Because I regard myself as even-handed in my condemnation of all organized religions and cults, I hope I may be spared at least part of the brunt of being called a "self-hating Jew" (which will probably be charged, anyhow). Besides, argumentum ad hominem - attacking the persona of the adversary rather than his arguments - is still the last refuge of scoundrels and losing debaters.
While it remains an inalienable right for anyone to make a fool or a martyr of himself, as hundreds of benighted souls chose to do in the Jonestown and Waco cult suicides, even when this is done in the name of The One True God, such a decision becomes indefensible when it is inflicted on innocent children. Unfortunately, however, it has been the practice of most organized religions to impose a rigidly-controlled behavior on their children, and to enforce that control either by the threat to withhold parental love, or by sowing the seeds of a cancerous guilt.
However admirable it may be to stand up for one's principles, when a person is unable to pass the simplest test about what distinguishes his inherited package of principles from the Boy Scout Creed, or from any other religion or set of noble pronouncements, he is an unmitigated hypocrite. The willingness to suffer martyrdom by dying in a concentration camp, however noble and glamorous that may appear from a safe distance, is terribly final. If adherence to one's principles is indeed so compelling, it seems far more intelligent to stay alive, in order to work or fight for them.
Such a capacity to compromise and adapt is the hallmark of rational behavior; while passive acceptance of premature death - even after the near-certainty of that death has been assured for six millennia or so - is the negation of rationality.
As this is being written, the Jews are engrossed in a frenzy of "Holocaust Remembrances"; dedicating monuments and museums, consecrating the ground at Auschwitz, and throwing bouquets at the movie, Schindler's List. When weighed against the facts of human nature, however, all of these are simply media events which offer no hope whatever of derailing or disrupting the next scheduled demonstration of man's inhumanity to man.
Even those media events themselves have become trite and ritualized over the years. The usual gaggle of aged survivors is rounded up to vow (in front of the cameras, of course) that "This must never be allowed to happen again." Elie Wiesel, the sad-faced doyen of professional victimhood, makes his obligatory appearance on the talk shows. Then the world yawns, stretches, and turns its attention once again to more pleasant pursuits.
If the Christ-killing legend constitutes a nefarious plot to impart communal guilt to an entire people, then all those Holocaust Remembrances are no less so. All they do is provide a sound bite or photo opportunity in which to waggle a finger at gentiles, for the sole purpose of imputing guilt to them. Such irritative rehashing of stale material serves only to provoke and hasten the coming of the next Holocaust.
The ancient and fatal fallacy that has guided our thinking, and that constitutes the ultimate source of the grief that has befallen the Jews over the ages, is the assumption that Anti-Semitism is a phenomenon for which a reason exists; that it has something to do with good and evil; or that it might even be based on our avowal of certain principles. The fact remains, however, that there is nothing we can do - no changes that lie within our power to effect - that will either mollify Anti-Semites or cause them to stop hating us. Quite bluntly, Jews are selected for persecution simply because of their "differentness"; for choosing to exist as a separate and identifiable entity within the Pecking Order. That is one more reason why the practice of self-segregation - or "multiculturalism," as it has come to be known - constitutes such a danger for Jews.
