Mick Hartley

In a post on the benefits of victim status, Jerry Coyne quotes from Alvin Rosenfeld's book, The End of the Holocaust:

As Christopher Lasch and others have pointed out, a politics of suffering and victimization has been developing within American society over the past several decades, a politics whose proponents draw on the pervasive presence of Holocaust images in order to garner for themselves a certain moral superiority that victims have come to enjoy in our society. In the words of one commentator, “paradoxically, in our era, which proclaims happiness as a universal goal, not only preoccupies itself with—even invites despair over—certain forms of suffering, but also on an ever escalating scale it recognizes, ideologizes, and politicizes some forms of suffering and victims, making them valid, fashinable, and even official.” In such a manner “suffering  becomes a moral identity and a basis for political entitlement.” The philosopher Tzvetan Todorov takes these insights still further:

“What pleasure is to be found in being a victim? None; but if no one wants to be a victim, everyone wants to have been one. . . Having been a victim gives you the right to complain, protest, and make demands. . . Your privileges are permanent.

“What is true of individuals here is even more true of groups. If you succeed in establishing cogently that such-and-such a group has been a victim of injustice in the past, this opens to it in the present an inexhaustible line of credit. . . Instead of struggling to obtain a privilege, you receive it automatically by belonging to a once-disfavored group; hence the frantic competition, not as in international commerce, the status of ‘most favored nation’ but that of the group most in disfavor.”

Words worth bearing in mind when looking at this Elder of Ziyon post, on how Palestinian media use Holocaust images as supposed photos of "Israeli massacres".