And a country the size of New Jersey that causes so much international consternation/condemnation..

Dennis Prager has mentioned this idea in the past -- the Chosen People as "canaries in the coal mine" -- and I find it quite interesting, especially when you set it next to the variously-attributed "Your Majesty, the Jews!" (said to be a learned man's response to a king asking for proof of God's existence). It may not be the kind of proof that a sciencologist would accept, but it certainly is suggestive.

Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.

"Unfortunately, in his infinite love for his creation, I suspect the Big Guy may have overestimated our intelligence."

Nice plug for the Republican party and especially for GWB.

A nice little essay.

There are two components of anti-semitism. Sometimes they are completely separate, sometimes they overlap or converge as they did in the case of Naziism.

The first is straightforward, vulgar xenophobia, the hatred of the other, the stranger. Of course this is exploited by those in power to cement a regime, provide a scapegoat, or for simple spoilation.

The other strain is harder to discern. Occasionally Jews are hated for being Jews. That is, that God Himself is hated, and the Jews as bearers of God's commands.

There is a telling passage in Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Foundations of the Nineteenth Century about this. At the very end of the Second volume, Chamberlain goes off into one of his three-page footnotes--he uses footnotes for failed chapters.

Those Jews he has attacked again and again in the preceeding 1200 pages really aren't so bad, if they had just kept their ideas to themselves. The problem, Chamberlain wrote, and the Nurenberg-convicted criminal Alfred Rosenberg later picked up on this, was that their alien, unfolkish, God-concept was grafted onto an unwilling Europe by the Catholic Church.

Chamberlain had gone on and on with quack ecclesiastical history about how Saint Paul, the Jew, and later, the Athanasians, perverted the real message of Jesus Christ, who, by the way, was actually German. The "real message" looked something like discarding the old Jewish God-concept and becoming a free, human hero. He goes into Conversion-age history to find a connection between "Arian" and "Aryan." It is all quite unhinged, reading like something from Louis Farrakahn.

Why bring up this now? The Klaven article spells it out, ". . .the Jew contributed so much to humanity's moral code., that to hate them as a race is to despise the restraints of morality itself." The enemies of permanent things--witches, queers, haters of their parents and neighbors--will wind up as antisemites.

Lou! I believe you've nailed it again.

OJ: I believe this and other comments are irrefutable proof that Lou is a Brother By Another Mother, or however you phrase it. You should give him a set of keys to the website and turn him loose.

I second Mike's motion. All in favor say aye?

As further examples of Lou's "second strain" of antisemitism, which is a by-product or symptom of hating Judeo-Christian morality, consider Voltaire and Mencken.

Lou has an unfortunate tendency to express himself in the language that his folkish ethos harkens to, using terms like coloreds, camel-jockeys, etc.

Lou is teaching me German, one word at a time.

Wasn't Voltaire's relationship to Christianity ambiguous, at least at the end? More like Pascal's wager?

No, Voltaire was a Christian:

http://www.brothersjudd.com/blog/archives/2005/12/theres_a_name_f_1.html

I suppose that is why Voltaire wanted to see the last noble strangled with the entrails of the last priest.