “sensitivity”. Of course, the open secret is that no one really takes charges of Islamophobia seriously – that’s not what causes them to respond to high-pitched Muslim accusations of intolerance. Rather, they’re responding to the subtle (and, frankly, not very subtle) threats of open violence – it’s not for nothing that Muslim leaders talk about how sacrilege “may incite violence in the community”. But no one wants to admit that they’re giving up free speech in the face of violence – so Western leaders call it multiculturalism. But honestly, does anyone believe that any more? It’s not said out loud really, but does anyone believe it? And of course Muslim leaders are happy to not declare that the Emperor is an unclothed dhimmi – why would they change anything, when right now they’re winning without even having to fight? (via Boing Boing)
Previously: The World’s Oldest Hatred: Maybe Not Fashionable, But Not Not Fashionable, Matthew Yglesias: Anti-Semitic Genocidal Maniacs Are Hip, Terrorists Are Fashionable (UPDATED AND BUMPED: Yglesias Article From Today Predictably Anti-Semitish), French Teacher ‘Sends’ Jewish Student to Furnace
