In the news:
“An 88-year-old gunman with a violent and virulently anti-Semitic past opened fire with a rifle inside the crowded U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum on Wednesday, fatally wounding a security guard before being shot himself by other officers, authorities said.
The assailant was hospitalized in critical condition, leaving behind a sprawling investigation by federal and local law enforcement and expressions of shock from the Israeli government and a prominent Muslim organization…….
Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center said von Brunn’s Web site has long been listed as a hate site.”
My Comment
It’s interesting how shootings in recent years have had some connection to the Holocaust (one heroic victim at Virginia Tech was a Holocaust survivor and a Holocaust survivor fell victim to the Mumbai attacks).
Von Brunn, according to reports, thinks “Jews control the Federal Reserve” and the banking system and are basically evil. He has a long-standing relationship with Willis Carto, founder of the Liberty Lobby, a white supremacist and anti-Semite.
His is also one of many people who question President Obama’s birth certificate, a group that’s apparently been christened the “birther” movement by many of our liberal-left pundits. At TPM Cafe, Joshua Marshall hastens to let us know that your ordinary, garden “birther” (I first thought they meant some kind of natural child-bearing advocate) is only a harmless wing-nut, but alas, not Von Braun.
Note:
It seems very clear from his previous arrests, writings and statements, that Von Brunn is NOT harmless. While I certainly think the federal government isn’t above milking every bit of lawless behavior to impose further controls, the fact is bigotry does increase during times of stress. And the most recent “hate crimes” legislation, does, in my estimate, try to deal with a broad range of victims – including anti-Christian bigotry in its language.
That’s a decided improvement.
I’ve been looking over some sites and postings that I’d consider antisemitic (this applies to other forms of racism or bigotry) and here are some thoughts:
1. Noting the ethnicity/religion of someone (especially if it’s germane to the story) is not racism/antisemitism/bigotry
2. Drawing an ineluctable connection between the ethnicity/religion and the behavior is racism/antisemitism/bigotry (the operative word is ineluctable).
Of course, in ordinary life, people do generalize about other races, even if it’s only in their own minds. In a stressful situation that might be understandable. (You get hit by a car and the driver, from a different race, ignores your plight and speeds off…you react by saying, “all so-and-so always act like this…”).
This sort of reaction is a momentary generalization or simplification of the kind that the brain is actually biologically prone to make (creating a binary of us versus them). The feeling crosses over and becomes racist when the reactive element in the response is deliberately cultivated and sustained through willfully ignoring all other factors, explanations, and theories.
Here’s what I mean.
It’s one thing to observe that there’s a high proportion of Jewish people working in finance and banking. There is. To deny that is to be out of touch with reality. The danger in trying to pretend this reality isn’t so deny reality is an obvious one. Uninformed people will then assume that every other part of what you’re saying is equally untrue and out of touch with reality. And they will assume every other thing they believe from appearances alone is true, even when in those cases, appearances are deceiving.
Now, if you are not a bigot, after that preliminary observation, several other things will (or should) occur to you. The first is that Jewish people are well-represented in practically all intellectually oriented professions. This itself should dilute the strength of any argument tending in an anti-Semitic direction.
Perhaps the dominance of Jewish people in banking could then be attributed to other factors – historical and cultural, rather than to “Jewishness.”
Now, I realize I am on tricky grounds here, because sensibilities have become so over wrought that any misstatement can be construed as intentionally offensive. So, let me first say, if I do make a misstep, it’s not intentional and will be glad to restate my position, if someone points out why it might be offensive.
More later..
Meanwhile, Jeremiah Wright has gotten into hot water for saying “the Jews” have kept him from Obama.
And, the thought police (in this case Newsweek) is after Oprah as well. Turns out the Queen of Talk is sympathetic to the anti-vaccine folks – the ones who think that vaccines are often about big pharma’s profts more than about your health. The article also criticized Oprah on other grounds, but methinks that’s the crux of the matter. The feds might have an interest in nixing any possible joining of forces between left-oriented alternative medicine advocates and right-oriented ones, in advance of selling swine flu vaccine to the public.
A swine flu pandemic also makes a convenient pretext to control the movement of people between countries.
Of course, it could all be coincidental, and I could just be another “wingnut” on the loose….
But so far, the wing-nuts are winning the credibility contest.
