Where do you get your expertise to speak authoritatively on "the black street?"
Posted on 09/30/2003 6:00:08 AM PDT by SJackson
I've never felt more loved and respected than during my recent trip to Israel, where I was struck by the sense of empathy that most Israelis feel for American Blacks, whom they consider to have endured similar trials of bondage and exclusion.
On the shared history of exclusion between Blacks and Jews, Rev. Martin Luther King observed: "My people were brought to America in chains. Your [Jewish] people were driven here to escape the chains fashioned for them in Europe. Our unity is born of our common struggle for centuries, not only to rid ourselves of bondage, but to make oppression of any people by others impossibility." This comradeship of hope and bondage united Blacks and Jews during the early days of the civil rights movement, when both groups worked together to secure those basic rights we all associate with happiness.
Four decades later, that bond is cracking apart. In 1991, the growing divide between Blacks and Jews exploded in violence, when a mob of Black teenagers rampaged through the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn shouting "Jew, Jew." The mob fatally stabbed a young Holocaust scholar and injured several others. The violence continued unchecked for three days.
More often than not, the divide is more subtle. It is twisted inward and was left quietly lurking beneath the surface of social etiquette.
In some ways this is worse. When racism is loud and violent, you can see it and raise it to consciousness for examination. The divide between Blacks and Jews has become far more subtle, and therefore enduring. It smiles at us from the political pulpit. It whispers in low, conspiratorial tones at dinner parties. It shakes our hand in the office.
IT WAS there in the 1980s, when Jewish leaders tried to explain away Israel's relations with South Africa. It was there when Black community leaders recently blamed the defeat of Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney (D-GA) on Jewish special interests.
"Jews have bought everybody," snorted McKinney's father on election night. In 1996 her father, who is also a state legislator, called her opponent a "racist Jew."
McKinney had spoken out in support of a Palestinian state, had insinuated President George Bush had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks, and repeatedly met with Black radicals of the Reverend Farrakhan variety, who regularly accuse Jewish interests of conspiring to repress American-Blacks.
The divide was there when, at varying times, Jesse Jackson and Rev. Al Sharpton solidified their power by focusing the fears of their followers on some vague threat defined only as "Jewish special interests."
It was there when Minister Farrakhan derided Judaism as a "dirty religion" and proclaimed Hitler "a very great man." It is there when Jewish leaders accuse American Blacks of shutting them out of the civil rights movement.
At bottom, our so-called civil rights leaders are able to exploit the divide between Blacks and Jews in the US because of the lack of empathy that continues to exist here at home between these two groups. Despite the arc of the Black American experience from slavery to segregation to integration most Black Americans remain unable to understand what it means to be Jewish; just as much of Jewish America remains unable to comprehend the mysteries of skin pigmentation.
A sizable number of our community leaders our so-called torchbearers in the dark make a living by exploiting this lack of empathy. They keep the descendants of slavery and the Holocaust fighting over Black rights and Jewish rights.
Meanwhile, the far more common cause of human rights falls by the wayside.
The writer is a syndicated columnist and talk show host in America.
I beg to differ. Black racism in this country IS loud and violent, but it can't be corrected, because the mainstream media, politicans, academia and the schools give it cover, and refuse to address it. The courts too, lest I forget.
As for the problems between Jews and blacks, the black leadership simply reflects the anti-Semitism of the black street. American blacks are demographically, the most anti-Semitic ethnic or racial group in America.
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Where do you get your expertise to speak authoritatively on "the black street?"
But in introducing it into Christian society, it was easier to graft it on rather than try and replace. Now, because of this, the enemy of Marxism is always that which stubbornly resists either replacement or grafting. That would be Zionist Judaism. Thus the Marxist Christians, being African-Americans and many Catholics, the JINO Marxists, and the Marxist Muslims (yes, I know in some places and times they've been deadly enemies. But they're bedfellows now, aren't they?) are pitted against that one stubborn group who will not succumb, backed by the stubborn WASPS who have crafted a new, uniquely American Christianity that revers individualism too much to fall into collectivism.
Fight, Israel. Fight.
Wish y'all'd hurry up.
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