How's That Workin' For Ya?

You know, Jews have a reputation for being very smart people.
And they are very smart people.

Per capita, men and women of Jewish heritage have won more Nobel prizes than all other groups put together. Their culture prizes study, honors learned persons, and is in all ways a culture that is intellectual and refined.

They understand the world and how to advance in it.

And that is why the Jews will never be able to solve the problem Israel poses.

The problem is summed up very nicely in this exchange:

“What about the Palestinians here?” I said. “You say Jews should be able to live in Judea, but most people who live here are Arabs.”

“There have a right to live here, as well,” she said. “I think they can gain a lot more from living in peace with us than they can by waging war against us. I hope that one day they understand that because we’re not going anywhere. I want to live in a world where Arabs don’t want to kill me, not because they love Jews but because it doesn’t advance their own interests. I want to live in a world where they think about what’s good for them rather than what’s bad for me.”

Did you see it?
If you did, you're doing well.
The reporter in the conversation missed it entirely.

It's the dog that doesn't bark - it's the perspective which an intellectual, a cultured, a successful person would never express because it never occurs to them to hold it.

What if "Arabs" - and notice, the woman even said "Arabs", although that's clearly NOT what she meant - are confident that the death of the Jews is good for them?

Now, why would they think that?

Well, let's go back to her little faux pas: the "Arabs."
That's an absurdity.
This woman isn't afraid of "Arabs" nor are "Arabs" trying to kill her.

People from Indonesia want her just as dead.
So do people from India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Egypt, and, for that matter, America.

What do all these people have in common?
Hint: it isn't their "Arab-ness".

Christian Arabs, Hindu Arabs, Buddhist Arabs, Jewish Arabs, atheist Arabs, none of these people want to kill Jews.

So what is the common denominator?
Dare we say it?
Yes, we dare.

It is the Muslims who want the Jews dead and Israel destroyed.

Not all Arabs are Muslim.
Not all Muslims are Arab.

It is the Muslim point of view that is deadly to her, not the Arab point of view.
From the Muslim point of view, Muslims gain eternal salvation by killing Jews and wiping Israel off the face of the map.

But cultured, refined, successful, intellectuals (read "atheists") never even conceive the possibility that there are people in their conversation who really, really DO hold a different worldview than they do. They think that, ultimately, everyone really thinks like them, and all that has to happen is you joggle them around until they admit it.

All right-thinking people think like them, and wrong-thinking people are only prevented from thinking like them by unhappy circumstance.

They can prove it.
They can point to Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs and Freud and Darwin, genetics studies, computer simulations, game theory, psychology, sociology, smooth histories written by buttery scholars who prove without question that mankind has always been driven essentially by economics or biology or a bit of rancid butter they had for lunch.

Everyone knows that real politicians, serious politicians, the kind of rulers who fisticuff their way into power, these people don't buy into any of this God stuff, this religious clap-trap, this airy-fairy salvation nonsense.

And this failure to understand the importance of salvation in the Muslim mindset resides precisely in the fact that even Orthodox Jews, even religious Jews, even really serious Jews, don't really spend a lot of time thinking about the afterlife.

As Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz points out, Jewish scholars agree on two things: (1) that Sodom and Gomorrha was wiped out due to lack of hospitality towards each other and (2) all the Jews in Sodom and Gomorrha attained heaven, where they dwell with the rest of the Chosen People. If the Jews don't worry about salvation, why would anyone else?

They literally can't conceive what the problem might be. We're nice to you, if you'll just be nice to us, everything will work out fine.

"I want to live in a world where Arabs don’t want to kill me, not because they love Jews but because it doesn’t advance their own interests. I want to live in a world where they think about what’s good for them rather than what’s bad for me.”

Honey, you should be happy.

That's exactly what you've lived since 1948.
That's exactly where you live right now.

How's that workin' for ya'?