Michael Ejercito
2012-10-10 15:07:31 UTC
On Tue, 9 Oct 2012 07:48:20 -0700 (PDT),Michael Ejercito
It is anything BUT superficial, gook. It is OVERRIDING.
It overrides NOTHING, nithing.On Mon, 8 Oct 2012 18:29:13 -0700 (PDT),Michael Ejercito
It overrides NOTHING, boy. It is superficial.White is a superficial characteristic.
White is the OVERRIDING characteristic.The following article explains your pathology.
History's oldest hatred
by Jeff Jacoby
The Boston Globe
March 11, 2009
http://www.jeffjacoby.com/4743/historys-oldest-hatred
ANTI-SEMITISM is an ancient derangement, the oldest of hatreds, so it
is strange that it lacks a more meaningful name. The misnomer "anti-
Semitism" -- a term coined in 1879 by the German agitator Wilhelm
Marr, who wanted a scientific-sounding euphemism for Judenhass, or
Jew-
hatred -- is particularly inane, since hostility to Jews has never had
anything to do with Semites or being Semitic. (That is why those who
protest that Arabs cannot be anti-Semitic since "Arabs are Semites
too" speak either from ignorance or disingenuousness.)
Perhaps there is no good name for a virus as mutable and unyielding as
anti-Semitism. "The Jews have been objects of hatred in pagan,
religious, and secular societies," write Joseph Telushkin and Dennis
Prager in Why the Jews?, their classic study of anti-Semitism.
"Fascists have accused them of being Communists, and Communists have
branded them capitalists. Jews who live in non-Jewish societies have
been accused of having dual loyalties, while Jews who live in the
Jewish state have been condemned as 'racists.' Poor Jews are bullied,
and rich Jews are resented. Jews have been branded as both rootless
cosmopolitans and ethnic chauvinists. Jews who assimilate have been
called a 'fifth column,' while those who stay together spark hatred
for remaining separate."
So hardy is anti-Semitism, it can flourish without Jews. Shakespeare's
poisonous depiction of the Jewish moneylender Shylock was written for
audiences that had never seen a Jew, all Jews having been expelled
from England more than 300 years earlier. Anti-Semitic bigotry infests
Saudi Arabia, where Jews have not dwelt in at least five centuries;
its malignance is suggested by the government daily Al-Riyadh, which
published an essay claiming that Jews have a taste for "pastries mixed
with human blood."
Esther Confounding Haman (Engraving by Gustave Doré, 1875)
There was Jew-hatred before there was Christianity or Islam, before
Nazism or Communism, before Zionism or the Middle East conflict. This
week Jews celebrate the festival of Purim, gathering in synagogues to
read the biblical book of Esther. Set in ancient Persia, it tells of
Haman, a powerful royal adviser who is insulted when the Jewish sage
Mordechai refuses to bow down to him. Haman resolves to wipe out the
empire's Jews and makes the case for genocide in an appeal to the
king:
"There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among ... all the
provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from those of
other peoples, and the king's laws they do not keep, so it is of no
benefit for the king to tolerate them. If it please the king, let it
be written that they be destroyed." After winning royal assent, Haman
makes plans "to annihilate, to kill and destroy all the Jews, the
young and the elderly, children and women, in one day . . . and to
take their property for plunder."
What drives such bloodlust? Haman's indictment accuses the Jews of
lacking national loyalty, of insinuating themselves throughout the
empire, of flouting the king's law. But the Jews of Persia had done
nothing to justify Haman's murderous anti-Semitism -- just as Jews in
later ages did nothing that justified their persecution under the
Church or Islam, or their expulsion from so many lands in Europe and
the Middle East, or their repression at the hands of Russian czars and
Soviet commissars, or their slaughter by Nazi Germany. When the
president of Iran today calls for the extirpation of the Jewish state,
when a leader of Hamas vows to kill Jewish children around the world,
when firebombs are hurled at synagogues in London and Paris and
Chicago, it is not because Jews deserve to be victimized.
Some Jews are no saints, but the paranoid frenzy that is anti-Semitism
is not explained by what Jews do, but by what they are. The Jewish
people are the object of anti-Semitism, not its cause. That is why the
haters' rationales can be so wildly inconsistent and their agendas so
contradictory. What, after all, do those who vilify Jews as greedy
bankers have in common with those who revile them as seditious
Bolsheviks? Nothing, save an irrational obsession with Jews.
At one point in the book of Esther, Haman lets the mask slip. He
boasts to his friends and family of "the glory of his riches, and the
great number of his sons, and everything in which the king had
promoted him and elevated him." Still, he seethes with rage and
frustration: "Yet all this is worthless to me so long as I see
Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king's gate." That is the
unforgivable offense: "Mordechai the Jew" refuses to blend in, to
abandon his values, to be just like everyone else. He goes on sitting
there -- undigested, unassimilated, and for that reason unbearable.
Of course Haman had his ostensible reasons for targeting Jews. So did
Hitler and Arafat; so does Ahmadinejad. Sometimes the anti-Semite
focuses on the Jew's religion, sometimes on his laws and lifestyle,
sometimes on his national identity or his professional achievements.
Ultimately, however, it is the Jew's Jewishness, and the call to
higher standards that it represents, that the anti-Semite cannot
abide.
With all their flaws and failings, the Jewish people endure, their
role in history not yet finished. So the world's oldest hatred endures
too, as obsessive and indestructible -- and deadly -- as ever.
(Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.)