Phyllis Chesler assails one of the most frequently-used weapons of the apologists for and allies of jihadist terror: the charge of racism. From FrontPage:
In these contentious times, debate about the Middle East and Islam is easily stifled. All it takes is for some disgruntled Arabs, preferably Palestinians, or a handful of western leftists to level a charge of "racism.” Then the alleged offender, whether he is a Jewish author, a Christian professor, or a Muslim dissident, is silenced and shunned. In this way, today’s charge of "racism" is similar to the Stalin-era accusation that one was a "bourgeois capitalist."The crime alleged is one of essence. It is meant to cancel out the humanity of the accused as well as the actual facts in the case -- and it does. Thus, the fear that one might be accused of being a "racist," either by Muslims or by western leftists is so great that most people either join the Orwellian jackal-chorus or refuse to "get involved." Here are the Alice-in-Wonderland rules: No one, especially westerners, particularly Jews, is allowed to accuse Muslims of being "racists.” This dictum holds even when Muslim governments refuse citizenship rights to Jews, wage genocide against Christian or black-skinned citizens, spew the filthiest hate propaganda about infidels and threaten to "eliminate" Israel with nuclear weapons. Neither politically correct western leftists nor Muslim leaders call this "racism."
The slander is instead reserved for those who document and challenge racist barbarities carried out in the name of Islam. As a result, two of Europe's most brilliant and passionate thinkers, France's Alain Finkielkraut, and Italy's Oriana Fallaci, have both recently been condemned as "racists" for telling the truth about Islam and about Israel. But, there are many other examples. Here are three in North America.
Consider first the case of Howard Rotberg. In 2003, Rotberg, a Canadian lawyer and author, published his debut novel, a charming and heartbreaking pro-Israel story entitled The Second Catastrophe: A Novel About a Book and Its Author. Life often imitates art and Rotberg himself soon partially experienced the fate of his fictional protagonist, Professor Norman Rosenfeld. Rotberg delivered his first lecture in a Chapters bookstore in Waterloo, Ontario. Suddenly, two Muslims interrupted his speech. The first disrupter, who identified himself as a Palestinian, accused Rotberg of saying or perhaps thinking that “all Muslims are terrorists.” The disrupter admitted that he had not read the book. A second man, who identified himself as an Iraqi Kurd, began “ranting about how Americans and Israelis are the real terrorists and that democracy is really fascist.” They did not allow Rotberg to speak. According to Rotberg, they used “Gestapo tactics to completely disrupt (my) lecture.” One called Rotberg, the son of a Holocaust survivor, "a f*** Jew.”
No bookstore staff person stopped them—that is, until Rotberg responded that he would “not be called a f*** Jew.” At that point, a store manager came over to tell Rotberg to stop swearing. Rotberg demanded that the store call the police. According to Rotberg, they finally did so, but very reluctantly. The police in turn refused to arrest anyone for disturbing the peace, merely asking Rotberg’s hecklers to stay away from the store. The police refused to escort Rotberg to his car. Rotberg’s publisher, Mantua Books (which Rotberg owns), issued a press release to cancel his future lectures at Chapters/Indigo bookstores since the security was not appropriate. According to Rotberg, the publicity director at Chapters “went ballistic.” She claimed that she had heard Rotberg say that “all Muslims are terrorists.” She even issued a press release wherein she “apologized for any inappropriate behavior and racist comments both from the guest author and some of the attendees at the event.” To set the story straight, Rotberg compiled affidavits from audience members confirming his version of the events. He also filed a lawsuit asking that the store to retract their characterization of Rotberg as a "racist." In mounting a defense of his reputation, he is waging a lonely battle: Rotberg told me that no Canadian-Jewish or Canadian-author's organization was willing to take up his cause.
What was Rotberg's crime? First, he did not demonize Israel. Second, he did not choose a "neutral" position, somewhere between Hamas' and that of the settlers ejected from Gaza. He dared speak about Israel positively, truthfully, and soulfully. But most of all, he also dared speak the truth about Palestinian and Islamic terrorism against Israel. He did not deserve to be labeled a "racist" for any of this nor did he deserve to be called "a *** Jew." That he was demonstrates the determination of radical Islamists and their apologists to silence their critics.
There is also a double standard at work here. Rotberg was reading aloud from a work of fiction. Normally, this means that his protagonist should have been allowed to say and do anything. For instance, Western critics still proudly insist that the views of Palestinian suicide killers depicted in the film Paradise Now cannot be confused with those of the film's Palestinian creator who has, after all, engaged in a "fictionalized' depiction of psychological reality. Pro-Israel Jews and their allies are not afforded the same distinction. Thus Howard Rotberg can be verbally attacked and called a "racist" for creating a fictional character who dares to question the motives and actions of Palestinian and Muslim terrorists.Then there is the 2004 case of De Paul university professor Thomas Klocek. Professor Klocek, who had taught at De Paul University for fifteen years, visited a student fair on campus and engaged in dialogue with some Muslim student supporters of Hamas and Islamic Jihad. He defended Israel. He questioned whether Rachel Corrie had indeed been murdered in cold blood and whether Israelis were really treating Palestinians in the same way that Hitler treated the Jews -- as the Muslim students’ literature and posters claimed. He insisted that “the Israeli Armed Forces have exercised very careful restraint in their responses to what has been almost daily suicide bombings.” Whereupon eight students descended on the single professor. A verbal melee ensued. Despite their clear superiority in numbers, the students donned the garb of victims, complaining that they were “harassed” and "threatened.” They further alleged that Klocek had made “racist remarks.” The students met with their advisors who alerted various administrative deans. The deans wasted no time capitulating to the student agitators. They apologized to the offended students and suspended Professor Klocek. As of this writing, a lawsuit is under way.
Lastly, there are my own experiences. On October 14, 2005, I spoke at the CUNY Graduate Center for the National Organization for Women of New York State (NOW-NYC). To protest my appearance, prominent leftwing feminists, including Katha Pollitt of Nation magazine, and NOW-NYC agitator Pam Martens, wrote a series of letters to intimidate and humiliate both NOW and the Graduate Center. Their crime was inviting a "pro-Bush, pro-war, neo-conservative" speaker (that's me, folks). Next they or their minions arranged for WBAI, a listener-sponsored hate radio station, to come and tape the evening. In December of 2005, WBAI’s "The Joy of Resistance," broadcast a one hour "feminist" program which aired a spliced-and-diced version of my talk mainly for the purpose of denouncing me as a "racist."
These critics correctly characterized me as "the Christopher Hitchens of the women's movement," but incorrectly interpreted my opposition to multi-cultural relativism as "racism." My denunciation of the atrocities being perpetrated against Muslim, Jewish, and Christian women and men of any color was offered as proof that I am a "racist,” offering yet another illustration that one cannot speak the truth about Muslim racism (or sexism, or homophobia) without being branded with the tag of racism.
These left feminists or their pawns continued their vendetta. Someone actually managed to cancel an interview that I had done a year ago on another subject on the grounds that a NOW-New Jersey interviewer should not be giving someone who is known as a "racist" and a "homophobe" (again, presumably that's me!) such credibility. The television interviewer is fighting back and hopes to air this program in the future. Finally, a supporter of my work tried very hard to interest a particular NPR program to interview me in December. After several conversations, she was finally told that "they could not afford the serious trouble and punishment they would have to endure if they allowed me access to their airwaves."
My work has received a very different kind of reception among Muslim reformers. When I testified before the Senate earlier in December about Islamic gender apartheid, one Iranian feminist said: "Finally! An American feminist leader who is not willing to abandon us to her theories of cultural relativity." She gets it. My leftist feminist detractors do not.
One can understand why many (but not all) Muslims often hotly allege racism even where it may not exist. Caucasian Christian westerners have held "racist" views of people who were neither Christian nor Caucasian and they have, in the past, colonized the immediate known world. Some leftists have also argued that France has caused her own intifada by continuing to hold "racist" views of their Muslim immigrant population.
But other sources of Muslim hostility are more difficult to justify. From a cultural and religious point of view, many Muslims have been relentlessly brainwashed against all non-Muslims and empowered to express themselves, often violently, when they feel shamed or dishonored. Systematic, normalized, but strenuously denied child abuse within Muslim and Arab families may also lead to a "paranoid" world view in which The Other is always blamed for one's own suffering. From a psychological point of view, most Muslims have been raised in shame-and-honor societies in which they have learned to blame others, preferably outsiders—never themselves. Consequently, their cultural skins are very thin; they lack the habit of introspection; and they are disinclined to take individual responsibility for their own mistakes. Above all, they have been trained never to criticize their own leaders, but to scapegoat the Jews and westerners for Arab and Muslim suffering.
This tendency makes many Muslims and Arabs uneager to hear—or, for that matter, tell—the truth. The blessed exceptions are usually imprisoned, tortured, and murdered either by their own families or by the state. Finally, too many Muslims have been deeply "Palestinianized,” i.e. empowered to unleash verbal and psychological intifadas, as well as actual riots and suicide terrorism on behalf of a presumably noble cause. Thus, they respond to honest criticism by baselessly interrogating the motives of the critics. Typical was a Muslim (former) friend of mine. After glancing at the names of those who endorsed my new book—a list that included Robert Spencer, Daniel Pipes, Alan Dershowitz, David Horowitz, Amir Taheri, Ibn Warraq, Bat Ye'or—she exclaimed, “I don't want to read this. You are working with known racists.”
If the reactions of some Muslims and Arabs can be so explained, what are we to make of the leftists, including feminists, who also allege "racism" where it does not exist? I recently had a wonderful talk with two pioneer second-wave feminists that may shed some light on the matter. Both had dropped out of the movement in the early 1970s, after observing and experiencing the abusive and destructive ways in which feminists treated each other. One remains a leftist, the other does not. One woman said: "I have a good friend who is a left feminist. She is an innocent, not malevolent in any way, but she is simply incapable of changing her point of view--not even after 9/11. It is psychologically too much for her to begin to think 'out of the box'. She is so used to blaming America for everything that she needs to keep blaming America, even for 9/11. To this day, she has not been able to blame the jihadists.” The other woman offered the following analysis of the thinking of leftist feminists: “Some people can't live with ambiguity, doubt, competing claims, the unknown. They need Total Answers, even when that particular boilerplate doesn't fit reality anyway." I think they are both right.
The terrorists who flew airplanes into the World Trade Center on 9/11 were all Arab Muslims. Saying so does not make one a "racist" but an objective reporter of the facts. Al-Qaeda’s terrorist network is composed only of Muslims. Saying so does not make one a "racist." Blaming 9/11 on the Mossad or the CIA, which many Islamists and radical leftists do is an example of culturally licensed "paranoid" thinking. Saying that the Palestinians systematically engage in barbaric behavior such as lynching, honor-murdering, dancing in the streets, and handing out cakes and candies on both 9/11 and, more recently, when they heard that Prime Minister Sharon had suffered a stroke, does not make one a "racist." The apologists who contend otherwise subscribe to a disparate array of political ideologies and religious beliefs, but they all have this in common: They are all determined to hold the truth hostage to the charge of "racism."
Islam is a slippery thing. One moment this, the next moment that. Islam will be whatever it finds convenient to be according to the situation it finds itself in.
So Islam capitalizes from the advantages of being labeled "a race" when it knows it will put its enemies in a bad light.
Ayan Hirsi Ali must really confuse these people. She's black, female and saying all the wrong things.
Dr. Chesler's essay is excellent and her analysis of the brick walls built around Muslims and feminists to keep out critics right is on point. The brick walls are maintained by a group of dedicated defenders, myopic journalists, politically correct top-level law enforcement officials, layers of government agencies, judges and most academics. The writer, Mark Steyn, called it by an equally appropriate term, "self-delusion." These defenders are unfortunately laying the groundwork for mass destruction of Western societies.
Right, Mary. But there are other factors, one is the widespread ignorance of history. Why don't schoolchildren, at least on the high school level, learn about the age-old struggle between Islam and Christian world? About the Islamic conquest of Israel, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, etc.?
And what that conquest meant for the native peoples [Jews, Christians, and others] of those countries? How come so many ostensibly educated people have such simplistic, pollyannish, shallow views of Muslim-Arab relations with the non-Muslim peoples under their control, particularly with the Jews? Could these nitwits that Phyllis Chesler describes maintain their ignorant stances if they had received even a mediocre background in real history, and not the rose-colored version of Muslim tolerance, etc.?
Feminists have betrayed their cause. It is absolutely unbelievable to me that feminists can take the stands they are taking and still expect to be called "feminists." HBO, always at the forefront of the great "Stereopticon" is bringing out a show glorifying polygamy. Yes, you heard right, polygamy.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10511139/site/newsweek
Where are the feminist protests??? Will our feminist movement stand by while women's place in society is set back, not just hundreds, but thousands of years? To protect woman, we must protect her status in marriage as an equal partner to her husband. Civilization is built, transmitted and maintained by and through the functioning of the nuclear family. If we lose monogamy, we don't just lose the status of woman, we lose civilization itself.
idiots.
The anti-racism movement has become an anti-Semitism movement. Ironic, but not surprising.
Chesler is a dying breed, much like the defeated Finkielkraut. It doesn't matter what she thinks of feminism, gay rights, or fighting anti-Semitism anymore. She is already defeated. In the spirit of anti-racism and Third Worldism, all of these things take a back seat, especially if it involves Muslims. In order to protect the "new Jews" (Muslims) from the "new Nazis" (Neoconservatives and Zionists), the Left and some parts of the Right have to defend Muslims at all costs and tolerate their intolerance whether that includes calling the son of a Holocaust survivor a "f-cking Jew" or being apologists for FGM. They don't hold them responsible for their intolerance mainly because they think their intolerance is an import of the West or a result of oppression. Those who repeatedly point out their intolerance or dare to criticize their religion and culture are deemed to be racists. It will be like this for a long time until these assorted Leftists and some Rightists realize that any partnership with Islam is temporary and they will have to be sure not to offend Islam. So I'm afraid that Chesler's old NOW friends will have to lay off the gay rights speeches and sexual lib speeches if they want to bring Muslims into their fold. The question is, how in love are they with the Third World, and are they willing to betray some of their feminist ideals in order to placate the Muslims? Will these NOW feminists, who are calling Chesler a racist, what will they say to their new Muslim friends who are opposed to abortion and contraception in most cases? That will be an interesting discussion.
"Feminists have betrayed their cause."
-- posted by Rebecca JW
And have got away with it because they have NOT been called to account for doing so. Willful dhimmitude is a concerted effort that coordinates several groups, of which feminists are the most conspicuous in their tacit Jihad.
But let us never underestimate the critical roles played by the MSM and academe, where indeed many of these putative feminists work.
The disruption of a talk or public meeting by even one or two muslims in attendance who do not agree with the speaker is a well-worn tactic. I have observed this myself. The whole feigned anger and indignation thing is all part of the schtick. Two observations; the speaker should be sure to have someone in the audience to videotape the proceedings (for the trial), and it doesn't hurt to have some large, athletic male sympathyzers in the audience to drag the disrupters out of the building, if need be.
Igor: "In order to protect the "new Jews" (Muslims) from the "new Nazis" (Neoconservatives and Zionists), the Left and some parts of the Right have to defend Muslims at all costs and tolerate their intolerance whether that includes calling the son of a Holocaust survivor a "f-cking Jew" or being apologists for FGM."
Laurence Auster, at amnation.com/vfr, had related thoughts in a December 20 post on his blog:
"Talking about the Steven Spielberg movie Munich, a friend noted how sad and ironic it is that even Jews won’t take the side of Israel anymore. But this seeming contradiction is merely a logical outcome of modern liberalism.
Modern liberalism had its genesis in the false insight that the essence of the Nazi genocide, and therefore the essence of evil itself, is intolerance and discrimination. This idea led to the conclusion that to spare the world from future genocides, intolerance and discrimination must be systematically eliminated. This not only means, as I have frequently pointed out, that our own nation and culture must be eliminated, since as a distinct and dominant culture it is by definition discriminatory against others. It also means that any notion of objective morality, and especially Christian morality, must be eliminated, because to believe in objective morality means to be judgmental and discriminatory against that which is seen as immoral. Under the modern liberal dispensation, traditional Western morality becomes the equivalent of Nazism.
Thus, in the act of articulating the ultimate evil, modern liberalism destroyed the very concept of evil, and with it, the very concept of good. This led to a reconstruction of the world as radical and unreal as any Communist propaganda. Just as Communism had to erase from its presentation of human reality such things as individual reason, individual freedom, and the profit motive, modern liberalism had to erase from its presentation of human reality any facts that suggest differences of moral degree between different kinds of discriminatory actions. Under the liberal dispensation, a passive victim of evil (and those who rescue him, such as Oskar Schindler) is still virtuous, since a victim has no power to exert discriminatory power over others. But if a person, or at least a Western person, takes action against evil, especially non-Western evil, that means that he is discriminating against others, and therefore he is as bad as, or even worse than, the people he is fighting. To maintain this view, all facts showing actual moral differences between the two sides must be whited out. Thus the Israeli agents who tracked down and killed the monsters who captured and murdered in cold blood the Israeli athletes at Munich, must be seen as, at best, the moral equals of those monsters; which means that Israel has no right to defend itself; which means that Israel has no right to exist. Modern liberalism is nihilism."
What Spielberg's Munich tells us about liberalism
Obviously westerners are suffering from great moral confusion. I think that half the struggle against Islam will be won when that confusion ceases. To that end, we are in dire need of more articles like Chesler's.
Rebecca-
Many women in NOW have not given ANY thought to the positions of their organization.
Case in point: some time ago I got a fundraising call from NOW. I asked the woman on the line if NOW supported partial birth abortion, and she didn't know.
She had to ask a supervisor, who told her yes.
She then asked ME what partial birth abortion was!!!!!! When I explained it to her, she gasped and said, "why, that's horrible!"
Fortunately, this sort of ignorance is open to change. I'll bet there are many more like her.
It appears that NOW needs to educate itself and its members about Islam and women. How difficult would it be to turn a blind eye if all their members were in burkas and continuously pregnant? Just a thought...
Caratacus
Very eloquent statement Rebecca. When we're not disagreeing on Iraq, I find your insights and observations quite impressive.
No question that polygamy is a one-way ticket to patriarchal despotism.
MARYROSE: "The brick walls are maintained by a group of dedicated defenders, myopic journalists, politically correct top-level law enforcement officials, layers of government agencies, judges and most academics."
Most of these people are utterly unaware that they are perpetuators of malevolance. It is a veritable culture that has swallowed them up.
My sister-in-law is part of it. She's every bit the girl next door who ended up teaching social-studies in the public school system. She's a woman of considerable intelligence who doesn't have a clue...because the culture referred to above has effectively insulated her from an empirical understanding of the issues. And she effectively transmits that insulation to her students...year after year.
Until we repudiate multiculturalism as a social construct, we'll never win this war at home.
Has everyone seen this billboard proposal?
Terrorist billboards rejected as 'racist'
Ad company refusing to carry campaign featuring Arabs with licenses, explosives...
from:
http://worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=48028
The misuse of the word racist (and even the creation of the word) is another example of adverse unintended consequences, such as "hate crime and hate speech laws" being turned back around and employed against the authors, by the authors own enemies.
I cannot recount the thousands of instances where I have read or heard antisemites called racists, by Jews, now it is Jews who have to suffer this misuse of language.. and misuse it is because neither Jew or Muslim is a race,but it's employment as a politically correct tool to gain the upper hand in a debate has been highly effective and contributed towards the PC culture.
It is the same with Hate Speech laws, Ernst Zundel was arrested, prosecuted and deported thanks to such laws in Canada, that prohibit any speech which can cause hatred against a peoples. The law was enacted under Jewish pressure well before the public awareness of Islam and well before 9-11.
Same with England, the English had an Incitement to Racial Hatred law, which inhibited antisemites, but has now been expanded to provide special protection to Muslims.
And of course Germany was racially sensitized after WWII and Neuremberg.
It's like multiculturalism, the sensitivity to Multicult provided succor and protection to millions of immigrants,like Ashkenazim Jews, Irish, Italians, Hispanics.
Reminds of the saying "Be careful for what you wish, you just might get it". Or hatched chickens come home to roost.
In light of all of this, how does one decry the libelous slander of racist and racism, without playing or appearing to be a hypocrite, when in fact one's own group has successfully used that very charge for political advantage and social protection for ages.
Another trouble development is the word antisemitism..originally coined by a Jew, it is now used by Arabs who claim that they too are semites.. the origin of the word (and this gets me in trouble here) is based on the adapted Sumero-Babylonian Flood myth of Utnapishtim/Ziusudra, which became Noah and his son Shem hence semites. But there is no such race as semitic, nor is there a race called Jew, compare Sephardim to Ashkenazim to Ethopian to Chinese Jews.
Yet antisemitism is part of our political lexicon, and the Arabs have laid their own claim to it, and a claim acknowledged by David Kimche, head of Israeli Council on Foreign Policy, former deputy head of MOSSAD who told an Islamic conference of the OSCE conference on antisemitism, "If some is antisemitic they are also Islamophobic".
I think it is past time to back out, abandon words, start anew with the social political debate.
For instance Zionists continued attempts to justify Israel by quoting a biblical promise is counterproductive in the modern rational world.
The Jewish claim to Israel is as solid as the anglo saxon claim to the U.S. and the Norman claim to England (whence the Crown)..you keep what you hold, the age old right of conquest, but with more validity because the original Jewish settlers actually paid cash to the Arab Sheikhs for their land.. that the Arab Sheikhs were not the owners of the land, but merely held it for the Ottoman's is irrelevant, for it was Arabs that sold land they did not own to the Jews, the subsequent borders became Israeli by the same right of conquest, however in their case it was not offense conquest, but land acquired in defense of the Israelis after successfully countering Arab aggression.
Nariz,
please don't quote a fool like Kimche. Some people don't know when to shut up. He is acting like he is in his second childhood.
as for your other arguments, do more study. I don't have time to do a proper refutation.
Nariz,
Racism does exist, but its modern usage is warped. Racism can mean whatever the anti-racists want it to mean. It can range from cultural indifference to cultural insensitivity to blatant bigotry. If I said to a Mexican that I'm colourblind and I don't really take into account his Mexicaness but treat him like I treat all people, I would still be called a racist by the anti-racists because I deny him his culture. If I critiqued the practice of FGM in Africa, I would be called a racist for trying to denigrate African culture. Racism in its modern context has lost almost of its meaning because it makes the critics of a certain cultures equivalent to the real bigots.
Antisemite is a legitimate word but it's often misunderstood. It never referred to Arabs (afterall how many Europeans had problems with Arabs at the time it was coined?), but it was a more scientific way of referring to Jews without denigrating their religion (there were anti-blasphemy laws in Germany at the time). "Semite" isn't a race but a language group. That is why there are many Jews who have more in common with non-Semitic groups such as Armenians and Kurds than with Arabs. Arabs only want the word to apply to them so that they can't be accused of being anti-Semites. Jews though are a race or at the very least have an ethnic component to their peoplehood. The racism against Jews is a little different from most of the racism we see targetting other groups. It's rarely argued the Jews are inferior but it is usually argued that they are nefarious by their nature. The Jews have been by far the most demonized race in history and that is why they are the centre of many conspiracy theories and why anti-Semites who try to "critique" the Talmud look for passages that tie the Jews to Satan. Still, there are some Jews who use the anti-Semitism card to win an argument. That will always be a problem for the same reasons why anti-racists constantly use the racism card.
I am not a fan of hate speech laws (or hate crime laws) and I would rather society as whole shun the publication or person who says these hateful things instead of imprisoning the perp. By drawing attention to the person's incarceration, you only give him a platform. It's better to shut him out instead of making an example of him.
Multiculturalism is tricky. It's definition has changed as well. It went from being a reality (what you described in your post) to an ideology espousing cultural relativism. It's current manifestation is pretty dangerous to society because it denies the legitimacy of the dominant culture and discourages new immigrants from trying to assimilate to the dominant culture. If this definition existed back in the day and the first Ashkenazi, Irish, Italian, and Hispanic immigrants did not integrate over time but remained as isolated as the Muslims are in Europe, then America would be very different and it would fail to be America. Multiculturalism encourages division, tribalism, and identity politics and it can be very disruptive to the host nation for a variety of reasons.
Only religious Zionists and cultural Zionists quote biblical promise to legitimize the Jewish state. It's a non-issue. I have no problem with them quoting some parts of the Bible because the Bible is also a historical record of Jewish history, some of which is corroborated by archaeological evidence.
We do not have to abandon these words such as "racism", "antisemitism", and "multiculturalism". We just need to revive their original meanings and prevent them from being politicized again. The only word I think we should abandon is "the Other".
No question "The Other" should be laughed out of town.
and "No question that polygamy is a one-way ticket to patriarchal despotism." - Cornelius
Not just that, it's a one way ticket to tribal or clan despotism too.
Thank you for the flattering remarks, Cornelius. I find your posts unfailingly well argued, if often misguided, as well.
Forgive me, but how is "jewish" a race?
What are the seperation lines that define such a class?
If a "jew" is born in Bethleham at this time, is he born a "jew", or a "Palistine"?
It seams much of our thinking on these matters is guided by the lines drawn on our maps.
Racism is taught to the young.
We are a species, and we are all human.