In a message dated 5/10/02 7:20:50 AM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
<< To make an equivalence between the racist filth against Black people that is pandemic in the United States and the occasional negative attitude toward Jews here is obscene. If there is a racist attitude toward Jews in the U.S. mainstream, it is a pro-Jewish racism, rather than an anti-Jewish one. >> 1) Aaron uses lots of mean words but - he doesn't read carefully. My comparison was not between US racism towards Black people and US racism towards jews. I was making a point about self-hating. It's quite clear in the text. Racism towards Jews in the US is not only different in quantity but in kind from racism towards Black people. Nobody thinks Black people run the world. part of the reason people vote for jews is they say, "I want to get MY Jew in there." Get it? If the attitudes towards Jews were simply one of exagerated respect, it would hardly be racism. I have encountered real respect for Jews in Serbia. It's quite startling and nothing like anything I have experienced in the US. The Serbs call Jews "Moses Serbs." What exists in the US is often rather different. I have heard, from US people that didn't know I was Jewish, that "I always try to get a Jew lawyer." In US idiom the use of "jew" as an adjective is very hateful, especially since it is also a verb as in "to Jew" someone. Even where there is no expression of hatred, as in the hateful "respect" of wanting "a ZJew lawyer because they're the best and most ruthless etc etc", what seems like adoration can be the flip side of fear and hatred. My mother made this point to me when she returned from my cousin's son's wedding to a white Southern Baptist woman in rural Alabama. Nobody in this little Church-dominated town had ever seen a Jew, and suddenly in came all these NY Jews. The bride's mother told my mother, "The Jew's are God's chosen people." I said to my mother, "Well, they didn't hate Jews." And she said, "No, that chosen people stuff is the flip side of something very negative." So I asked her what she said. "I told her, no, honey, the Blacks are GOd's chosen people and the Whites are God's chosen people and the Jews are God's chosen people and the Gentiles are God's chosen people," My mother said, "When I got to that point the woman burst into tears and hugged me." So there is more here than Aaron has perhaps thought about, looking, as he did at the very-often-repeated figures of Jewish members of Congress. There is also plain old loathing and hatred. As the new Empire attacks people, it organizes among them to blame it on the Jews. It is striking that Madelein Albright - a converted Catholic, so hardly "a Jew" - 'discovered' she was Jewish in the midst of attacking the Serbs. When I first started working among Serbian-Americans I was under constant and unbelievably ferocious and quite open attack for being Jewish. People argued that "the Jews" were responsible for everything from the Turkish genocide against Armenians to IMF policy. If Aaron thinks there isn't plenty of old fashioned hatred of Jews in the US he is mistaken. 2) Racism towards Jews in the world is intense and getting bigger, especially among Muslims where it is a basis of political organizing, openly taught in schools, and so on. In the past, fear and hatred of Jews has been a key support for the most savage Captialist poltiical forces, at least ever since the forgery, the Protocols of Zion. Why is this so hard to see? Yet the US and Western Europe "left" seems largely to ignore this. A very big mistake. Jared _______________________________________________ Leninist-International mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/listinfo/leninist-international
