Preferring those who hate us

There is a Ph.D. dissertation in it for whoever can figure out why we always prefer those who hate us. The spectacle of a few weeks ago of students at the University of California, Davis, heckling their Jewish peers and shouting “Allahu Akbar” would be merely funny if it were not tragic.

Would someone please tell these wet-eared 20-year-olds that the black-hooded men who shout “Allahu Akbar” 7,000 miles from their cushy CoHo café would make human torches of them if they could, and adorn their trucks with their decapitated head trophies. The lowliest ISIS operative laughs at the California dreamers’ naïveté.

In an example of the kindergarteners running the kindergarten, the UC Davis student government saw fit in their hoary wisdom to vote in favor of economic divestment measures against Israel. This presumably will punish the evil Israelis and please their adorable Hamas paramours. A photo of the smiling acne protestors shows them at the back of the auditorium proudly waving a Palestinian flag. Like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said in his Harvard address of 1978, “What are all the smiles about?”

This bizarre phenomenon (Stockholm Syndrome on steroids) of fawning over people who abuse us is old as the hills—and a significant enough problem that the Apostle Paul devoted a large chunk of his Corinth letter to make fun of it, precious literary real estate he would doubtless have preferred to spend on finer topics. Moreover, it was the one issue that made Paul so nuts he lost his dignity, as it were, and went into full fool-mode:

“I wish you would bear with me in a little foolishness. Do bear with me! For I feel a divine jealousy for you. … I repeat, let no one think me foolish. But even if you do, accept me as a fool. … For you gladly bear with fools, being wise yourselves! For you bear it if someone makes slaves of you, or devours you, or takes advantage of you, or puts on airs, or strikes you in the face. To my shame, I must say, we were too weak for that! …” (2 Corinthians 11:1–2, 16, 19–21, ESV).

In January of last year I attended a conference in Philadelphia called “Impact: Holy Land” (WORLD Magazine, Jan. 25, 2014), where anti-Semitism wore a Christian garb. Supposedly an open-ended “conversation” about Palestine and Israel, it booked only pro-Palestinian speakers and spoke of nothing but apartheid and divestment as it promoted so-called Holy Land tours for the purpose of showcasing the evils of Israel. One year later, the sowing of seminal hatred has blossomed into swastikas painted on the door and sidewalk of a Jewish fraternity house across the continent.

My kids and I laugh about my cat, Miss Kitty, because as cute as she looks we know that if she were 10 times her size she would eat us in a heartbeat. “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer,” goes a wise saying. But the kids at the college in Davis don’t even know yet who their enemy is.