Writing his memoir two decades later -- or reporting the experience to Bill Ayers -- Obama sympathized with his mother. The women wanted only to complain “about the quality of Indonesian help.” Of course he didn’t know that, nor did Ann, since she turned down the invitations. Some of the wives may have been interested in Balinese puppets or Javanese batiks, some in Mozart’s operas, some in orchids or Lepidoptera. But in his mother’s mind, and his, they were all Ugly Americans, neo-colonialist exploiters.

In 1970 Lolo Soetero, Barack Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, was hired by Union Oil to work in the company’s government relations division. He was asked occasionally to go to dinner parties with visiting Union Oil executives and American engineers working in Jakarta. It was naturally expected that his wife would accompany him, but Ann Soetero refused to go. Lolo was baffled and angry. Lying in his bedroom, Barry would listen to his parents argue. “These are your people,” his stepfather would plead. “They are not my people!” Ann would shout back.

Lolo, Ann came to feel, was weak and malleable. He admired the West. She began to glamorize, in retrospect, her first husband, Barack Obama, Sr. The marriage had not been very glamorous. Ann left Hawaii soon after Barry was born, moving to Seattle later in August 1961 to begin classes on the 19th. She must have been making plans for some time, in order to have applied to UW by its deadline. What was the problem with the marriage? Ann wouldn’t say, though she did tell a friend that one night, when Barack Sr. didn’t like the meal she’d cooked, he took a full plate of food and hurled it against the wall.

The volatile Kenyan left Hawaii in June 1962, having accepted a scholarship from the economics department at Harvard. (Typically, Obama-Ayers blames the university for the break-up of the marriage: it didn’t offer “enough money to take his new family with him.”) In Cambridge, Barack Sr. met and married another white woman, Ruth Baker. Despite her name, Ruth was Jewish. This was not a happy marriage either. According to their son Mark Obama Ndesanjo, Barack Sr. was abusive.

Like his half-brother, Mark also heard arguments late at night:

When I was abruptly woken up, I would see light streaming in around the sides of the door. There would be thumps and yells, often followed by the sound of my mother screaming in pain or anger. Once I heard a loud crash and rushed to the door of the living room. By the orange light I saw my mother on the floor and my father standing over her, his hands clenched.

When his father returned home after a night of drinking and approached his mother, Mark “would move protectively toward her and clutch her legs, crying. I know now why I mostly remember her legs, not her torso or even her face… Every blow my father gave my mother, I felt.”

A man who beats his wife is likely to have beaten women in the past and will go on to beat future wives and girlfriends. The violence doesn’t depend on the identity of the victim. Thus it’s more than likely Ann Obama was beaten, or threatened, by her husband.

Yet she turned around and held him up as an ideal to son.

This is a familiar syndrome, and on March 8 Karin McQuillan published a provocative article in American Thinker drawing on the way in which victims of abuse or terror blame themselves rather than the perpetrator. They must have been doing something wrong. If only they were better children or wives, the violence would end. Their tormentor is himself a victim, just as he claims.

Self-Hating Jews

McQuillan applies this analysis to American Jews. Though they appear to be doing extraordinarily well, Jews in the U.S. have been deeply traumatized by the Holocaust and are now menaced by a resurgent Arab anti-Semitism of Nazi-like virulence. The incitements to murder Jews from the Quran, repeated in sermons, taught in Salafist madrassas throughout the Middle East -- and in Europe and the U.S. -- are a threat to residents of Jericho, New York as well as of Jerusalem, to Scarsdale and Skokie as well as Tel Aviv. She quotes a philosophy professor, Joshua Halberstam, writing five years before 9/11:

…when I look at my daughters, I’m aware that somewhere on this planet, at this very moment, there are people who want to murder them…. Unfortunately, some of these people have the money, means, and ideological connections that can transform them from… haters to real-life killers

Yet even Jewish organizations whose sole purpose is to expose and combat anti-Semitism have politely ignored Arab calls for the annihilation of Jews. Since 9/11, the Wiesenthal Center has acknowledged anti-Semitism in the Middle East, but on its current home page, on a list of 15 “social action and news events” links, just one is to the Arab world (a book fair in Oman), while two concern Estonia, and one each Lithuania and Iceland. The Anti-Defamation League still prefers to focus on White anti-Semitism, which it continues to equate with opposition to illegal immigration, though the rise of ISIS may be changing this.

McQuillan explains the dynamics: “One of the most common effects of trauma is a psychological mechanism called displacement.” Quoting psychologist Judith Herman, she writes

“(The abused child) tends to displace her anger from the dangerous source and to discharge it unfairly on those who did not provoke it.” Thus, good-hearted liberal Jews are not angry at the Palestinians for their violent, hate-filled actions -- they are angry at Jewish settlers. They project their anger onto “bad Jews” -- the Orthodox, Likud supporters, settlers -- to bolster a sense of their own goodness, and the potential goodness of the abuser.

But there’s something deeper and more troubling going on here. Why should attacking Israelis -- for the “bad Jews” are not confined to Orthodox, Likudniks, and settlers -- be so rewarding? Why should “displacement” bolster self-esteem? The abused child or wife perversely blames herself for the abuse as a way of empowerment. If she’s responsible, she can do something about it. But this costly strategy is not socially approved. The victim gets no support from friends, family, or counselors for her misrepresentation of the problem.

This is not the case with Jews who condemn Israel. Books published by Jewish scholars denying Israel’s right to exist receive glowing reviews, the authors are lionized at conferences, interviewed by the BBC, NPR, etc. There’s a long list of these academics. Edward Alexander has a forthcoming book devoted to them. Thousands more hold the same views, and express them in their classrooms, on panels, etc.

McQuillan begins her article by describing an encounter with one such individual. Following a book talk at Brandeis by James Carroll, author of Constantine’s Sword, a history of anti-Semitism, Professor Arthur Green, a rabbi and specialist on Jewish mysticism, astonished McQuillan by blaming the Jews for the hatred directed against them:

it was Judaism which taught the Catholics to practice religious oppression, through the concept of the chosen people. Moreover, Jews exploit the victim role and enjoy feeling “moral righteousness.” He then falsely declared that rabbinic Judaism limits “noble ethical proclamations to one’s fellow-Jews rather than extending them to all humanity.”

Green attacked Israel for having besmirched the good name of the Jewish people by “many words and deeds.” In a publication in 2002 not cited by McQuillan, Green worried about Israel becoming “a barbaric Middle Eastern superstate,” and proposed a daring solution to Palestinian terrorism (the second Intifada was then raging): “we need to restore hope.” The “root cause” of suicide bombing was -- guess what? -- “the degradation and humiliation of the Palestinian people… How can we not expect them not to be frustrated and angry?”

This is, of course, delusional. The rabbi was writing nine years after the Oslo agreement, itself a striking example of Jewish mysticism in practice. Another Boston psychotherapist, with a Ph.D. in history as well, Kenneth Levin, has taken a sobering look at the illusions held and fostered by Israel’s ruling Labor Party that led to the most disastrous political decision in the country’s history. Prof. Green was also writing two years after the failure of the Camp David Summit, where Arafat rejected the offer of all of Gaza and 92% of the West Bank, and made no counter-offer. He insisted on “the right of return” -- i.e. the elimination of Israel. The wave of terrorism followed. This should not have been surprising: the Oslo Accords had installed a terrorist in power. But Green sympathized with Arab anger at the humiliations and inconveniences imposed on them by their commitment to terrorism.

Despite this article’s title, the term “self-hating Jew” is inappropriate. Such Jews think very well of themselves. It’s gratifying to occupy the moral high ground. It’s also usually a safe and comfortable place. As Anthony Julius puts it in his long book on British anti-Semitism, “The anti-Zionist Jew is not just a Jew like other Jews; his dissent from normative Zionist loyalties makes him a better Jew. He restores Judaism’s good name.”

Let’s not underestimate the importance of self-esteem. It was responsible for the election of Barack Obama. The nation twice managed to perform the remarkable feat of slitting its wrists while collectively patting itself on the back.

So while McQuillan acknowledges the importance of the prevailing Weltanschauung in defining psychopathologies, mentioning Freud’s unwillingness to acknowledge child abuse in fin de siècle Vienna, her article raises an important question: why should Jews who deny the right of Israel to exist receive such a warm response in the 21st century? What has changed in American public opinion -- that is, the opinion of the country’s political and cultural elites -- since the 1950s, when such a position would have been unthinkable?

Self-Hating Americans

Zionism is Jewish nationalism, and to understand the enthusiastic response to Israel’s Jewish detractors, we need to look at our American nomenklatura’s opinion of nationalism.

On March 3 of this year, the Associated Students of UC Irvine, the student council, passed a resolution banning the flag from the administration building where the council meets. The bill, R50-70, was as incoherent as Michelle Obama’s senior thesis at Princeton: “flags construct paradigms of conformity and sets [sic] homogenized standards for others to obtain [sic]...” The Stars and Stripes “has been flown in instances of colonialism and imperialism…and can be interpreted as hate speech.”

When the decision was overturned, at least sixty faculty members signed an on-line petition defending the Council’s decision. “The resolution,” the petition claimed, “recognized that nationalism, including U.S. nationalism, often contributes to racism and xenophobia, and that the paraphernalia of nationalism is in fact often used to intimidate. This is a more or less uncontroversial scholarly point.…”

Uncontroversial in departments of English, Comp Lit, Sociology, Education, and the various “Studies,” perhaps, but no professor of European history would sign such a statement, and I saw no signatory who claimed to be an historian.

Of course nationalism is a “construct,” as is any identification of the individual with a group beyond the family. Of course it was carefully nurtured by governments in public schools, in the army, in the subsidized press. Of course national pride, national honor, and national destiny were invoked by Europeans and Americans seeking territory to colonize or govern, and in diplomatic maneuvering. The rights of minorities were not always observed by the new nations created by the treaties of Berlin (1878), Versailles (1919) and Lausanne (1923), though provisions protecting those rights were included in all.

It’s easy to forget, though, that back in the 19th century, nationalism was the ideology of liberals -- in the days when liberals were the limited government guys. In the 20th century, however, nationalists often morphed into socialists, first introducing tariffs, wage and price controls, and then more radical interventions. These have included strict quotas in government jobs and educational institutions for high-achieving minorities.

But American nationalism was exceptional in important ways. Expansion to the Pacific was, in the first place, bitterly contested. The historian Frederick Merk concluded that the doctrine of Manifest Destiny “lacked national, sectional, or party following.... The reason was it did not reflect the national spirit. The thesis that it embodied nationalism, found in much historical writing, is backed by little real supporting evidence.” And what was the consequence of the march westward? A continent that was home to perhaps 2 million (the numbers are highly speculative) living in warring tribal societies was opened to 320 million descendants of people throughout the world, and is providing them a standard of living inconceivable to those who emigrated here.

And whereas throughout the world quotas are in place to limit the opportunities of minorities, “affirmative action” in America, now in its sixth decade, mandates discrimination against the European-American majority.

The student council members and signatories no doubt believe unlimited immigration from Latin America is a great thing. How about the immigration of Europeans in the 18th and 19th and early 20th centuries?

The council and petition-signers also undoubtedly harbor warm feelings for Palestinian “nationalism,” though unlike Greeks, Poles, Italians, Germans, Irish, Ukrainians, Czechs, etc. -- and Jews -- the Palestinians are not a nation, with their own language, culture, and common history. The nationalism that swept across the Third World in the 1950s and ‘60s, one can be pretty sure, also sets their hearts racing. But how do they feel about Jewish nationalism?

Nationalism, in short, is great for non-Westerners. But Americans? They are not my people.

In the Chicago alternative schools that Bill Ayers took over with his Annenberg money, no American flag was displayed and students pledged allegiance to the world. And in his iconic portrait, taken for an article celebrating the publication of his memoir Fugitive Days in August 2001 (bad timing), the unrepentant ex-terrorist is stepping on the American flag.

Self-Hating Whites

Let’s move from March 2015 and the removal of the American flag to April 1994 and the unfurling of a new national flag. This was the banner of the Republic of South Africa, which combined, unaesthetically, the black, green, and yellow of the flag of the terrorist African National Congress with the red, white, and blue of the former flag, and of the Dutch and British flags.

Two things were immediately predictable:

1. The hatred of the left would now be directed exclusively at Israel.

2. South Africa would eventually revert to the continent’s mean. The question was whether it would take one generation or two before it became another corrupt, violent, and repressive African state.

As for point one, as anyone who was a student in the late ‘60s through the ‘70s knows first-hand, the Left is all about anger. Chanting the chants at demonstrations, shouting obscenities at the police, saluting with the clenched fist -- it was all hugely exhilarating. Arriving at Berkeley in 1972, I was gratified to discover it was still not too late to throw rocks at the cops. I’d transferred from Reed, where I had always worn to the barricades the best-selling t-shirt in the college’s bookstore: it featured the Reed seal, a griffin rampant, with “Communism, Atheism, Free Love” around the circumference. Apparently, there wasn’t enough room for “Drugs.” In the bad old days, anger was one of them, a stimulant and intoxicant at one and the same time.

In Ayers’s memoir Fugitive Days, writes Jack Cashill,

“…rage” rules. Ayers tells of how his “rage got started” and how it evolved into an “uncontrollable rage -- a fierce frenzy of fire and lava.” In fact, both Ayers and Obama speak of rage the way Eskimos do of snow -- in so many varieties, so often, that they feel the need to qualify it, as Obama does when he speaks of “impressive rage,” “suppressed rage,” or “coil of rage.”

Like the fury of the abusive husband, the rage of the left moves from target to target. And so with the demise of white rule in South Africa, Israel inevitably became “the apartheid state.”

As for the second assumption, economically, Johannesburg is not yet Detroit. This is hardly surprising: South Africa’s gold, platinum, and diamond mines are the largest in the world. The country owns about half of the world’s gold reserves, and De Beers sells at least 60% of the world’s diamonds. South Africa has a GDP of nearly $600 billion, according to government numbers. But the unemployment rate hovers around 25%, in reality probably closer to 40%, and strikes are frequent and violent. And while undoubtedly more blacks are better off economically since 1994, income distribution is more badly skewed than under the old Afrikaner government.

But guess what? In a recent poll, 80% of the blacks surveyed blame the country’s poverty on previous regime. In reality, with the lifting of sanctions in 1994, foreign investors flocked to the new republic.

But crime and corruption will eventually take a toll. And the crime rate puts the Motor City to shame.

According to official statistics, the murder rate in 2014 was 32.2 per 100,000, about six times the global average, and 1000% higher than the US. Interpol believes the actual rate may be twice as high as the government reports. For white farmers, it’s officially 99 per 100,000, twice as high as for police. In another estimate, of the 50 people murdered per day in the country, at least 20 are whites, who make up less than 9% of the population, almost five times the black rate.

A computer consultant friend returning recently from a stint in J-burg told me that his employer warned him under no circumstances to leave his hotel room at night.

The Medical Research Council reports that 37.4% of men polled admitted to having raped a woman or girl. Even according to government statistics, the rate of rapes, 132.4 per 100,000 people, is the world’s highest. (It’s about 27 per 100,000 in the US.) It’s estimated that 500,000 women are raped per year, though the true number could be over 1,300,000.

And life expectancy, which rose from 51 to 64 between 1960 and 1994, is now back to 53.4 The global average is 70.

In 2012, Genocide Watch, apparently the only NGO interested in crime in South Africa, issued a disturbing report. Dr. Gregory Stanton, its head, implicated the government in the murder of white farmers and warned of “a downward spiral into genocide.” All whites, according to the ANC charter, are “settlers” -- like the Jews who have lived continuously in Hebron for over 3000 years (except when they were expelled by the Crusaders in 1100 and the British in 1929). Their elimination is a matter of time.

This is scary stuff. But as Bob Dole used to repeat so plaintively, “Where’s the outrage?” That useful construct, the Man from Mars, would be asking himself why Europeans and their descendants in other parts of the world would be indifferent to the fate of Europeans on the continent of Africa. The Dutch began farming in Cape Town in the middle of the 17th century, only a generation after the first Europeans came to North America, and before the arrival of many Bantu tribes.

But for Americans, these are not my people.

In the ‘80s, Afrikaners became Hollywood’s favorite villains -- they were the bad guys in Lethal Weapon 2, Hard Target, and other thrillers. The typecasting didn’t stop with the end of apartheid. The Sum of All Fears (2002), The Manchurian Candidate (2004), and Red (2010) -- three movies that sound like they must be about the President -- feature baddies with crude Afrikaner accents.

They may be glowering on the silver screen, but Afrikaners are MIA on newscasts and in the paper of record. The descent of the “Rainbow Nation” into barbarism is not fit to print. When Matti Friedman was working for the AP’s Jerusalem bureau between 2006 and 2011, the news agency had 40 staffers in Israel and the Palestinian territories, more than in China, Russia, and India, and more than the combined total in the 50 nations of Africa. If Israel should disappear, they and their colleagues will all pack their bags. Palestinians and Africans are victims; that’s the story. What happens after “liberation” is not news. Google “violence in South Africa New York Times” and the first story is about attacks on black lesbians. There are two stories about attacks on foreign Africans, and a reminiscence about casualties among reporters during the fighting in the run-up to 1994, for which the government is blamed, though the killings were a result of a brutal war between the ANC and the Zulus. Google “attacks on whites in South Africa New York Times,” and the most recent of three stories is from 1993.

Back in the USSA:

When did liberalism go off the rails? Some will say 2011, when the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others by a schizophrenic with no known political beliefs except that he was pro-abortion was blamed on Sarah Palin -- a delusion as unhinged as any that haunted Jared Loughner. But a better date is 2007, the year of “the Jena Six.” These “youths” had punched, kicked, and stomped a white student until he was unconscious. After one of the assailants was charged with attempted second-degree murder, the howling of the enragés of the left reverberated through the media. Across the country, the legions of the righteous signed petitions, marched, and listened raptly to harangues from the usual haranguers. Three nooses had been hung on campus six months earlier as a prank against members of the rodeo team. The students who hung them were unaware of any racial connotations, but were suspended for six weeks. The attack on Justin Baker had no connection with this, nor had he made any kind of racial comment, which would of course have justified his being beaten into a bloody pulp.

Mychal Bell, with two previous convictions for battery, became a martyr. Of course he was still alive and had not retained the services of Ben Crump and Ryan Julison, so he did not achieve the apotheosis of St. Trayvon and St. Michael.

Ordinary European-Americans rallied to the causes of the Ferguson cop and the Sanford neighborhood watchman. (By the way, as far I know, it is perfectly legal to question someone in your neighborhood who you don’t know and who is acting suspiciously.) But these folks were not among the People Who Count, our bi-coastal betters.

George Zimmerman? Darren Wilson?

Not my people.

Both events received wall-to-wall coverage 24/7 for weeks. But it did not occur to any reporter in the Zimmerman case to phone the national HQ of 7-Eleven in Dallas and ask what the videotape of Trayvon Martin revealed. I know because I did. And the director of public relations expressed her surprise that I was the first reporter (OK, I lied) to contact her. And so American Thinker became the first news outlet to reveal that Martin had left the store between 6 and 6:30. The 7-Eleven is about a 15 minute walk from Brandy Green’s apartment, and so when spotted by Zimmerman, who called 911 at 7:09, St. Skittles, an accomplished burglar, had probably been loitering around the apartment complex for 20 to 50 minutes.

If the media had no interest in what Martin had been up to before Zimmerman reported him, they had, and have, even less interest in letting you know why the “White-Hispanic” vigilante, along with Darren Wilson and the President’s grandma Madelyn Dunham, might have been a tad wary of a young black male acting suspiciously. According to a 30-year study of homicides by the Justice Department, spanning 1976 to 2005, African-Americans, currently 13.2% of the population, committed 52.2% of all murders. They were 7 times more likely to kill than whites. For the most recent year for which arrest records by race are available, 2012, blacks committed 49.4% of murders, 32.5% of rapes, 54.9% of robberies, 30.8% of burglaries, and comprised 43.8% of prostitution and “commercialized vice” arrests. Since the percentages don’t include crimes not reported or where a suspect was not apprehended, a lot of gang-related violence is unaccounted for. Victim surveys discredit the idea that the arrest records are skewed by police bias.

This reality is not part of the narrative. Murders, assaults, and rapes committed by African-Americans against European-Americans are strictly local news. When committed against other African-Americans, they are often not news at all. Those who want to keep up to date on nation-wide black mayhem each weekend and holiday need to consult Colin Flaherty’s tours d’horizons at American Thinker.

And so the psychopathology of Jews is writ large in America. Thugs are celebrated, victims denounced. (“Thuggery” by the way, the practice of murdering travelers by Thugees, followers of the goddess Kali, was eliminated from India by the evil British colonialists. Some 30-40,000 were killed each year by the cultists, making commerce a bit risky.) America is vilified, European-Americans are vilified. The “Other” -- to use an indispensible bit of leftist jargon -- is celebrated.

And like the abuser who represents himself as the victim, and is seconded in this misrepresentation by the actual, traumatized victim, so the practitioners and defenders of violent and aggressive behavior here and in the Middle East claim that they are the oppressed. Concessions are instantly forgotten and new demands issued. Racial preferences have been in place since 1965. Untold millions of European-Americans have been denied admission to colleges and universities and been rejected for jobs because of their skin color. In the Middle East, territory over three times the size of Israel has been given up merely for the promise of peace and an end to terrorism. Never in modern European history has contiguous territory conquered in war been returned to the defeated nation or empire without concessions elsewhere. But there has been no real peace; there has been no end to terrorism. And there has hardly been a flicker of gratitude for the concessions, any more than for Affirmative Action.

A couple of final thoughts.

1. I’ve used the term European-American throughout this article, except in the title. I don’t like hyphens any more than the next guy, but for defenders of people of no color, “White” has no future. Whites wanting representation on any campus in this country will have to present themselves under the aegis of their nationality. Even the student council at UC Irvine would be hard-pressed to turn down an application for an Italian-American Club, an Irish-American Society, or an Association of Polish-American Students. Ask for a “White” club and you’ll be charged with hate speech. In any case, “whiteness” was historically not part of any European identity. If surveyed, most Europeans for a millennium before 1800 would have identified themselves as Christians, and mentioned their family, their village, and their province, county, duchy, or principality.

2. The anti-Semitism of the left is ineradicable. It long predates Zionism, going back at least to Karl Marx, if not to Voltaire. The task of community organizers in the 19th and early 20th century was to get workers to say in public “capitalist” instead of “Jew.” And as long as Israel exists, left anti-Semitism will only become more vociferous and more audacious. Nationalism (in the West) is wicked, but nothing is as evil as Jewish nationalism. The solution for the left has always been for Jews to disappear, a bloodless (they hope) Final Solution.

Anti-Semitism on the right is growing too. It’s an update of the 19th century version. Jews are denounced precisely because they are not nationalists. Their first loyalty is not to their own country, but to Israel. According to the ADL, 31% of Americans and 41% of individuals worldwide believe this. Before 1947, a common accusation was also that the first loyalty of Jews was to their co-religionists abroad: the scourge of America was “the international Jew.”

There’s probably a still larger group in the U.S. that resents Jews less for their support of Israel than for their leftist politics, particularly their advocacy of open borders and amnesty -- even when they understand the historical reasons for this support. Others, who are in no way anti-Semites, are puzzled about this, too. Hispanics, after all, do not like Jews any more than do African-Americans. According to the ADL, 30% of each group is anti-Semitic, versus 5% of non-Hispanic whites.

Mass immigration does not seem to be any more in the interest of Jews than is their support of Obama, disciple of Edward Said, pal of Rashid Khalidi, Ali Abunimah, Salam al-Marayati, Mohammed Elibiary, et. al.

It’s sometimes not appreciated even by those who are not anti-Semitic that Jewish opinion is not monolithic on any subject. Politics in Israel, as the recent election showed, is as rancorous as anywhere in the West. If in fact 69% of Jews in the U.S. supported Obama in 2012, as pollsters claim, that still means about one in three did not vote for the President. Though most families agree to disagree, every week there are shouting matches -- or at least sarcastic exchanges -- over lox and bagels at holiday gatherings, bar mitzvahs, weddings, and funerals.

Jews can do no more about neo-Nazi anti-Semitism than they can about that of Bill Ayers and his friends or about Muslim anti-Semitism. The good news is that Jews can do something about the low-grade antipathy on the right on the part of individuals who don’t know Stormfront from The Weather Channel. But to do so, they will have to fly in face of the good opinion of the bi-coastal bien pensants.

They will have to say:

Americans? My people.

European-Americans, AKA Whites? (We’re not on campus) My people. Afrikaners? My people.

And they will want to say as well, proudly, along with Evangelicals and the great majority of conservatives:

Israelis? My people.