May 25, 2004
BAD DREAMS
Berkeley Intifada (Anneli Rufus, East Bay Express, May 19th, 2004)
On the day after September 11, Micki Weinberg walked to the UC Berkeley campus still in shock. At the entrance to campus, facing Telegraph Avenue, huge sheets of blank paper were spread out as an impromptu memorial on which students, faculty, and other passersby were invited to write comments. Glad to have found such a forum, Weinberg scanned the inscriptions. Then he saw one, large and clear, that stopped him dead in his tracks:"It's the Jews, stupid."
The slender Weinberg, a year younger than most freshmen, had only just arrived at Cal from Beverly Hills, where he had been president of his high school's Shalom Club. As a young teenager, he had savored heady stories of how Mario Savio and his comrades in the Free Speech Movement danced the hora and sang "Hava Nagila" at sit-ins and peace rallies forty years ago. The son of left-wing, Jewish intellectuals, Weinberg viewed himself as one too, having spent the summer before his senior year of high school in Myanmar, cataloguing the archives of Rangoon's disintegrating and depopulated Jewish synagogue. "That's why I came to Berkeley -- because of its strong romantic aura of the Free Speech Movement and Mario Savio," he recalls. "Then I got here and discovered that that light seems to have been extinguished. You have this vitriol. You feel it everywhere. Berkeley is now the epicenter of real hatred."
Almost three years later, Weinberg graduates this month as a student whose days at Cal were marked by what he calls "pinnacles of horror," in the pinched tone of a man betrayed. He remembers pro-Palestinian protesters insisting that Israeli border crossings are as bad as Nazi death camps. He remembers the glass front door of Berkeley's Hillel building -- where he attends Friday night services -- shattered by a cinderblock, with the message FUCK JEWS scrawled nearby. He remembers the spray-painted swastikas discovered one Monday morning last September on the walls of four lecture rooms in LeConte Hall accompanied by the chilling bilingual message, "Die, Juden. "
In recent years the international press has documented the resurgence of anti-Semitism around the world. Jewish schoolkids have been attacked by epithet-shouting gangs in Belgium, Denmark, Sweden, France, and Brazil. Synagogues have been destroyed in Marseille and Istanbul; a Jewish school was firebombed this spring in Montreal; "Death to the Jews" was shouted through bullhorns outside a temple in South Africa. AP ran photos last month of a Jewish graveyard in eastern France where a hundred tombstones had been spray-painted with blood-red swastikas and the Nazi slogan Juden Raus: "Jews out." The Chicago Sun-Times and the British Guardian report that a ubiquitous chant at European soccer matches -- leveled at London and Rotterdam teams perceived as having Jewish roots -- is "Hamas, Hamas, Jews to the gas."
So, what is to be done?
Posted by Peter Burnet at May 25, 2004 7:15 PMPut a replica of the entrance to Auschwitz on the Mall. Place an armed guard next to it, with orders to shoot anyone who tries to deface it.
What is to be done? Bring all the willing Jews of the world to the USA and forget the rest. We are the final protection and salvation of this gifted ethnicity and we will be blessed by the untold contributions they will bring with them to our democratic republic. Let the rest of the world go .... themselves, including the ........ at Berkeley or wherever.
Posted by: genecis at May 25, 2004 8:24 PMAhhh. Singing "Hava Nagila", cheering on
the Viet Cong and generally sneering at the
beer swilling gentile masses. Those where the
good old days of free speech man.
And now, political crazies have fermented into their universal endpoint: Jew-bashing.
Extreme Right or Extreme Left, you'll find all political crazies have one thing in common:
They hate Jews.
Posted by: Ken at May 25, 2004 8:49 PMI agree they are a gifted race.
Thank you...
Emma Lazarus,Rosenbergs,Oppenheimer,SDS,ACLU,
NAACP,Freud,Marx,Franz Boaz(and your cultural relativism),Allen Ginsburg,Abbie Hoffman and
too many others to mention.
It's been a long strange trip.
By the way, cut the pro-hamas hooligans some
slack. That's the kind of wretched refuse we
were supposed to welcome right?
So what's your suggestion J.H.? Name an recent ethnicity that has contributed greater real value to our basic culture than the jews. Of course they're not the only ones of late. But what they have to offer is a treasure beyond the consciousness their stiff neckedness brings to us. Makes us uncomfortable at times? Hasn't morality always? Whoever said a life worth living was easy?
Posted by: genecis at May 25, 2004 9:07 PMWhat's to be done? Perhaps nothing but let the Left-Right discredit themselves so much that even the apolitical middle begins to rally behind Jews in general and Israel in particular. Have seen a lot of examples myself.
Posted by: MG at May 25, 2004 9:12 PMThank you...
Jonas Salk
Paul Ehrlich
Benoi Mandelbrot
Ayn Rand
John von Neumann
Baruch Spinoza
George Cantor
Albert Einstein
Fichard Feynman
Niels Bohr
Carl Sagan
Murray Gell-Mann
William Herschel
Simon Wiesenthal
Larry Ellison
Michael Dell
Alan Greenspan
Alan Dershowitz
Benjamin Disraeli
Barry Goldwater
Billy Joel
George Gershwin
Carole King
Irving Berlin
Gustav Mahler
Ari Fleischer
Wolf Blitzer
Flavius Josephus
Jesus Christ
Shall I continue? I'm sure I can name at least one or two more who have contributed positively to our world.
Posted by: Scott at May 25, 2004 9:19 PMYou left off David Cohen.
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at May 25, 2004 9:35 PMEmma Lazarus? Poets may be the unacknowledged legislators of the world, but immigrants don't actually get to come in to this country because of the poem.
Jeff -- I blush.
Posted by: David Cohen at May 25, 2004 10:07 PMJ.H. -- Most of the Jews you name were Jews in the sense that their parents or grandparents were Jews, or in the same sense that I am (probably) Welsh-German-Irish. They did not practice the religion.
Also, for your edification, Karl Marx hated the Jews.
Scott: don't forget Sammy Davis, Jr.
EO
Posted by: at May 25, 2004 10:08 PMNot to mention the debts owed to:
Abraham Cohn
Issac Gause
Sydney G. Gumpertz
Henry Heller
George Geiger
Benjamin Levy
David Orbansky
Simon Suhler
Samuel Gross
William Sawelson
Benjamin Kaufman
Raymond Zussman
Isadore S. Jachman
Jack H. Jacobs
John L. Levitow
Leopold Karpeles
It's not the Rotterdam team which is "perceived as having Jewish roots", it's the Amsterdam team, Ajax. This is also hardly a recent phenomenon, it traces back at least 3 decades. See also:
http://www.ajax-usa.com/history/kuper/we-re-hunting-the-jews.html
What we know for certain is that the author can't get simple facts straight.
Posted by: Dutch at May 25, 2004 11:48 PMI really don't see how any logical argument can work on the nutcases described in the article. I'd simply recommend killing the bad guys and hopefully some of these "true believers" will glance at the dead bodies and think, "You know, maybe Allah wants me to be an accountant or an elevator operator or something other than a cuckoo-bird." The rest? Keep on cleaning the Augean stables out, and keep sniffing around 'cause there'll always be more.
Posted by: Just John at May 26, 2004 12:19 AMWhat genecis said, 100%.
It's a shame and a tragedy if Jews worldwide have to uproot themselves, especially from nominally "civilized" places like Europe, but ultimately the US and Israel offer a future.
Posted by: Michael Herdegen at May 26, 2004 12:29 AMScott: I take issue with Salk and Joel. Especially Billy Joel.
To the rest: Nicely done.
Posted by: Chris at May 26, 2004 8:06 AMIf you see America merely as a techno-mercantile entity and a producer of disposable pop culture than you can come up with all sorts of people we
"owe debts to".
The reality on the ground is that the core
Western-ness of America is a degraded imitation
of what it was at the turn of the century.
What group embraced these ideas...
a) socialism
b) radical feminism
c) uncontrolled immigration
d) destruction of Christianity as America's
public religion.
e) dissolution of America's racial integrity.
f) fostering of pluralism
g) freudianism
more than any other?
These ideas are not necessarily lethal to a
group that is ever-moving and in a sense
without a country, but to the dominant cultural
ethnic group (rooted in a place) that can't so easily morph from one ideology to another it has been quite destructive.
Regarding my very fist post :
I merely got a chuckle over the article because
this student was so shocked by the behavior
he saw on campus, when exactly the people he
idolizes (SDS/free speech) created the environment that led to our country welcoming such
trash in the first place. The irony is painfully
obvious to me, why not you all?
My first reaction to the question ("what is to be done?") was not thoughtful. Intemperate, but I would still do it, although 5 seconds after posting, I remembered the Holocaust Museum, which is right there next to the Mall.
It is one of mankind's characteristics, that the Jews have received some of the worst treatment (and continue to do so), while within the Holocaust Museum is a wall which spells out the issue pretty clearly: "I have set before you life and good, death and evil....", a formulation given to a Jew. And after all we have seen in the 20th century (and all before that), people still choose death and evil.
What drives people to hatred? Get down to that root, and then we will know what to do.
Posted by: jim hamlen at May 26, 2004 10:09 AMJ.H.
What group embraced those ideas more than any other?
Christians.
Posted by: Peter B at May 26, 2004 10:44 AMJH was concerned over the "dissolution of America's racial integrity."
It is to laugh...the Virginia General Assembly had to pass laws to maintain racial integrity as early as the the 1690s because the colonists--male AND female--couldnt keep their hands off the native people and Africans.
Racist Ben Tillman's brother talked South Carolina's legislature out of adopting the "one-drop" rule following the Civil war because it would have disenfrachised so many "white" Confederate veterans.
I myself, like millions of other "white" Americans have both native and African ancestors in this country...the latter of which under the laws of many states makes me a black man even though that ancestry is over 200 years in the past.
Anyone who studies the genealogy of old American families will be surprised at the amount and variety of ethnic stock they contain. Especially in the South. There is precious little racial integrity in theis country.
Posted by: cornet of horse at May 26, 2004 11:47 AMJim:
"What drives people to hatred?"
On an individual level, nine times out of ten it's self-loathing and a sense of inadequacy.
Self-confident people tend not to bother with hating.
Get a group of self-loathing inadequates together and you've got trouble.
Posted by: Brit at May 27, 2004 4:09 AM"Get a group of self-loathing inadequates together and you've got trouble."
Brit, that is the common wisdom, but I don't think it is true. There was a study done of bullying, and what they found was that bullies don not suffer from low self esteem. In fact, their self esteem was high, too high. If you think about it, you have to have a pretty high opinion of yourself to feel that you are entitled to inflict pain and suffering on innocent people.
To answer Jim's question (I'm surprised that the house theologians haven't answered it yet) - men are fallen and sinful. To the Darwinists among us, that translates to the fact that hate has been an adaptive mechanism driving our evolution. Hate is functional, in the right circumstances. Our ideas of justice go against the grain of our nature.