Appeasing contempt of the Jews

Jewishworldreview ^ | 7-24-06 | Suzanne Fields

[SJackson]

They're caricatured with hooknoses and humpbacks, as sucking up a sow's excrement, murdering children for their blood in a recipe for matzoh. They're scorned for being weak and sneered at for being strong, for passivity and aggression, for segregating themselves and for assimilating to disappear among their secular neighbors. They're too studious or merely stupid, obsessed with cleanliness or living in filth, hated for their industry and reviled for their sloth. They're condemned as greedy capitalists and naive communists, as reactionaries and radicals, patriotic nationalists and secular internationalists, for being stateless and for building a thriving state.

Jews are persecuted when they don't convert and persecuted when they do. The converted are accused of hating themselves, and the unconverted are accused of hating everybody else. Seneca, the Roman tragedian, expressed annoyance at Roman Jews for their observance of a ritual Sabbath: "This meant that Jews were wasting one-seventh of their lives doing nothing."

Now the Jews of Israel, doing what they have to do to survive, are accused of "acting out of proportion" to the daily assault of Iranian rockets fired by Hezbollah to kill Jews in their homes. The Jews should show restraint. Restraint was what the Jews in Germany showed when the Nazis were organizing the Holocaust and the world wouldn't believe that what was happening was happening. Restraint is what the rest of the world showed when they dismissed a crazy Austrian paperhanger and his nutty book, "Mein Kampf." If the rest of the world was willing to ignore Hitler and his boasting and bloviating, why couldn't the Jews?

[SJackson]

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[tkathy]

Why doesn't Israel publicize the vile lies of the death cult???

[Alouette]

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[Zionist Conspirator]

For the record, not everyone stereotypes the Jews in the various ways Ms. Fields mentions. Believe it or not, there are actually people in this world for whom the Jews are forever frozen in amber as they appear in the Book of Joshua: rustic, Theocratic warrior shepherds who periodically suspend animal sacrifices to kick Canaanite butt. But ironically, it is the people who hold this Biblical stereotype who provoke the most hostility from Jewish liberals, who prefer to be viewed by the world as decadent, world-weary Weimar intellectuals. The traditional reasons given for rejecting Fundamentalist support (they're chr*stians, they want Jews to convert, they want to provoke the "second coming") are merely covers.

I will never understand why so many people seem to see only two alternatives for Jewish identity: either passive, inoffensive, forever-oppressed Tevyes or secular "new Jews." What about the "old Jews?"

[gogogodzilla]

Ping...pong.