(The blog has been neglected due to hand injuries, which have healed.)
This is not what you think. The anti-Semitic tripe isn’t a video, but comments on clip of a video I made, “Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers” (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o4QcgKUamBA).
At first I excised the offensive anti-Semitic comments, but then decided to leave them up, see what they attracted, like a shiny lure dragged through the water. What I found most interested, however, is that deranged people exist who actually believe the fantasies cooked up by monsters.
Anti-Semitism is as old a topic as the History of the Jews, so I have nothing more to add to it. Observers, however, point out that the new US Attorney General Mukasey is Jewish, only the second man of Jewish origin to hold that title. The first was Edward Hirsch Levi in 1975.
There are those who will see this appointment as just another example of how the Jewish people run America, rather than a rare example of how democracy allows the best and the brightest of which ever race, creed, or color, to rise to the top of their chosen fields.
The same anti-Semites could also point to the disproportionate number of Jewish men and women who received the Nobel Prize, Jewish names appear 127 times on the list, about 18 percent of the total. In economics, for which the Nobel has been awarded for only the last 31 years, 13 laureates are Jewish, more than 40 percent of the total, including Paul Samuelson, Herbert Simon and Milton Friedman.
This from a group that make up only 1/24th of 1 percent of the world's population. But what would effect would these facts have on the bigots? They’d probably claim the Jewish people have somehow gained control of the Nobel Committee and any evidence to the contrary would be like dropping gasoline in their fire of hatred; the facts disproving the bigots' beliefs would simply burn up in a microsecond.
What has become clear over the centuries is that hatred needs no rational cause to propel animosity into the stratosphere, a hint, a wrinkled nose, a deep-seated grudge, or in the case of the Nazis, drooling greed mixed with jealousy and centuries of Church inspired hatred, are enough to cause the mobs to run wild.
This hatred is not restricted to the Jewish people, much as the Jewish people would like to believe; soccer fans routinely run amok beating, sometimes to death, those fans from opposing teams. Riots in black ghettos result in dead white strangers who happen to be haplessly driving through the neighborhood.
During the Black (bubonic) Plague that swept Europe during the 14th Century, (one of the most deadly pandemics in human history, killing approximately 75 million people world-wide, nearly 50 million in Europe alone.) it was the Jewish people who were ultimately blamed for the cause of the Black Death.
Jews, it seemed, were hardly touched at first by the death and disease, spread by rats and feces and dirt. When those dying saw the healthy Jews, friendly neighborly relations turned into pogroms. What the bubonic plague didn’t do to the Jewish population their neighbors did.
All because the Jews kept clean, went to the “mikve” to bath, washed their hands, in accordance with Jewish ritual purity laws, before they ate. Cleanliness kept them alive. Fear of witchcraft by the ignorant host population, killed them.
What is it today, what plague sweeping the world, that necessitates such hatred? Rivalries clearly are part of the cause; the Arab population still smarts over the defeats suffered at the hands of the Israelis, (excluding the debacle in Lebanon II) outnumbered hundreds to one. Rivalries similar to fans rioting at soccer games exist between the Moslems and the Jews, as if fanatics like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad must prove that his God can defeat the God of the Jews, much as the Biblical struggle took place between Balam and Balak. Between Moses and the magicians of Egypt. In this rivalry it is pride that plants the seeds of death, and little else.
But perhaps these seeds are planted not by man, but by God, or the survival genes in man’s DNA. Perhaps like the forest fires which help scythe through the overgrowth allowing for a healthier green area, man is programmed to hate and kill just to keep the population numbers manageable.
One wonders when these barbaric impulses will be finally controlled. When pride takes a backseat to wisdom, when rivalries are contained by mutual benefits. Sports, after all, is just entertainment, no more important than a film, or a play, or an opera. Certainly not something to kill for. But go tell that to a beer-laden lout whose superego has been suppressed by a few gallons of brew allowing his monstrous id to come roaring out.
When these folks rant on the comments of the youtube video clip of Hitler's Jewish Soldiers they’re hiding in the deep shadows, under rocks, taking pot-shots that can’t be returned in kind. Get enough of them together and you have a mob, have one in shiny armor speaking dulcet lines and you have a leader of the mob. God protect us from those out to protect us.
And, these films about how some Germans weren’t actually the bad guys, but just men trying to stay alive, even if they were doing good deeds with an eye to the Nuremberg trials (an explanation of why Admiral Canaris, of the German Abwer, helped save Jews during the Holocaust), have raised the call of ‘revisionist’ against filmmakers. Excusing the Germans for their crimes by making them into men who weren’t blood-thirsty; showing the gray in the enemy, not just the black against the pure white of the Allies.
Problem is, nothing is as clear-cut as it seems. There are always footnotes to history that turn black to gray, or white to black. Heroes become villains when new evidence appears, just as villains can be heroes under different circumstances.
Even History doesn’t tell the whole story, since no one has the whole story, of just about anything. So let’s hope those fanatics keep their hatred in check until they get their facts straight. Only then is there hope that the world as we know it will still be around, fall-out free, in the coming decades.
