David Suissa plaintively tries to explain why: “For some reason, the notion of ‘suffering Christians’ seems to resonate less with liberal hearts than ‘suffering Muslims’.”
His lament, in my view, is more than justified, but perhaps he pulls a few punches in offering an explanation.
Why don’t Jews, especially liberal Jews, care more about creating “a safe space” (to use the run-amuck term on college campuses) for Mideast Christians persecuted by Muslim fanatics? Freud speculated that the among the most intense forms of hatred was rooted in the narcissistic phenomenon of dislike for “the almost the same.” Do Jews and Christians—both People of the Book—have too much in common for either to be comfortable with each other? The Quran, unlike the Christian Testament, never presents its founder as the Jewish Messiah.
This explanation may have some merit, though it’s also true that, theologically, Judaism is probably more congruent with Islam than with Christianity, which could make them more competitive. This picture is complicated, however. Jewish secularists tend to be deeply suspicious of Christian fundamentalism and ignorant about or indifferent to Muslim fundamentalism. This is strange because, whatever you say about Christian fundamentalists like Southern Baptists, they have been since Jefferson’s time strongly in favor of separation of church and state. Muslim Sharia law doesn’t even comprehend such a concept.
Propinquity can be a negative. As the jaundiced saying goes, “familiarity breeds contempt.” According to polling data, American Jews long had a lower opinion of American Catholics than American Protestants, despite the fact that rural and small town American Protestants have been more anti-Semitic than the American Catholics with whom Jews have been neighbors in big cities.
It is also true that European and, to a lesser degree, American Christians practiced virulent and active forms of Jew hatred for centuries. Muslims, on the other hand, usually but not always, practiced more low key anti-Semitism, consigning Jews to second class dhimmi status, but generally tolerating them otherwise.
The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Is this another reason why Jews have been less hostile than they might be to militant anti-Christian Muslims?
On at least one college campus, the University of Minnesota, student government wanted to ban a moment of silence remembrance for 9/11 because it would be “offensive” to, and create “an unsafe space” for, Muslims. How would Jews feel if Christians wanted to ban any mention of the Inquisition or the Holocaust by invoking their potential hurt feelings?
Just to be explicit, I have no sympathy with the argument that it somehow “privileges” Christianity to favor expedited refugee status for Christians (or Yazidis) in danger of being annihilated in the Middle East.
The point needs to be made that before and during World War II, the argument was often made by opponents of Jewish rescue that it was “prejudiced” to give “preferential treatment” to Jewish over non-Jewish victims of the Nazis. This argument still has resonance in some countries, especially Poland.
In my view, Jews too blinded by disdain for Christianity or particularly Christian conservatives to see the humanitarian and existential reasons why Mideast Christians today deserve refugee preference need moral corrective lenses.
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