In 1943, a lot of people thought that the Third Reich required toppling. Nobody accused those people of hating Germans on racial grounds. During the cold war, those who wanted the USSR replaced were not accused of anti-Slav racism. Back in the first half of the 1970s, various loons did try to pin the "racist" label on those who said that Pol Pot's government had to go. (I recall hearing a few comments of that sort while listening to the local Pacifica station.) But most people saw through that nonsensical accusation.
Israel presents us with a very different situation, for understandable reasons. You will be called a bigot is you admit that you want to see the "Jewish State" replaced by a true democracy with equal rights for all.
After I wrote denunciations of the Gaza atrocities -- and earlier, when this humble blogger did everything he could to oppose the unjustifiable attack on Lebanon -- the wackos came out of the woodwork. As always, they tried to sell me on the Protocols. Why won't that forgery die? Pushing such malarky only tends to increase Jewish paranoia -- and the greater the paranoia, the greater the support for Israel's tyranny.
Anti-Semitism midwived Israel.
Even though American Jews would prefer not to live there, they seem to like the idea of a bolt hole, a place of escape, just in case the "bad old days" should ever return. It's a ludicrous fantasy: If anti-Semitism in America ever reached a level sufficient to trigger an exodus from New York and Encino, how exactly would Israel provide refuge? Gathering all the Jews into one easily-nuked strip of land is an idea that would have made Hitler erect.
The larger question is this: Do Jews actually think that the "bad old days" will return, and that America will be infected by the Nazi virus?
The Protocols-addled boobs have helped me to understand why many Jews may harbor such fears, consciously or un-.
Not long ago, I took a look at Xymphora's web site. He used to be an interesting (albeit paranoid) writer; now, he's running a toxic dump. He's made the transition from implacable opposition to Israel (justified, in my view) to racial hatred of Jews as a whole (unjustified). Repeatedly, he accuses all Jews of holding to notions of racial supremacy.
Clearly, he has met few actual Jews.
I've known plenty: Friends, bosses, one girlfriend, family members. My stepfather was a non-observant Jew, and although I came to detest him, I liked his mother better than I liked my own.
This background taught me that Jews are like everyone else. I don't have a high opinion of everyone else. In fact, I think that most people are either dolts or scoundrels, which means that most Jews are dolts and scoundrels. Perhaps that attitude makes me an anti-Semite.
But I can say this: I've never met a Jew who harbored "supremacist" beliefs.
Such Jews do exist. See, for example, the work of Israel Shahak, a concentration camp survivor who went on to write denunciations of Jewish fundamentalism, which is just as vile as any other form of fundamentalism. Naturally, Jewish fundamentalists call him a "self-hating Jew." (I'll have more to say about Shahak's work in the future.)
The Jews I have known were and are not fundamentalists, and they've all been pretty humble, sometimes neurotically so. They are certainly bright enough to understand that any Jewish claim of racial superiority would mirror Hitler's madness.
Granted, my stepfather was of the opinion that Jewish comedians are funnier than other comics. (They aren't. Give me Monty Python over Milton Berle any day -- although I still prefer Chaplin to Keaton.) If you pressed him, he would probably confess to the opinion that the average Jew was probably a bit smarter than the average Anyone Else. A harmless delusion, that. But he never thought that this advantage counted for much. Early on, life had convinced him that homo sapiens sapiens was a carnival of schmucks, and that those who denied their schmuckhood were the biggest schmucks of all.
And yet.
My Jewish friends, on rare occasions, would occasionally offer hints of a suspicion that der Tag might one day come, that the aficonados of Adolf might one day goosestep back into power, and that their reach could extend even into the United States. Therefore, no goy -- not even me, not even the shiksas my friends dated -- could be entirely trusted.
Thus the earwig of paranoia burrows into the Jewish cranium.
The earwig finds other routes into other skulls. No-one has immunity: The earwig is a universal constant.
I am always astonished when people who have no reason to feel insecure manifest symptoms of a persecution complex. For example: Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, fundamentalist Christians disributed scare-books devoted to spreading the idea that the "gummint" was gonna force all believers in Christ to live in concentration camps. This theme permeates some of the more hilarious Jack Chick comics. A former friend of mine -- a bright guy -- actually believed this nonsense.
Many Jews are just as silly. I once got into an email fracas with a Jewish lady I met on a usenet group devoted to movies. She seemed intelligent and well-educated -- yet she was convinced that anti-Semitic imagery permeates most films and television shows. Moreover, she believed that this was the case because a "glass ceiling" prevents Jews from rising within the Hollywood power structure.
What could I say?
I was reminded of the time I found a JDL pamphlet on a bus bench near CSUN. The featured item was a poem, the opening lines of which linger in memory:
Hey Jew
Yeah, you Jew
I'm talking to you
Wake up Jew
Don't you know the Nazis want to kill you?
Memory may not be exact, but it is nearly so, I assure you. The doggerel went on in that vein. No, it was not a period piece. The intent, obviously, was to convince kids from Encino that the Gestapo was going to come a-knocking on their doors within the hour.
My friends, of course, would have found that verse laughable. And yet, on some deep level, perhaps they would not have laughed. Propaganda of that sort is designed to have a primal appeal, and no amount of education can obliterate animal instinct. The JDL is hardly the sole pusher of fear-junk. Over the past four decades, a propaganda river has flowed into the Jewish community, just as other propaganda rivers have flowed into the Christian and Islamic communities.
My question is this: Can we draw a line connecting that pamphlet -- what it implied, what it stood for -- and the recent barbarity in Gaza?
15 comments:
Nah, not gonna comment on the recent turmoil except let's hope BOTH sides honor the ceasefire this time, hm?
Maybe this time they *both* will? We'll see.
But I did want to comment on the "anti-Semitic" imagery in films. Yeah, well, you can find that and more...there is no end of bigotry and ingrained slants you can find in movies, and it's hardly limited to Jews.
Women...how many movies have one, maybe two token females? And even if one is a costar, she isn't billed in the promos. Blacks? How many are the ones first killed in action and scifi movies?
White males? omg...if he has a British accent, he's a villain, almost always. If he's too smart, he's also a villain.
See? There are prejudices enough to go around.
My favorite are the spoofs on the obvious prejudices, and who did this better than Mel Brooks? In fact, he was endearingly over the top in his spoofs on both Jews and Blacks! Does anyone else miss this? He was fearless, brutal and loving,
all at once.
The notion of "pre-emptive" war was explained by Bush Admin this way:
If any nation or group possesses or intends to possess WMD, we reserve the right to attack that nation or group at will and without provocation.
By all accounts, the Iraq War has not only resulted in a safer America, but has created countless potential America Haters.
The same logic applies to the existance of Israel. Jews in Israel are not only not safer than Jews elsewhere, but the collective behavior of Israel to ensure the survival of a safe haven for Jews has resulted in an increase in anti-Semitic feelings.
beeta
Milton Berle would laugh about being compared to the Monty Python group when he was usually compared to Tom Jones.
Yes we can draw a line. People are capable of the most horrendous actions when they lose a care for common humanity, and racism is a known route for enabling precisely that.
Few who 'signed up' to the recent and ongoing hasbara effort believed Jews were responding to being forced to be victims when they did a Warsaw Ghetto against Arabs in Gaza. (One could riff about the way the tunnel scare was used, even). Recall the most euphoric guy on the Youtube video posted on this blog, the one that showed nutters dancing in the street to celebrate the massacre. "Don't mess with the Jews", the hassid cried, "because the Jews kick butt". He ended with a sound like "Maaaaa". He should be interned in a mental hospital getting treatment. People like him should certainly be separated from others like him, with a view to helping them recover their humanity. (Is any other view really supportable???)
Out of interest - could you comment on the usage (or otherwise) of the idea of "shanda fur die goyim" among Jewish people you've known. Most Jewish people I've known (well enough to talk about this kind of stuff, that is) have been brought up in families where they've always taken it for granted that there is a big difference between what they're allowed to say in all-Jewish company and what they're allowed to say in mixed company.
Thinking the average Jew is smarter than the average gentile is no less racist than thinking the same where 'Jew' and 'gentile' are replaced with 'white person' and 'black person'. Neo-Nazoid British politician Nick Griffin actually celebrates the role of Jewish academics in making this kind of vile thinking 'respectable' (again).
One observation re. Israel Shahak, who was one of the good guys IMHO. He didn't only suffer from opponents who called him "self-hating". In one obituary, he suffered posthumously from some liar who said Shahak believed that Jews had a duty as Jews, given 'the Jewish experience', to lead everyone else in being anti-racist. Shahak never believed any such thing, and would have condemned it for the racist bilge that it is.
This reminds me of the commentary when an Arab violinist was forced to play his violin at a Zionist checkpoint in Palestine. I recall reading some crap by a Jewish racist who said he was against such treatment of the Arab guy not because it was wrong for someone to be treated that way, nor because the guy was an Arab, but because it demeaned himself, "as a Jew", that this treatment had been meted out by a Jewish regime. To my mind that's completely insane and objectionable thinking. Ditto with the Nazi concentration camps. What was wrong about them was how human beings were treated.
b
The definition of a "good Jew" today sounds a lot like the definition of a "good German" in the 30's.
This said, I don't see how Israelis are worse than the Americans who supported the slaughtering of thousands and thousands of innocent people in Iraq based on non-existing WMD. The problem is "exceptionalism", and it's a disease some Israelis share with some Americans and most other colonial power. The belief that an American / Israeli life is worth more than the life of a "savage", so it's justified to kill thousands of them in order to insure the security of a few.
Preemptive war was not invented by Bush, look at the history of the 6 days war.
See, the problem with asking the question is it brings out all the "Zionist" this and "Zionist" that people from the woodwork where we wish they would remain.
Too bad...we've had so many film buffs here I was hoping to hear more about that.
b: "shanda fur die goyim"? Not in my experience. Frankly, a lot people seem to have taken me for Jewish on my younger days. For example, the pulchritudinous daughter of Tuco (heroine of an earlier story) probably thought I was Jewish.
This was due to a number of factors: I spent my adolescence in a mixed household, my friends tended to be Jews, and the occasional Yiddishism entered my speech. I lived only one block south of "the Boulevard." In SF Valley parlance, the Boulevard (Ventura Blvd.) demarcates the flat part of the valley -- where the hoi polloi congregate -- from the hillside areas, where the rich Encino-ites lived. My Jewish friends (who lived north of the Boulevard) referred to the area as Hebrew Hills, which really was not fair. It's a bedroom community for the Industry.
So I'm a little like the guy who crashed the Freemasons only to discover that there ain't much going on there.
I'm an old "Pico and Fairfax" man myself.
Later on, it was Westwood Blvd. between Venice and Washington in Culver City.
Berle stopped being Jewish and converted to Christian Science. Oscar Levant (on behalf of all those who were Jewisher than Milton) told Jack Paar, "Our loss is their loss."
Are Jews smarter? No, they just have more chances of becoming better educated. They have a culture that teaches deep respect for learning and for serious intellectual effort. No one is telling them to get their nose out of a book and go outside to play ball. Nor that book reading looks sissy. That I suspect is where the idea originated. Jews are rewarded for studying; Gentiles not so much.
Meanwhile, in the "only democracy in the Middle East":
"-In her view, the inexorable shift of the Israeli public towards out and out hostility and hyper-defensiveness was inevitable from as far back as 1967, when the West Bank was first conquered. "We used to hold signs at protests reading 'The occupation will corrupt'," she told me. "Now, we can see that it has [come to pass]. As a society, we have lost our ability to see clearly; we have let fear blind us. Once, calling someone a racist was the harshest accusation you could make. Later, you began to hear people say 'I know I'm a racist, but...'; nowadays [during Cast Lead], we heard 'I know I'm talking like a Nazi, but at least the Nazis knew how to deal with their enemies'."
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jan/21/gaza-protest
I most certainly have met Jews with supremacist beliefs. I can't help but roll by eyes when I recall the long discussions that basically boiled down to "we're the most advanced people on the planet which is why we're always persecuted and plotted against." They would also tell us that we couldn't possibly understand Mel Brooks because we're not Jewish. It's just sad, and I wish those particular individuals a kindly wake-up call and some humility.
.R.S.E.
I have to correct an earlier comment.
I lived one block NORTH of "the Boulevard." In an apartment. My friends lived south of the Boulevard, where there are only houses -- nice houses.
The distinction will matter only to those who understand how that part of Los Angeles works.
In the United States, the greatest threat to the Jewish community's existence is assimilation and intermarriage, therefore a little paranoia may be useful in order to help the cohesion of the community.
"Most" Jews may not hold supremacist beliefs in a blunt form, like saying "we are the best." Jewish supremacism exists by placing themselves as an untouchable group, that is immune from criticism and whose "tragedies" are more important than everyone elses. Jews have believed they are superior or chosen for many thousands of years, and over time this has become sublimated into these forms.
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