Posted on 09/02/2006 5:13:18 AM PDT by Clive
Ireceive anonymous letters once in a while. In times past, some were filled with anti-Semitic venom. They'd arrive at the newspaper, often in messily addressed envelopes, usually illiterate, always unsigned. A few, written in the sloping hand of the demented, muttered about sinister Jewish conspiracies; others offered malicious and unbelievably ignorant interpretations of history.
Those were the good old days.
These days I still receive letters at the newspaper filled with anti-Semitic venom. Their authors still mutter about Jewish conspiracies or push revisionist history. However, they're no longer anonymous.
Until recently, anti-Semitism was the hate that dared not speak its name. In the last few years it has begun to emerge from the closet. Increasingly, venomous anti-Semites see nothing wrong with sealing their malice and ignorance with their full name and return address.
As hate goes mainstream, it turns into pride. It begins to brush its clothes and clean its fingernails. The spruced-up envelopes, improved spelling and, most of all, the signatures and return addresses adorning my recent hate correspondence indicate that anti-Semitism is becoming socially respectable.
That's bad news. While anti-Semitic outbursts come in unsigned letters, written in the sloping scrawl of the demented, there's room for optimism. Anti-Semitism is just a backwater. It's becoming extinct. But when the same letters start arriving in neatly typed envelopes, flawlessly spelled, with return addresses carefully affixed, watch out.
Do anti-Semites spell better because they're becoming more literate? That would be bad enough, but reality is worse: It seems more and more literate people are becoming anti-Semites. Do anti-Semites sign their names because they're becoming more daring? That, too, would be bad enough, but reality is worse: It no longer requires daring to be anti-Semitic.
During the 1960s and 1970s anti-Semitism was largely the fallacy of the uneducated. The fallacy of the educated was anti-capitalism. Illiterate people of irrational impulses tended to be neo-Nazis; literate people of irrational impulses tended to be New Lefties. Why are educated people becoming anti-Semitic in greater numbers? Because our universities, those ever-reliable hotbeds of error and terror, have replaced anti-capitalism with anti-colonialism (read anti-anti-Islamism) as their favourite fad.
I'm not sure what mankind would have lost if we had done away with universities in, say, 1900. We would have missed a great deal, no doubt, in chemistry and medicine, but we would also have been spared nuclear weapons. We would almost certainly have been spared social Darwinism, fascism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Maoism, nationalism, socialism, National-Socialism, Khomeinism, extreme irredentism and separatism, militant feminism, eco-fascism and political correctness. With no Sorbonnes, Heidelbergs, Berkeleys, Cambridges, U of Ts or American Universities of Beirut to spread and nurture them, demented ideologies couldn't have spawned the terrorists and suicide bombers of ETA, PETA, the IRA, the Tamil Tigers, Hamas, Hezbollah, Abu Nidal, Osama bin Laden -- to mention just a few. On balance, we might have been better off.
No wonder God had this thing about the tree of knowledge.
Would we have missed out on such good things as air travel? Not necessarily. Flight was invented by two bicycle mechanics who never went near a university. It was the Wright brothers who figured out how to fly. What took some university-educated political activists to figure out was how to blow us out of the sky -- and for what sorry reasons.
While on the subject of flight, the principle of "whatever can go wrong, will" was tragically demonstrated this week by a fluke accident.
When I was a student pilot, among the numerous procedures and "drills" my instructor, Dave Frid insisted on was a glance at three items before starting the takeoff roll: the numbers painted on the asphalt or affixed to a sign next to the runway; the directional gyro on the instrument panel and the magnetic compass.
"What for?"
"To make sure you're on the runway you think you're on."
"Oh, really!" I remember being amazed at the rigidity of aeronautical drills. "Who wouldn't know what runway he was on?"
Dave was amused. "On any given day?" he asked. "Let's see: It might be you, me, the guy lined up behind us ... " For the crew of Comair Flight 5191, the given day turned out to be last Sunday. Had the pilots' scan included the heading indicator or the magnetic compass as they pushed the throttles forward, the number "260" might have alerted them that they were departing Runway 26 instead of Runway 22 at Lexington's Blue Grass Airport. Both runways were the same width, but at 3,501 feet, Runway 26 was about 1,200 feet shorter than the CRJ-100 needed to become airborne. But Captain Jeffrey Clay and First Officer James Polehinke either didn't look at the heading last Sunday or the number didn't register in their minds. Clay taxied into position, then turned the controls over to Polehinke. Everything was routine. As the plane hurtled through the dim Kentucky dawn toward a small copse of woods at the end of the runway, 49 of the 50 souls on board had about 12 more seconds to live.
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While I think this is a silly statement, I nevertheless am glad that the author has written publicly about the increasing evidence that anti-semitism is, indeed, out of the closet.
It would be best to publish these letters with the names attached!
Yeah. Anti-semitism is "in" at major liberal colleges and universities. It's now cool to hate the Jews because Israel is just like the NAZIs during the 30s. I'm serious, go to Madison, Ann Arbor, Bezerkley, Columbia, New Haven, Cambridge; this has become standard liberal fare.
We have a huge problem.
Please send me a FReepmail to get on or off this Canada ping list.
--I think this is a silly statement
Definitely, everything was in place before 1900 and Einstein was a patent clerk. Los Alamos would have been populated with engineers and physicists who weren't on loan from University but from corporations.
A "little" wandering? Antisemitism, Universities and then runway headings. That's more than a "little." But it was a good read with some fair linkages between the sections. He's certainly spot-on regarding the new respectability of antiSemitism.
Yes, we wouldn't have had the atomic bomb.
Hitler would have, of course, but we would have been spared it?
This man is an ass.
What irony that he publishes this on the day Japan surrendered in 1945, 61 years ago.
If he had is way, Japan would have been invaded by us, assuming Hitler hadn't dropped their atomic bomb on us.
The first part of the editorial about how anti-Semites are coming out of the woodwork and becoming "respectable" was spot-on and rather disturbing. I liked his characterization of neo-Nazi kooks and commie kooks. The article should have ended there. But then the next part, speculating about a world without universities, was stupid. I don't see that the last part of the article had to do with anything. It seemed to be just an opportunity for the author to brag that he is a pilot.
Anti-semitism seems to go hand in hand with contemporary liberalism. The fact that Israel is a friend of the US is no doubt a contributing factor.
The same will happen again, as the liberals are forced by the inhumane, anti-semitic, activities of Clerical fascism, to admit their wrong views and actions before disappearing into obscurity.
And Anne Coulter has it right in dealing with Liberals, as history will undoubtedly prove, before our tangle with Islamofascism is finished.
Pi$$ on all liberals , for they are simply ignorant and on the wrong side of history. Those who wish to lick the hands of the enemy, do so as fools doomed to infamy. Lieberman is not one of them. Neither is Ed Koch.
Well, it certainly wasn't me. I don't hate anybody. Much.
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