Posted on 12/18/2003 12:51:56 PM PST by missyme
>?<
"I volunteer to work on Ramadan and Yom Kippur. It's no big deal. I don't celebrate those, and a day at work is NORMAL behavior, not exceptional."
You sound like the perfect compliment to the Jews I worked with & a decent person.
Those days you volunteered to work may have not meant much to you, just another work day, but not to the Muslim & Jew.
As I said you sound like a decent person to which I would add, considerate.
"I agree with your sentiment. That's not all that compelling evidence, however."
Well just for the record I never intended to offer my experience as any kind of "evidence," just my personal experience; and, while I'm relating my experience let me tell you of something else I learned about the Jews I worked with when Christmas time came around.
These people were the most generous people I've ever known in my entire life, when, it came to the subject of giving gifts & mind you the Jews where I worked outnumbered us 8 to 1, too.
For a peoples who don't celebrate their holiday(s) in such a fashion, per se, I'd always found that experience -- about the Jews I worked with -- to be a glaring contridiction of the horrible stereotypes Jews have had to endure.
...fact.
It must also be recognized that the Jews who were involved with the Left had rejected traditional rabbinic Judaism and were, at most, "bagels and lox" cultural Jews. Heresy and apostasy in Judaism reared its head in the 18th Century with the "Frankist" movement and with the effects of the Enlightenment in Europe. By and large, observant, orthodox Jews have opposed Marxism. However, they represent a minority in the Jewish community, especially upon the emigration from the Russian Pale to America.
The importance of Eastern European Jews in the Communist Party and various Marxist and socialist groups is evident in a review of their rosters. The relatively few non-Jews in these circles, such as Arlo Guthrie or Whittaker Chambers, often married Jewish women. However, the overtly Communist networks alone, while effective in the labor unions and pro-Soviet espionage, were not sufficient to overturn the foundations of American culture. In this regard, Michael Savage (himself of Jewish background) is wrong.
In the 1930s, a number of professors of German Jewish background entered this country as refugees from the Third Reich. Among them were Herbert Marcuse, Theodor Adorno, and Hannah Arendt. They were Marxists who went beyond the economic and class warfare bases of Marxism-Leninism. They perceived the underlying social structures such as churches and families as paternalistic institutions that supported ruling class oppression. Not only that, but racism was viewed as a tool of impression that needed to be overturned. The pioneer in this area was Antonio Gramsci, a non-Jewish Italian Marxist who died in Mussolini's prisons. This line of thought became known as Gramscian Marxism. The summary of the positions held by Gramsci, Marcuse, et. al., was that the overthrow of paternalistic, sexist, and racist institutions and ideals was necessary for the revolution.
The ideas of these professors entered an American intellectual environment where the effects of the philosophies of John Dewey, Charles Darwin (or rather his more enthusiastic acolytes), Sigmund Freud, and Carl Jung had largely expunged the traditional Western and Christian worldview from the ivory towers of academia. For those who think the ivory towers are irrelevant, consider that by the mid-1900s, most of our national leaders, such as Franklin Roosevelt, Dean Acheson, and John Foster Dulles, came from Ivy League colleges where pragmatism and positivism were the prevalent moral philosophies, evolutionism was the prevalent view of cosmology, and mental illness, and not the sinful nature of men, was the reason for anti-social behavior. Deprived of the Biblical and natural law bases for individual liberty and social order, there were no reasonable grounds to oppose the agendas of Marcuse and others, which became known as the New Left in the 1960s.
The leadership of the New Left and the antiwar movement was made of men predominately of Jewish background. For example, six of the "Chicago Seven" were of Jewish ancestry. Most of these leaders were "Red diaper babies," with parents who were usually Communists or socialists of Eastern European Jewish heritage. However, one must ask if the likes of Jerry Rubin or Abby Hoffman would have had the mass support they received without the effects of liberalism undermining the viewpoints of college students. Additionally, had the nation's leaders seriously considered the dangers of fighting a prolonged "no-win war" in Vietnam with draftees, they would have either won the war or withdrawn.
The American Left is not a Jewish plot against the Christian religion and Western tradition, even though many of the most prominent spokesmen for these positions are two to three generations away from the Russian Pale. These ethnic, irreligious Jews are reprehensible, but no more so than the old Yankee families like the Tafts, the Welds, the Whitmans, etc., the Irish Catholic Kennedys, and the black elite that currently root for special rights for their co-racialists under the name, "affirmative action." If America ceases to be a free nation, there will be plenty of people to blame, not just the apostate, leftist ethnic Jews.
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