Replies

"Its proper when discussing someone to give them a heads up so that, if they want to respond, they may."

He can respond. The discussion was out in the open, but it was a response to someone else. Iconoclast is his/her own person, and should not feel slighted. If he was insulted by not being CC'ed, mea culpa.

"You should wait to hear from a Jewish person who feels hated by iconoclast for their religion before you label him an Anti-Semite."

Nope. If someone aligns themselves with someone who has made blatant antisemitic comments and agrees strongly with those comments, there's an incredibly short path to the label. Why should I have to wait for a Jew to respond before I criticize wrong thinking? That's cowardly.

You may have missed it in the post that you responded to, but we missed the chance to defend the Jews when this sort of nonsense started before, and the Reich moved quickly to capitalize on that lack of outside condemnation. It would be a worse tragedy if such horrors visited them again, considering we SHOULD recognize the pattern.

As for hearing from a Jewish person, I have family members who ARE indeed Jewish, one of which was in the US Army during the war. That fine gentleman was a blond-haired, blue-eyed Jew of all things, and lied about his name when he was captured. This saved him for a while, though they did eventually figure out his racial background, and trucked him off to a camp. He and his lifelong best freind were the only survivors of the breakout in which many of his fellow campmates were gunned down. I know a bit about this subject.

"And, any thoughts on how someone who would qualify as having an America-First philosophy could express themselves w/o running into knee-jerk accusations from defenders of the status-quo?"

Simply put, don't fall for leftist and/or isolationist dogma and actually try to understand that, in fact, there is no such thing as isolationism. I'm America First as far as I am concerned, and that includes going abroad to stop our avowed enemies from continuing to plot against us and our allies.

As far as defenders of the status quo, I assume you mean agreeing with our current course of action is considered such. If so, your view of status quo is very small. Status Quo is the nonsense of letting Saddam pop off weapons at our jets during the laughable ceasefire period. Status quo is also letting the terror states continue to go the way they have been going regarding us - now that we have brought the theatre of war to THEIR borders, via our Iraq troop presence, we can influence or directly spur change to that "status quo".

Actually, that was a similar situation in my family. My paternal grandmother's family could have passed for Aryans (blond, blue eyed and the men are quite tall). Which shielded them from quite a bit of anti-semitism.

The quote earlier by James Lileks (But they're not anti-Semites. Heavens, nay. Don't you dare question their philosemitism! No, they looked at the entire world, including countries that lop off your skull if you convert to Presbyterianism, and what did they choose as the object of their ire? A country the size of a potato chip hanging on the edge of a region noted for despotism and barbarity. By some peculiar coincidence, it happens to be full of Jews.) explains why overwhelming hatred and resentment of Israel often overlaps with anti-semitism.

At the same time, cry 'anti-semitism' is a little bit like crying wolf. Which is not to say that wolves don't exist, or aren't a serious problem. But if you see every shadow of a wolf, sooner or later most people will stop believing you. And as a Jew, that's a big concern for me. Cindy Sheehan's views are certainly disturbing, even offensive, to me.

I would like to know why Iconoclast aligns himself with Cindy Sheehan. But I'm going to hold off on calling him an anti-semite for the time being.