…and victimology:

One aspect of the speech that hasn’t received sufficient attention is the focus on victimology: Israelis were victims of the Holocaust, Palestinians victims of dislocation after the founding of Israel, Americans the victim of the 9/11 terrorists, Arabs the victims of Western imperialism, and so forth.

That this appeals to Obama is not surprising. He and I attended law school at the same time, Obama at Harvard and me at Yale. Victimology was all the rage. It gave one not only moral standing, but, oddly enough (like Sotomayor’s “wise Latina”) a certain level of intellectual standing.

During our first year in law school, there was a one-day nationwide “student strike for diversity” at elite law schools, including Harvard and Yale. (I don’t know for sure whether Obama was involved in this “strike,” but he gave a speech on behalf of uber-diversity advocate, and Harvard lawprof, Derrick Bell.) At Yale, students gave speeches throughout the day. What struck me at the time was how eager, almost desperate, the various student speech-givers were to be perceived as victims.

As he notes, Obama ignores, or seems unaware of or indifferent to, the real reasons that we support Israel, relative to its despotic neighbors. But I guess western liberal democracies just aren’t worth defending any more. After all, it’s all culturally relative.

Oh, and speaking of Marty Peretz (about whom we’d still like to know who he voted for), he’s wondering if Dennis Ross was removed from his planned position of envoy to Iran because he’s too hawkish, or too Jewish.