George Salzman <doctorsci@gmail.com>
initial posting 15 Oct 2010 - last update 16 Oct 2011
Hatred to spare. One of the most disgusting people I have ever met is an American believer in the absolute correctness of Adolph Hitler’s ideology, which is based on an unshakeable hatred of Jews, i.e. all people of so-called Jewish ethnicity. Clearly this degree of hatred requires a belief in the correctness of the concept of ethnicity. For someone with this belief, it’s clear that “once a Jew, always a Jew”: that identity is indelible. As an American Jew I’ve had no trouble accepting that category as my “birth-stamp”, if not my “birth-right”. Simple enough, my parents and grandparents were all Jewish. My so-called “ethnic identity” was never a question. I may not have been “kosher”, but I sure as hell was Jewish. For many years I remained largely ignorant of the inhumane, absolutely unacceptable policy of the dominant Zionist ideology, which was to seize the territory of Palestine to make it into a Jewish State. What that meant, as this 1948 photograph [1] shows, was first of all, drive the Palestinian Arabs off their land by any available means. It ought to be recognized that people of so-called Jewish ethnicity are not at all different in their inherent qualities than any other ethnically identified group — neither better nor worse. All peoples are subject to the same range of emotions — of love, hate, tenderness, ferocity, and so on. Which ones predominate at a particular moment depend on the circumstances of that particular time. And they are all authentically human. That is as true of David Baillie, the American “Nazi” whose behavior fills me with disgust, as it is of every human being. I’ve been aware for a long time that among the people I come into contact with, many of whom are almost consumed by their hatreds, an especially frequent target of their virulent hatred is the category “Jews”. Why is this so? What kind of image does the term “Jew” cause in a normal person’s mind? |
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