'Jews have too much power'

[bemildred]

Anti-Defamation League survey shows plurality of Europeans believes Jews are not loyal to their country, have too much power in business and finance; 20 percent of those surveyed across Europe continue to blame Jews for death of Jesus

A plurality of Europeans believes Jews are not loyal to their country and that they have too much power in business and finance, a new poll released by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Tuesday showed.


According to the poll, 43 percent believe Jews are more loyal to Israel than to their own country, with a majority of respondents in Italy, Germany, Poland and Spain saying they believe that this statement is “probably true.”


Alarmingly high levels of those surveyed across Europe still believe in the traditional anti-Jewish canard that “Jews have too much power in the business world.” Overall, nearly 30 percent of all respondents believe this stereotype to be true.

YnetNews

[Spinzonner]

1. If that's true

somebody got my cut

[pelsar]

3. damn...

mine too......must be those damn jews that took ours....

[drdon326]

4. Me Three....

I want some power.

And one good corned beef sandwich.....dammit.

[Deja Q]

2. 'stereotype' defined:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&oi=defmore&q=define:Stereotype

An author's method of treating a character so that the character is immediately identified with a group. A character may be associated with a group through accent, food choices, style of dress, or any readily identifiable group characteristic. Examples are the rugged cowboy, the bearded psychiatrist, and the scarred villain. A criticism leveled at TV drama is that those who produce such dramas use outdated or negative qualities of groups to stereotype individuals. Ignoring the group's positive qualities, they perpetuate and strengthen the group's negative image in the minds of viewers. Some examples are: the Jewish accountant, the corrupt politician

Biased generalizations about a group based on hearsay, opinions, and distorted, preconceived ideas.

A stereotype is a popularly held belief about a type of person or a group of people which does not take into account individual differences.

Stereotypes are representations of people that rely on preconceived ideas about the group that person is perceived as belonging to. It is assumed that an individual shares personal characteristics with other members of that group eg blondes are all stupid, accountants are all boring. Although using stereotypes saves a lot of explanation within a text, it can be a very lazy method of characterisation. Stereotypes may be considered dangerous, as they encourage audiences to think large groups of people are all the same, and often have the same negative characteristics.

A character who represents or stands for many like him/herself in society

(link has many more)


I'd like to know how stereotypes can be removed from the collective psyche of society. Maybe that would resolve these problems once and for all. It's not one religious ideology. It's greed that engenders power, which in turn engenders greed. Jews hardly have a monopoly on this. (and when I talk about the wealthy, many people summarily decide I'm anti-semitic. :eyes: Gee, who's the bigoted one? It isn't me.)

[bemildred]

5. "Corrupt politician" is not a stereotype.

It's a job description.

WRT your question, I don't think you can remove stereotypical thinking,
it's necessary to simplify things in order to not get bogged down in
the infinite details of the world, of people. A lot of what people
call "intuition" is really stereotypical thinking in action, but in
a context where it's "accurate", i.e. where it helps one get on in
life.

I agree that it's common to all people, or any creatures.

I think the real problem is when it's applied to pseudo-categories
like ethnic groups and religions and political groupings that appear
to tell you something about their members but in fact do not.
When it manifests the xenophobic tendencies we all share, in other
words, in ways that are pernicious.

[bennywhale]

6. I think stereotypes are natural, however when directed against

certain groups such as Jews or Africans can engender and manifest dangerous future consequences if left unchecked. this is due obviously to the horrific persecution of these groups in history. Another particularly dangerous one in europe today is Romany Gypsies, who are still (astonishingly quite frankly) denied full citizenship in certain countries. (Slovenia, for example, following the Balkan war, sent out forms to its citizens to register with their "new" country, when declaring official independence. These forms were deliberately not sent to the Romany Gypsy community, and there was a deadline on them. Hence thousands were denied citizenship purposely in their own country, and this happened but 8 years ago. Depressing.)

As an Englishman i'm off to stroke my well groomed mousetache while hatching villianous plots and throwing children on the fire to keep me warm. Then i shall, as i am a camp army general, willingly murder the woman and children of as many Scottish clans, American "Patriots", or African tribes i can find whilst siiping tea with my little finger poking out. Once finished with the natives i'm off to a soccer match to drink 35 pints of beer and smash up a european town, beating anyone i find to a pulp.

[Colorado Blue]

7. Enjoy:)

Maybe I'll deck out in full hijab and see if I can get arrested:)

No - wait a second. That actually isn't funny these days.

[The Magistrate]

8. Well Said, Mr. Mildred!

"'Corrupt politician' is not a stereotype. It's a job description."

[Jack Rabbit]

9. "Corrupt politician" is a stereotype when . . .

. . . one believes, without further evidence, that all politicians are corrupt or that it is the general rule that they are corrupt.

I think the real problem is when it's applied to pseudo-categories
like ethnic groups and religions and political groupings that appear
to tell you something about their members but in fact do not.
When it manifests the xenophobic tendencies we all share, in other
words, in ways that are pernicious.

True, but the article in which you anchor the thread is still indicative of a serious problem. It shows that there are still too many people willing to embrace a stereotype about Jews that has been around since before Shylock. This stereotype does a great deal of harm. That it is so pervasive should alarm us.

Now, what can we do to combat this?

[bemildred]

10. I must admit I do have a low opinion of politicans.

But there is plenty of evidence to support that view, and it
was you that told me all politicians are professional liars.
Or was that diplomats?

It is true that it indicates as serious problem, but it's not new,
and the piece also says:

The opinion survey of 6,000 adults – 500 in each of the 12 European countries – found either minimal decline, no change or, in some cases, an increase in negative attitudes toward Jews from its 2004 findings.

The poll also showed that large portions of the European public continue to believe that Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust.

which I took to indicate things have not changed much, if at all.

As for what we do, I don't know, you can't make people like other
people, you can put the law on them if they misbehave, and you can
educate them in your excellent public schools (if you have them).
I would wager if you did the studies you would find that the Jews are
not alone in being the subjects of bigotry and are not the subjects
of the worst hatred nowadays, relatively speaking, assuming one could
figure out how to measure that. The Nazi's gave Jew hating a bad
name that persists to this day.

[Colorado Blue]

12. I just ran into this very sentiment today on your Rangel

thread:

"The poll also showed that large portions of the European public continue to believe that Jews still talk too much about what happened to them in the Holocaust."

SOME PEOPLE really get upset when we Jews talk about the Holocaust, and accuse us of going into victim mode, so forth, when we get annoyed at people who try and conflate the Holocaust with other disasters, or refuse to acknowledge either its awesome horror or its uniqueness as a Jewish disaster or - most disturbing - the fact that it was only the most recent catastrophe in a long list of catastrophes, that have happened to the Jewish people.

The UN actually brought that up in an antisemitism conference. Basically, they concluded that Jews should stop having such tsuris over the Holocaust, stop trying to "own" it, more or less; and also they seemed to conclude that there wouldn't be so much antisemitism if there weren't any Jews. Which is logical, I guess:)

Also, there's a great reluctance among people to look at the culture that creates such victimizations, especially when the religious aspect comes into play. I believe that people feel threatened when one doesn't agree that THEIR god is THE god. That's behind a lot of it but nobody really wants to confront that because then they'd have to question their own beliefs, and maybe also their own inchoate prejudice. So they assume that the non-believers are bad in some way or find other avenues in which to belittle them - like by accusing us of going into victim mode, or denying the impact or uniqueness of the Holocaust, while simultaneously protesting that they're aren't, in fact, doing that very thing.

As for solutions, I, personally, think that NON-JEWS have too much power:)

[bemildred]

13. Well, the "uniqueness" is what's being questioned.

Which is not a black or white thing, it was unique, but it's also
one of a long list of similar atrocities, and not the largest by
any means.

http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocidetable.htm
http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstatx.htm

[Colorado Blue]

14. It's unique in a modern, sophisticated, hi-tech, "civilized"

country in the heart of modern Europe. The long chain of events leading up to it ARE unique to this particular group of people and so is the mythology, which has outlived the fires.

And I don't see why people are determined to deny and/or examine the disease in Western, Christian culture that has allowed this particular form of scapegoating, stereotyping and victimization of this particular group of people to continue for all these many centuries. These factors make the Holocaust unique, not the body count.

And bringing OTHER disasters into discussions about the Holocaust is just another way of deflecting attention away from the problem. People still, just do NOT want to look at the mechanisms inside THEMSELVES and inside Western culture, that caused this thing and is keeping the mythology alive.

In fact, there's a discussion ongoing in Spain right now, reflecting the refusal to deal with the issue of antisemitism as a separate, important and continuing problem. I'll link to the article in a separate post. Essentially, though, instead of dealing with antisemitism they want to deal with racism, antisemitism and xenophobia all in a big lump and can't even agree on the order of the wording.

The very fact that people can't just deal with this problem, admit there's a flaw in their reasoning about their perception of God and the way they treat people who simply don't wish to convert, really face the fault-line in the culture that created this evil, but try to lump it in with a whole bunch of generic problems common to all cultures at all times, really ticks me off.

It is a cop-out.

[Colorado Blue]

15. Here's the link to the aforementioned article:

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/586094.html

I also posted it separately in case people want to discuss.

[bemildred]

16. I'm sure the Chinese, Russians, and Japanese, to name only three,

will be relieved to know that they are not modern,sophisticated,
hi-tech, and civilized, and that therefore they are less culpable
and their victims less to be remembered.

[Colorado Blue]

17. Bemildred: this forum and this topic deals with antisemitism.

Constant attempts by people in THIS culture to avoid dealing with THIS phenomenon are discouraging.

Talking about things that happened in China in the context of the Holocaust are red herrings.

Time for "Western Civilization" to deal with THIS PROBLEM.

As for genocides in OTHER cultures, I'm one of the people who's CONSTANTLY trying to get people to PAY SOME GODDAM ATTENTION TO SUDAN.

[bemildred]

18. I am hardly trying to avoid it. I started the thread.

I'm just saying it's an instance of a general phenomenon,
and you apparently dislike that idea.

[The Magistrate]

19. One Small Point, Mr. Mildred

There are some truely unique factors to the Hitlerite crimes, and while people may not be fully aware of what these are, they do tend to sense their presence.

The first is that, in just about all the other great slaughters of the last century, the mass murder was a means to some comprehensible, even rational end. The Japanese in China slaughtered as a form of force-multiplier in an attempt at conquest of a vastly larger society. Stalin slaughtered and worked to death in an attempt to break political forces and force the pace of industrializtion; so did Mao. Hitler meant the total extermination of a people, and while there were by-products of this effort, in terms of forced labor and even political effect, they were not the point of the exercise.

The second is that the root of Hitlerite policy in this matter was genuine lunacy, rooted in a wierdly false to fact view of history and humanity and the nature of the world and even of the universe. He viewed the world as the stage of a cosmic struggle between the Aryan, embodying all that was good and noble and creative, and the Jew, embodying all that was evil and base and imitative. He felt, at the time of his rise to power, that this struggle was on the verge of total victory for the Jew over the Aryan. He believed that the extermination of the Jew would allow the recapture by the Aryan of a full heritage of mystic and magical abilities that had been lost due to corruption of the pure stock. Never in modern history, perhaps never in history itself, has so vast a criminal effort been moved by such trumpery and delusional motivation.

[bemildred]

20. I must apoligize for the delay, Sir.

I was out of town. Way out of town.

I have never meant to imply that the Nazis were not loons, or that
there were not certain unique things about their killing. I would
add the "industrial" way they went at it (although one can of course
point to the Mongols or the likes of Tamerlane, but it's really not
the same it seems to me.) So I will concede there is a certain
singularity about it, but one can say that in some degree of any
historical occurrence.

I merely want to point to the similarities. Xenophobia and genocide
are not new, and it seems unlikely to me that one can successfully
address anti-semitism in isolation, or that it would be all that
useful to stamp out anti-semitism while leaving the larger problems
of genocide and xenophobia unaffected. Nevertheless, I can understand
why a Jew might feel relieved by that prospect, unrealistic though
I think it is, and I don't mean to imply that a certain anxiety
about this sort of thing is unreasonable in Jewish people.

I don't consider the other fellows you mention models of reason
either. They are more in the nature of the standard model of
genocidal loon, so to speak.

It seems likely (to me) that one reason for the long history of
anti-semitism is the long history of the Jews in diaspora; that the
Jews have maintained themselves as a coherent religion/culture for
millenia is what allows for the long history of xenophobia directed
against them. There is nothing worse than a good example, as Twain
said.

The modern hatreds related to the establishment of the state of
Israel and it's consequences seem to me to have different origins
and to be of a different nature from the ancient hatreds based
of religion and cultural differences. I think the tendency to
conflate the hatred of Jews as outcasts and untouchables and
outsiders with the hatred of Jews in positions of power and
domination confuses two different issues.

And I must point out that one cannot use the "uniquely" loony
nature of the Nazi's to show the unique nature of anti-semitism
over the centuries. If the Nazis were unique, then the rest,
presumably, was not.

[bemildred]

21. There is the matter of "purity" also, Sir.

What little I have seen of the Nazis own justifications for their
"activities" are couched in those terms. "Cleansing" and "purity" and
a utopia to come when all this dirty business is done; and that is
a theme that does echo in the works of Stalin and Pol Pot and a legion
of other fellows who really went at killing in an enthusiastic and
industrious way; they were all out to make a better world in a really
big way.

It is precisely that vision of a purified nation leading to utopia
that disturbs me most in the "Christian right" in this country, the
delusion that there are collections of other human beings that are
"impurities", or that there is one right way of thinking and being and
that a "better world" will come once all the alternatives are stamped
out.

It is true, or course, that a good deal of this sort of thing is
driven by Machievellian divide-and-rule politics; but as you point out
one does see persons in power that actually believe their own bullshit
to one degree or another, and it does seem that the soil of humanity
is most fertile for this sort of growth.

[bemildred]

22. A Deserter From Death: Letter From Europe

From 1994. I rather like this guy.
It's worth reading the whole thing.
He has a lot to say.

---

Not that I was untouched by the bloody conflict. Far from it. My father was sent to the gulag in distant Siberia, my older brother was killed in the battle of Tobruk and my sister jumped from a second floor in Marseilles rather than face deportation. To escape the Nazis, I had illegally crossed the border into Switzerland and on the way I mistook in the dark the greenish uniform of the Swiss for the Feldgrau of the Germans. After such an experience, you grow up very fast indeed. At the time that Allied troops were landing in Normandy, I was attending Calvin's high school in Geneva and treating my classmates as kids. But in another sense, I was a youth like any other, reading Rimbaud, discovering not only the Surrealists but also the "surprise parties," as they were called, at which we jitterbugged to Mezz Mezzrow and smooched to "Blues in the Night"--instead of providing fodder for the gas chambers as did my aunts, uncles and innumerable cousins.

---

Unique and Comparable

After the landing came the liberation of the occupied territories and then the invasion of Germany itself. Accompanying the hour of glory was the horrifying discovery of the concentration camps with their ossuaries and their waking skeletons. Even we who lived close to the camps and were supposed to know were completely shattered by those pictures from hell, defying the imagination of a Hieronymus Bosch, and will probably be haunted by those images for the rest of our lives.

Whenever I am asked, or ask myself, what it means to be a Jew--as one who does not think of Jews as a race, who is a nonbeliever and was not brought up in Hebrew or Yiddish culture--I find the rudiments of an answer in my relationship to those corpses. I know and fully accept the proposition that we should share our sympathy and solidarity with the victims, the exploited, the downtrodden and humiliated without distinction of nationality, religion or skin color, Yet I could have ended up in that charnel house myself. I almost wrote "should have ended up,'' assuming, with utter irrationality, that I am a deserter from the army of the dead.

Words should be handled with care. Not every reactionary and repressive regime is fascist. Not every horror of our time can lie equated with the Holocaust. The organized, systematic, almost scientific extermination of a people on alleged racial grounds and on such a scale seems to me to be a unique event in human history. Unique but not incomparable; quite the contrary. We are living in a crazy and increasingly dangerous world. When Jews, even if a small proportion of the whole population, can rejoice, both in public and in private, over the mad massacre of praying Palestinians; when the death of one race-car driver in the Grand Prix takes five times more space in the media than that of 200,000 blacks in Rwanda; when "ethnic cleansing," which one thought had been discredited forever, becomes bloody purification in the former Yugoslavia and looks highly contagious; when blood ties, once again, seem to negate all other forms of solidarity across national frontiers--when all this happens it is important to recall the Holocaust as a reminder of what humans are capable of performing and as a warning that it can happen here, there and everywhere if we don't tackle the deadly disease from its earliest symptoms.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml%3Fi=19940620&s=singer

[Colorado Blue]

23. Awesome piece. Thank you so much for posting this.

These paragraphs blew me away. They overlap some of what we've been discussing elsewhere, the blurring of history as the old ones die.

Soon, there will be no more witnesses to the Holocaust, no more withered forearms with the numbers inked in Prussian blue. And in many new histories, the "political correctness" of the moment seems to be changing what happened, before our eyes:

"Revisionism itself is being revised. Its cleverest practitioners have realized they could not wipe out the Holocaust; those dead millions will not vanish into thin air. But you can make light of its importance and shift the blame for it. The revisionist historians in Germany no longer deny that Martin Heidegger was a Nazi. Instead they argue that, faced with the choice of two evils--Communism and National Socialism--he wisely chose the lesser, i.e., Nazism. In France you can't yet go as far. Nevertheless, even there a brazen attempt was made last year--with a book, a television show, a press campaign and, naturally, a "Russian document," to describe the leader of the Resistance on French soil, Jean Moulin, as a Soviet agent. The whole fraudulent construction was rapidly destroyed by prominent resisters and principled historians. The purpose, however, was obvious: If even the hero Moulin was a spy, Soviet or Nazi, what does it matter, ma chère? Whom can we trust and whom should we blame? The next stage came in Italy, where the neo-Fascist Gianfranco Fini, the chief ally of the new Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi, proclaims that Fascism is no longer a relevant problem and that Benito Mussolini "was the greatest statesman of the century."

History's image is growing faint not only because of the passage of time and because many of the actors are gone. It is being distorted because the political climate has changed and conscious efforts are being made to change it still further. In the circumstances, anything that refreshes the memory--books, films, trials or celebrations, and particularly anything that transmits the true image to the younger generation--is very precious. Earlier this year the French tried 79-year-old Paul Touvier, who during the war was chief of intelligence and operations of the Vichy militia in Lyons. What is important is not that this former executioner and still unrepentant Jew-hater was sentenced to life. What matters is that many people learned about the past from his trial and that a Frenchman was for the first time condemned for his participation in "crimes against humanity"; they also learned about the role of a section of the Catholic Church in hiding and protecting the culprit. Touvier, however, was a mere thug, a flunky with blood on his hands. If, as may be hoped, Maurice Papon, a more important figure, is finally brought to trial later in the year, the complicity of the French administration will be illustrated and the impact will be greater."



I also liked what he said about the Eastern Front - that, no matter how we revile the brutality of Stalin, the Russians took the brunt of Hitler's onslaught - 20 million died there. Millions died at Stalingrad alone. But the line held and Hitler's army broke upon their courage.

My father-in-law, the Luftwaffe fighter pilot, was shot down there. He spent the last year of the war in the cold, in the mud, in the ignominious and humiliating safety of a POW camp. "Mom" remembers the savagery of the Russian soldiers when they entered Germany - and to this day, can't understand their fury.

My old chess buddy, Boris, was a Soviet tank commander. He whispers of the brutality, the desperation of those last-ditch battles - a fight to the death in the snow. He was at Moscow too, defending his home city.

Leaning over the board, he recalls how Russian infantry swooped in on skis, dressed in white, silent and invisible. The Germans never heard them, couldn't see them coming. The snowed bloomed with red blossoms.

Who will remember when they're gone?

[Colorado Blue]

24. In exchange: the Holocaust through Arab eyes

http://www.legacy-project.org/symposium/printpaper.html?ID=1

A fantastic and thoughtful paper, worth reading in entirety.

A few paragraphs from The Holocaust, seen from the Arab World, by Rami Khouri and comments by Anwar Chemseddine.

Rami G. Khouri is a well known Jordanian journalist whose work is syndicated around the world. The following column, filed on May 16, 2001 from London, reflects on the Holocaust’s centrality in western culture, and the complexities this poses for interchange between the Arab and western worlds.

snip

A key element of this cycle has nothing to do with the modern Arab-Israeli conflict, but rather relates to modern European and Jewish history. For the other thing that one notices in the Western European mass media is the persistence of articles about the many dimensions of the Holocaust, the Nazis, German use of Jewish and other slave labor, and related issues. The latest such news last week was about a regional cabinet minister in Belgium who resigned under pressure after he was filmed attending a meeting of SS veterans and Nazi sympathizers, and the news that compensation payments for former Nazi slaves and forced laborers were likely to begin this summer, following the end of some court proceedings in the United States.

The glaring contradiction we face is this: while the horrific treatment of the Jews half a century ago remains a central moral and political issue in the Western psyche, the trend among public opinion in the Arab world today is to question the veracity of the accepted wisdom about the extent of the killing of Jews by the Nazis. Both of these trends are the work of rather small minorities, in that the majority of Arabs and Western Europeans get on with their lives without thinking about these issues. But the small minorities of people on both sides who do bring these matters into the public eye via the mass media and the political systems tend to perpetuate these opposing views. The resulting bitter cycle of anger and enmity on both sides includes dangerous overtones of racial stereotyping and anti-Semitism that targets both Arab and Israeli Semites (both of whom are the ‘Semitic’ descendants of Shem, Noah’s son).

snip

Comments:

"The Arabs' View of the Holocaust is indeed troubled"
Anwar Chemseddine

Rami Khouri’s description of the Arabs’ confused perception of the Holocaust, and the West’s “anger” over this, is on the whole accurate. But his account is itself slightly confused, for it neglects the cause of the confusion. Merely reiterating the terms of “the bitter cycle of anger and enmity on both sides” is not enough. The Arabs’ view of the Holocaust is indeed troubled, not because of any revisionist or negationist schools of historians actively engaged, as in Europe and the United States, in questioning the extent of the massacre, or doubting its veracity, or deliberately blurring the issues raised by it, but because the Holocaust is almost invariably regarded through the foggy prism of the Middle East conflict. Let me put it abruptly: Arabs consider the Holocaust with suspicion because they believe that Israel is using it as a master theme in its propaganda.

snip

Now in my opinion, it is grievously wrong to draw the Holocaust into the conflict, because the Holocaust has nothing to do with war, not fifty years ago or now. The Holocaust stands above all crimes, not only because the crimes were unprecedented in magnitude and cruelty and cold-bloodedness, but precisely because they had nothing to do with war. The Jews were singled out by the Nazis for mass-killing not for any hypothetical military gain – there are reasons to believe that the labor that went into organizing the extermination camps actually hampered the Nazi war machine – but because they were a specific portion of humanity. In that sense, the Holocaust is not only the greatest catastrophe that befell European Jewry, but stands as the epitome of the mass crime committed by a modern State, not in the conduct of war, but because it has set up a criminal public service. The genocide’s principal significance today is that it stands out as the archetype of the crime against humanity. It is this crucial relationship between the Holocaust and modernity that Arab opinion fails to understand, Israel threatens to weaken, and Khouri overlooks when he implies it is a minority interest. The Holocaust is not Europeans killing off “their Jews” (a calamity restricted to Europe, as is often heard), but a horrific event that must engage all humanity precisely because it is a crime against humanity. Perhaps it is the feebleness of this concept in Arab culture and thought which has precluded broad Arab understanding of the Holocaust’s centrality to Western culture and thought, and which may account for our continued puzzlement at the “exorbitant” attention it gets in the Western media, academy, and politics. In short, we fail to grasp the significance of the Holocaust to Western modernity because we still have difficulties engaging the issues raised by modernity, namely the ethical, juridical and political issue of human rights. Let me explain...

The Nazis’ disastrous scheme of “The Final Solution of the Jewish Question”, which aimed at nothing less than wiping the Jews from the face of the earth, did not originate from their hatred for the Jews as deicides or as well-poisoning, money-grubbing criminals (Khouri mistakes modern anti-semitism for medieval anti-Judaism). Instead,the Nazis singled out the Jews as a parasitic race responsible for all the evils of the modern world. This idea was by no means the invention of the Nazis; it had been in circulation since at least the first decades of the 19th century, and was shared by conservatives, liberals and even revolutionaries. The main charge against the Jews was that they were “in essence” cosmopolitan (Bodenloss). In the context of a Europe exalted by rising nationhood, this was the crime above all crimes, the sad illustration of which is the “Dreyfus Affair”. Anti-semitism is a modern European phenomenon in which Jews, assimilated or unassimilated, secular or religious, liberal or radical, are made the political, cultural, ideological and social scapegoats of modernity. It is bitterly ironic that the Jews’ modernity is held against them in the name of modernity. It was presumably to enable the human race to move forward that the Jews were slaughtered. And this is the basic definition of a crime against humanity: a crime perpetrated for no other reason than the victim being singled out as a human being. The continued significance of the Holocaust is that it persistently asks the questions: How is it that in the name of humanity crimes against humanity are committed? And how is it that in the name of modernity such savagery and abomination are allowed to occur? And what aberrations of thought have led a cultured nation like Germany to execute such horrors?

snip

[geek tragedy]

11. Widespread anti-Jewish sentiment in Europe? Next thing you know

someone will find that there is significant anti-Muslim bias in Europe as well. Wouldn't that be shocking!