Europe - Empathy for sale - by David Burchell
Medieval Europeans were titillated by reports of dog-headed men and other far-off monstrosities, but chiefly because they provoked interesting thought experiments (what's human and what's not?). Medieval Muslims were so incurious about the Europeans, they called them all Franks, or Frenchmen, and distinguished them by body smell.Global empathy is one of those illegitimate children of the imperial experience whose origins we like to forget. In the days of the British Empire, Australians greeted reports of distant massacres of British soldiery with a new urgency, as if we too were witness to the Indian Mutiny or overrun by African tribesmen at Mafeking. Even today, the same impulse appears to unite the sympathy of pious Muslims everywhere -- towards suffering peoples of their own kind. After the catastrophe of World WarI, however, a new generation of critical intellectuals turned the tables on imperial sympathising, rerouting all that emotional energy towards the victims of European colonialism.
The same complicated moral logic was on evidence in The Netherlands last week when two high-profile Dutch political figures assumed leadership of a demonstration against Israel's invasion of Gaza. Harry van Bommel, a former schoolteacher, serves as Socialist Opposition spokesman on international affairs. Gretta Duisenberg, once a flamboyant socialite, is the socially conscious wife of the former Dutch central bank chief. Each has spoken at great length about the Palestinians' plight. (According to Duisenberg, Israeli rule in Gaza is worse than wartime Nazi rule in Holland.) And each looked thoroughly comfortable in their skins as they led the crowd in chants of that old party tune, "Intifada, intifada, Palestinian state!" Even as, in the background, their fellow demonstrators could clearly be heard singing the more uninhibited political ditty: "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas!" And so here they were together: the warm heart of the global conscience and the icy blood of Hamas, united within the same pulsing breast.
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