A better understanding of Antisemitism

Foofie's lack of a sense of humour isn't the problem, it's the fact that he thinks he's hilarious that bothers me. Not as bad as Buzz though.

http://able2know.org/topic/184162-11#post-4907021

and to think that was just yesterday morning within this thread; yet, today it reappears. with more useless nonsense.


If I wasn't so blessed as to be on his ignore list now (which he has now sent 4 messages to inform me of, as well as dropping not so subtle hints within threads....he even dragged up 2 old threads to do so), I'd be preparing for it to again say I'm chasing it around. I mean why would I ever post in a thread where it has posted unless I was stalking? (seriously, it has a very high opinion of itself, thinking people would stalk it )

Hopefully its imaginary children (sometimes there are 2, in earlier posts there were 3) can offer it solace.

Thank you for giving me a better understanding of what is taking place.

In my own opinion, my sense of humor is quite British. And, I do not think I am hilarious, except to those people that are on my wavelength. Yes, there are people on my wavelength. You will find them on the right side of the bellcurve. And, now for something completely different!

Speaking as an Englishman, I'm sorry, but you're not remotely British.

I dress British, but think Yiddish. That's an old joke for how to get ahead in business.

I do not think many Brits have a sense of humor, unless they are interacting with other Brits, since they do not, in my opinion, want to admit the sun set on their Empire awhile ago, and the inheritors of their Empire are those oftentimes uncouth Americans.

But, whatever you can find in Britain, I can find two of in the States, and we are more egalitarian, in my opinion. We don't call Pakistanis "Pakis." They are Pakistanis, and when they are Americans, they are Americans. We are inclusive, not exclusive. And, the fact that I am going off on a tangent is humorous, which I wonder if you are getting?

It's a little after 5 p.m. GMT. Time for din-din.

The reason didge said you were humourless, was because his jokes shot right over your head. I do get your jokes, and I'm sorry but they're not funny. Nothing to do with being British or American at all. They're just not funny.

Why don't you swap asnecdotes with Buzz, that way you'll stop two other people being miserable.

If I can't be funny, can I be nostalgic? Better yet, I'll be boring. Boorish behavior should have a place on this forum, in my opinion.

Do you know if you had any family members involved in Jewish-American organized crime?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish-American_organized_crime

Do you know what is appropriate to ask on a forum? The reason the question could be considered offensive is because if a person thinks of him/herself as an upstanding person, coming from an upstanding family, your question infers that might not be the case. Get it?

I think you are a great person and I did not mean to be offensive. If I had a family member like that I would tell you. Yes my real father was into all kinds of activities and has been in and out of prison all of my life.
He is in prison today and may die in there.
I am not proud to admit it but reality is what it is.

I Like to consider myself to be an upstanding person coming from an upstanding family that has a member who was not as logical nor as moral as most of us would expect from a person.
I myself see everyone to be very immoral on some issue but I can not get people to see theses issues any more than I could get a pedophile to stop wanting to be a pedophile. To them it is normal but with the case of immorality, I think that much of it is environmental.

You are talking about an entirely different set of events than I am. I thought it was pretty clear that I am not referring to the Pre-Roman Diaspora as I referenced the loss of their homeland as a key turning point, which did not happen in the Pre-Roman Diaspora that you are referring to.

The events that I am referring to, in which Jews were scattered throughout the Roman empire and persecuted by the Romans did share a temporal relationship with the rise of Christianity which did go on to pick up the persecution of the Jews where the Romans left off.



I am not even of the opinion that the diaspora has ended, so I am not sure where this is coming from.



Nowhere did I say otherwise and I'm quite clearly talking about a particular part of it.



Only if you move the goalposts and take a reference to the Roman dispersion of Jews and move it back to the Pre-Roman Diaspora in order to call it temporally challenged. I'd argue that the whole moving it centuries back is itself a big reason why this nit is pickable.

Nonsense. Christianity was adopted as the state religion after the reign of Julian, who died in 363 CE. The last Roman expulsion of the Jews from Palestine was after the second Jewish war, which ended in 135 CE--it is estimated that a half million or more Jews were killed in that war. I don't think that more than 200 years qualifies as "shortly after." In fact, in the second and third centuries, the persecution of christians began, in part because they were seen as a Judaic sect. The persecution of christians only ended with the promulgation of the Edict of Milan by Constantine and Licinius in 313 CE. The coincidence of any set of events does not constitute evidence of cause and effect. Certainly christians persecuted Jews. But claiming that they picked up where the Romans left off is not just silly, it is not supported by the historical evidence.

The persecution of Jews by the Romans was certainly not limited to the wars and it was not a sudden singular event. They subsequently codified persecution of Jews, taxing their temples and treating them as a sub-class and this was ongoing till the end of the Roman empire.

Again, only by moving your goalposts do you get to pick this nit.



Says Setanta. But the truth is that there are a variety of clear ways that the Christian empire continued the persecution of the Jews from the Roman empire. Here is an excerpt from the Wikipedia article on the Jewish diaspora.

I haven't "moved goalposts," if anyone here is doing that, it's you. You keep redefining your terms, so as to support your thesis. The most obvious is your silly claim that you don't think that the disaspora of the Jews has ended. That's certainly a conventient way to authorize any statements you make on the subject.

Since you want to use Wikipedia as a source, this is from their definition of Diaspora:



They go on to discuss the expansion of the term. Seen as a discrete historical event, the diaspora of the Jews ends with Hadrian's explusion in the first half of the second century, a time when christians were also being persecuted. Your apparent view of how history can be enlisted to support your argument reminds me of the Marxist dialectical historical method.

By the way, note that Wikipedia's definition of the diaspora begins with the return from the Babylonian captivity. It seems that your preferred source does not in fact support your claims.

It always amazes me how the non-Jewish world can define the Jewish world, as they might see it. In this case, Jews think of themselves TODAY as living in the Diaspora, as long as they are not living in the State of Israel, whether or not it is a Zionist State. Meaning, if a Jew lived in Jerusalem, under the Ottoman Empire, he was not living in the Diaspora. However, Jews today consider themselves (which should be the criteria, since Gentiles do not have hegemony over Jewish history) living in the Diaspora, if they live in the USA, France, Britain, Russia, etc., for example. When any Jew decides to immigrate to Israel, and take citizenship, based on the Israeli law of return, that Jew is considered returning from the Diaspora, and making Aliyah (which I think has a meaning akin to stepping up in one's spiritual status).

Mr. Gentel seems to understand Jews from their perspective, rather than the Gentile written history, that might be based on wanting to define Jews as Christians see them (aka, subordinate).

Does anyone have evidence or written history about Jews being slaves at one time like the bible suggest?

Then again, maybe not.

Gunter Grass's Tin Ear

'The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz,' runs a mind-bending quip.."

By JOSEF JOFFE

Nobel laureate Günter Grass, 84, is a poster boy of "re-education," America's therapy for post-Hitler Germany. Or he was. In 2006, this chest-thumping anti-Nazi laid bare his long-concealed career in the Waffen-SS. Had Mr. Grass sprung the shocker a decade earlier, his 1959 novel "The Tin Drum" would still shine forth as a masterwork, but without the Nobel Prize, which he was awarded in 1999.

Just before Easter this year, Mr. Grass launched a bigger bombshell, a poem titled "What Must Be Said." The gist: For too long, the poet had been cowed into silence by what he calls the "verdict of anti-Semitism."

But in his dotage, he finally dared speak out against the diktat because Israel was readying a "first strike" that would "extinguish" Iran and the "fragile world peace." Germany, though, would "share the guilt" because it was arming Israel with nuclear-capable U-boats.

Thus did the bard go into battle against "hypocrisy" and "lies." Never mind that Iran is routinely threatening Israel with eradication. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is but a "loudmouth," a lamb in wolf's clothing.

Was this anti-Semitism, as Emmanuel Nahshon, Israel's envoy to Germany, intimated? The poem, Mr. Nahshon explained, was in the "European tradition" of sticking the Jews with blood libel just before Passover. Once it was matzo made with the blood of Christian children. Today, the "Iranian people" were "slated for extinction" by Israel.

After the Holocaust, traditional anti-Semitism is out. Jews are no longer fingered as Christ killers, usurers and despoilers of the Aryan race.

But Mr. Grass's indictment is rife with post-Shoah analogues. Carefully coded, it pins on the Jewish state what used to be applied to Jews throughout the ages.

We are not talking here about criticizing Israeli policy, a legitimate pursuit. Mr. Grass now charges Israel with concocting the greatest possible evil: a nuclear Holocaust to be visited on Iran and the entire world.

Even as Mr. Grass touts his "attachment" to Israel, recalling the my-best-friends-are-Jewish refrain, he casts the tiny country as an überpower. Apart from threatening the globe, Mr. Grass imagines, Israel enslaves 80 million Germans by wielding the Shoah to gouge U-boats out of Berlin and to suppress "what must be said."

This is mendacity to the max, for critical coverage of Israel is a staple of the German media. But the falsehood is a necessary part of the indictment. If we could only speak out, insinuates Mr. Grass, we will save the planet by defanging Israel. By eliminating its nukes through a "permanent control" regime, we will bring peace to the "demented" Middle East and "help ourselves" to boot.

The motive is unbearable guilt feelings, though Germany has evolved into a model democracy since 1945. How to regain moral worth? By projecting culpability onto Israel.

"The Germans will never forgive the Jews for Auschwitz," runs a quip ascribed to Zvi Rex, an Israeli psychiatrist. You don't need a shrink to deconstruct this defense mechanism. Our grandfathers did it, but the Israelis, who won't let us forget, are just as bad. Three classics are: "They are the new Nazis," "Gaza is like the Warsaw Ghetto," and "We learned our lesson, the Israelis did not."

Thus, the accounts are squared, with a tidy moral surplus left over for Mr. Grass and his new friends on the far left and far right. The good news is that the poem did not play well in the middle. For the past two weeks, the media have weighed in against the bard, saying "what must be said" in a very different way: that he had breached a 70-year-old moral consensus, that he had turned the moral universe upside-down by casting Israel as aggressor and Iran as victim.

The bad news oozes out from the underground. Go to the website of any paper that has run critical pieces on Mr. Grass and read the comments, thousands of them. By a rough count, 90% cheer Mr. Grass. "At last!" is but the mildest applause.

The arsonist has lost the battle aboveground. Yet below, he is the redeemer who has finally struck a blow against those—Israel, Jewry, the political class—who rob Germany of dignity and freedom.

Germany in 2012 is a normal country, a solid liberal democracy. The norm for Europe is for 15%-20% of the population to possess opinions labeled by the pollsters as "latent" anti-Semitism. Germany is not an outlier, but mainstream. Considering the past, that is reassuring.

Mr. Joffe is editor of Die Zeit in Hamburg, senior fellow of the Freeman-Spogli Institute for International Studies and fellow of the Hoover Institution, both at Stanford.