The Watcher’s Council forum question this week was on anti-semitism. I didn’t participate this week but if you’re interested in the remarks of my fellow Council members the forum is here.
My own thoughts on this subject are, well, complicated. I think that in the Western world anti-semitism is a complicated stew of force of habit, prejudice, and anti-Zionism.
Also, political orientations don’t travel well. Neither “conservative”, “liberal”, “right-wing”, nor “left-wing” mean the same thing everywhere but, particularly in the United States, partisans of one stripe or another incorrectly feel sense of solidarity based on the labels.
Over the period of the last couple of decades in Israel Likud, the “right-wing” party, has gained ascendancy over Labor, the “left-wing” party. Despite their having practically nothing in common American conservatives are siding with Likud.
I have the apparently benighted view that Israel’s problems are Israel’s to solve and as an American I should butt out of Israeli politics.
BTW, lest we feel too complacent, in the United States and based on the FBI’s statistics the number of hate crimes perpetrated against Jews outnumber hate crimes perpetrated against Muslims by 10 to 1, despite the number of Jews and Muslims in the U. S. being roughly comparable. Somehow this is interpreted as Islamophobia being a major problem while anti-semitism is barely a thing at all. IMO it’s almost exactly the opposite.
Grew up in a Bircher household (Dad knew Welch). Anti-semitism was the norm. Was well accepted in Southern Indiana. Was a bit of a mystery to me as a kid since (we were also extreme evangelical Christians) Jesus was a Jew, but go figure. AFAICT, that degree of anti-semitism has mostly, but not entirely, gone away. It certainly persists in stereotypes and occasional outright hatred, but I don’t see it or hear it like I did in the past. Of course. the evangelicals in the family have now decided that the Jesus killers need to be supported to help bring about the end times, so I am not sure that necessarily means they actually like Jews.
On the other side of the issue, it does seem hard sometimes to criticize Israel w/o being accused of anti-semitism.
Steve
Steve:
As a nominal Jew I agree, it has gotten a lot better. Right wing anti-semitism isn’t gone, and it’s still at the heart of evangelicals’ mad embrace of all things Israel. And of course Donald Trump endorsers like the KKK still hate Jews good and hard.
But nowadays anti-semitism has also taken root on the Left, on campuses. I suspect some of this trickles down from Russian communism (and that in turn came straight from the Czar’s secret police and the Orthodox church.) Some of it is just the natural mistrust intellectual totalitarians have for those outsiders, those gimlet-eyed skeptics, those Jews.
I think a lot would be solved if we found a way to teach history – actual history – to kids in school. They are astoundingly ignorant, like most Americans when it comes to history, and when you marry that core ignorance to the confused vacuity of the campus left and the energetic sophomorism of students whose own life experience extends back no further than the birth of Twitter, you get wild-eyed nonsense, including anti-semitism and even vegetarianism.
There’s a tendency of liberals to assume that everyone on our side is smarter the everyone on the other side. In fact we are clearly smarter on average, but we also have our idiots, many of them teaching college. I’ve been arguing PC with lefties lately and their ignorance, their inability to form a rational argument easily equals the average Fox News contributor. We’ve got our own bubble babies on the left.
Most of my dad’s college chums were Jewish and about half of our neighbors (in the neighborhood in which I spent my early teen years, not the old neighborhood) were Jewish. The idea of hating somebody because he or she was Jewish never crossed my mind.
However, there was a strong anti-semitic streak in Catholicism in my early years. That was strongly condemned in Vatican II (early 60s).
The inability to form or follow logical reasoning is characteristic of the cognitive changes I’ve written about before in my posts on visualcy. If, as I suspect, we become an increasingly visual society, expect more. There will be basic changes in cognition, changes I think are inconsistent with liberal democratic republican government.
Dave:
I keep that theory of yours very much in mind. It’s hovering there, awaiting additional evidence. I strongly suspect you’re on to something. Once I’m convinced I will, of course, appropriate it and pretend to have come up with it on my own.
But I would also note that our test-driven schools have no use for forming or following logical reasoning. Data entered, data regurgitated. It’s one of the flaws that Common Core is meant to address, though I remain agnostic on CC – largely because I cannot translate impenetrable education jargon into English.
I wish there was a metric to compare reasoning skills 30 years ago to the present day. I feel – but have no data to prove – that there is less capacity to form rational arguments. I know that 30 years ago I was often frustrated talking politics with people because they had too little knowledge of the subject, but now the frustration is more often with people who speak in non sequiturs – non-sequiturs they are absolutely convinced make sense. You get these 2 + 2 = 9 conversations. Or people who think that correctly regurgitating a slogan is a conversation topper that absolutely closes the subject. Or people who own exactly one fact which they wave in the air like it’s the only fact — and they generally have the fact wrong, anyway.
It’s common to both parties, sadly, which is why I gave up on OTB finally. I’m used to stupid conservatives, it bothers me more dealing with stupid liberals. (In my professional life they’re the ones I argue with.) Every discussion I get into I feel like I first need to teach some basic history and some logic as a preface. It is honestly depressing to me when I’m in a room (virtual or real) full of relatively well-educated people and the high school drop-out (that’d be me) is the best-informed. I learn by testing my ideas against competent opponents. My self-imposed reality test is trotting some notion out in public and seeing what people have to say in response. That is becoming less and less useful. I have on occasion gotten so frustrated I just give them an argument to make. It’s like playing chess against yourself, not very satisfying.
It is especially strange given the fact that in any online conversation the internet is right there. Right there! Answers to just about any question of fact, answers that would obviate the need for at least half of debates, and yet no one opens a new tab and takes 30 seconds to search.
I’ll tell you one thing: if I were staging a formal debate within my admittedly limited circle of friends and acquaintances the only two people who’d make me feel I would really need to bring my ‘A’ game are my kid and you.
I would so end this with an emoticon if I knew how to do that.
Saw a news article recently, where some young white men, ( 4 or5)
advertised in advance they were holding a KKK rally at a public place. When they got out of their vehicle, they were immediately beset upon and beaten by African American males. My first thought was that Blacks should be better than to be baited like that, but then I remembered what the Klan had done, hangings, burnings, castration, and I realized that any damn fool who dresses Klan deserves to get his ass beat.
What got to do with Jews? Jews are so much more successful financially in so many areas of life, its easy to pass on the evil of the Holocaust. Maybe I’m just an ignorant farm boy, but I cannot see Jews in America being mistreated today. Although I can see why they can never forget that.
According to the FBI’s statistics in 2014, the latest year for which statistics have been released, there were almost 7,000 hate crimes reported. Of those about half were perpetrated against blacks. Almost 60% of the hate crimes perpetrated on the basis of religion were perpetrated against Jews–about 600 incidents.
The number of hate crimes on the basis of religion perpetrated against Muslims in 2014 was about 100. In a country of 310 million people you’re bound to get some nutcases.
You can feel free to school me on this Dave, but how the hell in my daily life, do I even know who is or is not a Jew? With Blacks, that’s easy.
But to commit a hate crime against a Jew, I suppose you must feel strongly enough to figure that out. Maybe that’s more dangerous, if real, because the perps are committed enough to ferret out someone’s religion. I don’t know, follow them to the synagogue?
Maybe just go after people with “gold” “silver” or “stein” in their name.