Anti-Semitism is an ancient scourge that has destroyed all who have become infected with it throughout history. It is a deadly illness of the mind which contains the nidus of self-destruction within its genetic code.
Most of us in the West have long recognized the danger of anti-Semitism. Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out that it is symptomatic of totalitarian societies which need to deflect the blame for their failures onto others:
Anti-Semitism, of course, is the mother's milk of fascism. It is always, they say, a small group of Jews — whether shadowy cabinet advisers and international bankers of the 1930s or the manipulative neoconservatives and Israeli leadership of the present — who alone stir up the trouble.
The beauty of anti-Semitism is that the Jews have a long tradition of being small in number yet relatively visible in the societies in which they lived. Thus, they serve as the perfect objects on which to project ambivalently held traits. For example, the leading anti-Semites of the world are now found in the Arab world. Their projection of all evil traits onto the Jews is a thing of beauty in its incoherent hatred. Pamela comments on the prevalence in the Arab world of the most noxious cartoons slandering Jews with the old time-worn and time tested blood libel first made popular int eh middle ages:
In an interview with the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, analyst Joe Kotek, writes that "The main recurrent motif in Arab cartoons concerning Israel is 'the devilish Jew.' This image conveys the idea that Jews behave like Nazis, kill children and love blood."
"A major theme in Arab cartoons is the blood-loving or blood-thirsty Jew. This originates in Christian anti-Semitism. The Christian anti-Semitic libel alleged the Jews needed Christian blood for their Passover service. Its claim is that the Jew is evil, as his religion forces him to drink blood. In today's Arab world this image of unbridled hatred has mutated into the alleged quest for Palestinian blood.
Blood-drinking Jews are frequently shown by Al Ahram, one of Egypt's leading dailies. On 21 April 2001, it printed a cartoon showing an Arab being put into a flatting mill by two soldiers wearing helmets with Stars of David. The Arab's blood pours out and two Jews with kippot and Stars of David on their shirts drink the blood laughingly."
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Unfortunately it is not just the Arab world that seems comfortable publishing blatantly anti-Semitic slurs in the guise of "political" cartoons. As previously documented by Honest Reporting, media in Europe and the United States have published cartoons that go beyond offensive.
A political cartoon published in The Independent in 2003 depicted Ariel Sharon biting into the flesh of a Palestinian baby. The background shows Apache attack helicopters firing missiles, and blaring the message "Vote Likud." Sharon is saying, 'What's wrong, you never seen a politician kissing babies before?"
Interestingly, those who take the greatest delight in bloody displays are the Islamic fascists and their followers. All you need to do to confirm this is to look at the posters carried by the Muslims protesting against the Danish cartoons. Little Green Footballs has an entire section dedicated to blood drenched Palestinian Car Swarms. When people attribute a negative trait of their own to others, it is projection, by definition. Another instance occurs when Europeans and Arabs describe the Israeli treatment of Palestinians as genocide or Nazism. It is the various Arab Islamic fascists groups that call for the destruction of Israel and murder of the Jews yet they ascribe such ideas to the Jews.
None of this is news to anyone who follows current events so logically one can ask why I would have pity for the anti-Semites. The fact is that if one explores the deeper structure of anti-Semitism, one will find some surprising aspects that reveal its self-destructive nature.
Today MEMRI posted excerpts from a Syrian government run newspaper which describes some of the lengths to which the anti-Semite is willing to go to blame the Jews for events:
On January 31, 2006, the Syrian government daily Al-Thawra published an article by columnist Abd Al-Rahman Ghunaym suggesting that Israel created the avian flu virus in order to damage "genes carried only by Arabs." The article further speculates that Israel may have planted the virus in East Asia in order to mislead the world, and that this is why the disease first appeared in that remote region. Another possibility given is that the virus was created to attack "the yellow race - especially in China and Vietnam" which are "rising powers" threatening "American hegemony over the world."
The article has a compendium of other paranoid fantasies about the Jews. It includes the canard, which unfortunately a significant percentage of the American black population believes, that Jews developed AIDS to kill blacks. The article ends with this gem, which bears scrutiny:
"Tampering with Arab genes [without affecting] the white race is very difficult. But the Zionists are capable of attempting this [risky] adventure if [they have] a preventive treatment or a [cure for the disease]. Recall that the assassination of Yasser Arafat was carried out by means of biological weapons. The attempt on the life of the fighter [Hamas leader] Khaled Mash'al [likewise] involved a biological [agent] which [is countered by] a secret antidote that only the Zionists possess."
Not only is "tampering with Arab genes [without affecting] the white race ... very difficult", it is not possible (yet) though if it becomes possible, it is almost certain that Jewish scientists will be involved. However, consider the implications of this idea and other common delusions/fantasies about the Jews. Jews control international finance; they control governments behind the scenes; they have death rays, control tsunamis, etc. The list of powers that Jews are supposed to possess are remarkable and incredible; the Jews are supermen! Meanwhile, the poor Arabs are weak and helpless victims. [Notice, the alternative, that Jews are a hard working group who value education, would cast the Arab world's manifest failures into an even worse light.] S, C & A, in a post about Moderate Muslims that should be read in full, comments on the fatalism inherent in Islam:
Islam and Muslims necessarily see themselves as victims, waging battle against mythical Gods- a battle they cannot win, save for the Divine Intervention of Allah. In other words, Muslims are powerless and will remain powerless until Allah deems them worthy of his interceding Grace. As Muslim prayers for redemption remain unanswered, the passage of time only serves to magnify the greatness of the kafir adversary and the conspiracies they face- and thus, their deliverance will be an even greater miracle and manifestation of Allah's greatness. It is only by an ever increasing escalation that the Muslim world escape it's own failures and ineptitudes. The whole world is against them and their adversaries become stronger every day. Thus, it is not evil to kill innocent women and children. That, after all, is what Allah will do.
Thus, without that intervention, Muslims see themselves as impotent. They are waging a battle against superiors- one they cannot win. Unworthy as they are, they wage the battle nonetheless, in the hope that Allah will take mercy upon them and intercede on their behalf and continue the righteous slaughter of their adversaries they have begun in his name.
Jews, and now Americans as well, are the "mythical Gods" who are oppressing the helpless Muslim.
Last month, Andrew Klavan in the LA Times, described the anti-Semite's world in Why God chose the Jews:
Now, I understand the situation in the Middle East is morally and politically complex, as is the situation in South America. I know that honorable people can hold conflicting opinions about the issues in these places. But when the entrenched misery of an area nearly as large as the United States is consistently blamed on 5 million people in a country the size of a shoebox, or when the ills of the world are loaded onto less than 1% of its population, I begin to become suspicious.
If it were only a matter of hating Jews, we could say: "Feel free, hate everyone, knock yourself out." The trouble is the suffering, the slaughter of innocents and indeed the destruction of entire nations that seems inevitably to follow when anti-Semitism is allowed to spread beyond the cesspool of the mind that contains it. History is too full of lowlifes who thought all their problems would be solved if they could just kill enough Jews — or thugs like Pontius Pilate who thought it was a matter of killing the right Jew — for us not to realize that their Final Solutions aren't final and are no solution. They are often the first, and sometimes the last, road sign pointing the way to an earthly hell.
Here is the crucial point for those who imagine that a tiny group of people, barely 60 years out of an almost successful genocide, left with nothing more than the clothes on their backs, comprising approximately .05% of the world's population, who came to the desert in Palestine and built a modern technological nation, would have the time and interest to simultaneously devote themselves to oppressing the Muslim world, with almost 100 times their population and oceans of oil:
The anti-Semite necessarily defines himself as monumentally inferior to the Jew.
This resides in the core of the anti-Semite and renders him permanently damaged and weakened. Only the aid of a being much greater than themselves, Allah, can save them from disaster. Short of such divine intervention, they are doomed to remain defeated. The Muslim nations of the world do not see it as within their abilities to compete in a world of high technology, higher education, competitive open economies; no, they look to nuclear weapons, only available to them by virtue of their Allah given oil money rather than by the sweat of their own brows, to bring them relief from the often imagined depredations of the now conflated Jewish/American demi-Gods.
For those who have the hubris to attempt to destroy the Gods, there are only two outcomes possible:
If they partially succeed, as the Nazis did, they imagine they have become Gods, intoxicated with their power; and, as with all who pretend to be Gods, they over-reach themselves and are inevitably destroyed. Only those with the egotism of the Malignant Narcissist would dare attack England, invade Russia, and antagonize the sleeping American giant, at the same time.
Should they attempt to destroy the Jewish American God-beings and fail, they will surely be destroyed themselves. The most recent example of such spectacular self-destructive failure is Osama bin Laden, who though perhaps still alive, is frightened and in hiding; while he may perhaps be able to prick the God, he is no more able to slay Israel or America than the fly can kill the eagle.
Iran is now the most recent of a long line of anti-Semitic states threatening to kill the Jews. Their leaders proclaim, with the hubris produced by having already successfully tweaked the God-America when it was wounded and tired, that they will destroy us, as well. Their destruction is already almost assured; they are preparing to over-reach and invite disaster for themselves. They have created nothing and have learned nothing. Now they imagine they will attain glory by finally destroying the hated and envied Jew and will only succeed in bringing misery upon themselves and their children. Ultimately, once we have assured our own survival, we might from time to time allow some pity for such misguided fools.
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