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Thursday, August 11, 2005

Anti-Semitism

Lileks is in rare form here:

The Presbyterian church - not the members, but the learned elders - has announced it will use the church’s stock holdings to target Israel for being mean to the Palestinians. But they’re not anti-Semites. Heavens, nay. Don’t you dare question their philosemitism! No, they looked at the entire world, including countries that lop off your skull if you convert to Presbyterianism, and what did they chose as the object of their ire? A country the size of a potato chip hanging on the edge of a region noted for despotism and barbarity. By some peculiar coincidence, it just happens to be full of Jews.
Anti-Semitism strikes me as the best objective evidence for the existence of Satan. For no particularly discernable reason, all sorts of people seem to go out of their way to hate Jews. Other than 'the devil made me do it' it is sometimes hard to fathom why. It is not particularly hard for me to be disgusted by this behavior though.

1 Comments:

Blogger Eitan Ha'ahzari said...

Anti-semitism is a phenomena that has been explained in so many ways one cannot possibly keep up with them. It's an evil that has existed since Abraham's disavowel of Haggar, Sarah's servant whom she instructed to bare a child for Abraham considering that she, herself, was "fruitless". Ishmael, or "God heard"-referring to God's hearing Haggar's pleas for help while stranded in the desert, was the first Arab. Obviously people had existed in the region before, but these had been bedouins with no particular ethnic background.

God,in one of His prophetic dialogues with Abraham stated that the descendants of Ishmael would hate and prosecute Israel-or the Jewish people.

Although most people would trace the origins of anti-Semitism to the Middle Ages, I myself, although an aethiest, do believe that already in the 4th century B.C.E. various desert groups clashed with the Jews who were-as they continue to be-inheritantly different and therefore the objects of persecution.

One may attribute the evil that is anti-Semitism to various reasons such as the socio-economic standing of the Jewish people wherever they happen to be, Israel's so called "occupation" and harassment of the so called "Palestinians", the Jews' bitter resentment of Christians who would have us believe the Jews were responsible for killing Jesus as almost every single Pope has done so far,etc.

The reasons are there-whether justifiable or not-but as Dave comments, there's something evil about the whole premisis of hating the Jews.

8/11/2005 08:50:00 PM  

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