Jame Taranto, at the Wall Street Journal, is one of my favorite pseudo-bloggers. He recently shared his opinion about European feelings of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism…
This led us to muse that the close U.S. relationship with Israel has a psychological basis as well as a moral and strategic one. Both the U.S. and Israel, after all, are immigrant nations, founded and originally settled by people who, for various reasons, got the hell out of Europe. One can see why Europeans who stayed behind, and whose societies are considerably less dynamic than either ours or Israel’s, would resent those who rejected the European way.
Further, World War II left Europe owing an incalculable moral debt to both America and the Jews: America because it saved Europe from its own savagery, Jews because they were the primary victims of that savagery. European anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism are often hard to tell apart, and it may be because they both reflect a self-loathing aspect of the European psyche–a neurotic need to compensate for an overwhelming sense of historical guilt.
Good stuff…
Europeans only like themselves.