Parochial Jews love to feel like victims, despite the fact that they’re largely a successful, connected and wealthy community. Being a victim is terribly effective politically, despite its inherent dishonesty.
In that tradition, here’s a recent letter in the Australian Jewish News:
Where would we Australian Jews be without our demons? Without (in no particular order) The Age, the ABC, SBS, Antony Loewenstein, the Australian Jewish Democratic Society, Barack Obama, Justice Richard Goldstone, Louise Adler, Noam Chomsky, John Pilger, the United Nations, Amnesty International, and the Australian Labor Party? Forget the KKK, the British National Party and the Holocaust deniers. They belong to the past.
STEVE BROOK
Elwood, Vic
And a response the week after:
Steve Brook (AJN 23/10) asks “where would we Australian Jews be without our demons?” Among the latter he includes The Age, the ABC, SBS, Antony Loewenstein, the Australian Jewish Democratic Society and Richard Goldstone.
The real demons, however, are those he doesn’t list. They include allegations of deicide; the “blood libel” (still current in some Arab states); forced expulsions; the Chmielnitski massacre in the Ukraine in the 17th century; Babi Yar; the six million who perished in the Shoah; Arab anti-Semitism; the bombing of Argentina’s Jewish centre in 1994; the Park Hotel bombing in Netanya in 2002; Ahmadinejad; threats of nuclear holocaust; and the plot, albeit foiled, to blow up the Riverdale Jewish Centre in New York just a few months ago.
Tragically, this list is not even close to being exhaustive.
DR DAVID WEINTROB
Caulfield, Vic
These people are out of their fucking tree.
Compulsory residence in Gaza or Hebron, etc.. etc. for twelve months should serve to shake the hysteria, no doubt inculcated in faith schools that kept them from exposure to the real world.
The quality that pervades this crap, apart from the ersatz paranoia, is the racism towards the Arab world.
Anti-semitism is historically a phenomenon of the Christian world. The contribution of Zionism and actually-existing Israel to the enmity of the Arab and Muslim worlds has been effaced from chain of causality.
And these are people no doubt with an excess of formal education. All for nought where it matters.
The AJN needs a classification not yet in the film censors’ spectrum – for paranoid and hysterial viewers only, mature audiences beware, extremely dangerous to the underaged.
These people live physically in an integrated world, yet there is an isolation (self-imposed) harking back to the shtetl.
The life of the shtetl was steeped in principle; the life of these people is steeped in a lie.
the Chmielnitski massacre in the Ukraine in the 17th century
If one is actually personally worried about something that happened to people in the 17thC, then I think we are seeing evidence of actual mental illness here.