AntiSemitism

I grew up in the afterglow of the revulsion to Hitler’s destruction of European Jewry.  That a civilized country could be manipulated into such a program, however achieved was a very unwelcome revelation.  It made no country exempt.  It also undermined ethnic and racist based policies in the developed world by starkly revealing their fraud.  A natural result for my generation was the civil rights movement throughout the west that largely succeeded.

This does not mean that one day that paradise arrived but that the promise of freedom itself became universal.  Most of that freedom merely says that you can expect to be judged solely on your own merits.

Suddenly it has become acceptable to again spin the same anti Semitic doggerel that infested human discourse prior to the defeat of Hitler.  Yes it is been actively promulgated by the Islamic types, but it is the appearance of these threads among the leftist dreamers in the West that I find disconcerting.  I had thought we had won the battle of education.  That is obviously not quite true.

And lest it becomes an issue, my own ancestry is best described as Saxon Celtic with no Jewish ancestors.  I suspect though that most European Jews were converts of Saxon ancestry, something I am certain most Arabs would support (which is another reason they feel somewhat put upon).  None of this really matters.

Judaism has been a resilient faith sustaining itself as a healthy minority community just about everywhere.  This has provided a common language of ethnic exclusion that has pervaded Europe and the Islamic worlds and now appears to arise even in places were this is not true. 

It is far easier to turn ethnic hatreds against a handful of Jews than say against a local minority supported by a strong next door nation state.  In a way, Judaism has become the universal minority.  What is new recently is that any numbers of bad actors are now suddenly able to play the anti Semitic card again.

The logic of hatred knows no limits.  Anti Semitism is today the canary in the mine.  We must all do everything necessary to stamp it out and also wonder how these ideas keep coming up, regardless how discredited.