If we assign blame to those who commit or acquiesce in persecution, should we not also condemn those who stand by and do nothing proactively; or worse, who block effective action, even as the clouds of the next Holocaust gather over them and their children? And doesn't that include just about all of us who have grown up in the Jewish tradition? I cannot help but wonder how the course of recent history might have been changed, had the generation of the grandparents of Hitler's victims engaged in such a discourse. "If only I had known!", becomes such a hollow and pathetic bleat, by the time one is already shuffling to the gas chamber.
However, under the duress of self-imposed social ostracism, Jews have never offered their own descendants in advance the right to participate in decisions governing their own destinies. After the fact, however, they have never exhibited particular reticence in flaunting their victimhood and Holocaust scars, as perverse badges of honor.
In the absence of such a wide-ranging proactive dialogue, however, additional millions of Jews are fated to suffer and die, presumably still wrapped in their prayer shawls and waiting for the arrival of that same Messiah, despite the obvious fact that he is already overdue by thousands of years. Also not stated is the fact that they are waiting forlornly for the arrival of the first God-like Jew, the first Christ-like Christian, and the first Mohammed-like Muslim!
In my thumb-worn edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica there are nineteen pages devoted to Anti-Semitism, and zero pages devoted to Anti-anyone else. Of course it is too outdated to record Palestinian terrorism, the neo-Nazi skinhead movement, the bombing in Buenos Aires, or any other of the more recent manifestations of hatred of the Jews. I am certain, however, that we can look forward to bigger and better entries on that subject, with each outbreak of economic malaise, earthquake, typhoon, pestilence, or sociologic dysfunction, anywhere in the world.
For example, there is already widely disseminated among American-Africans the canard that the AIDS epidemic is really a plot against them, conducted by Jewish doctors. And the malaise following the reunification of Germany has apparently dried the few remaining tears of shame and remorse shed by Germans, because Anti-Semitic incidents there have doubled in the past year alone. Handicapped as the Germans are by the pitifully low supply of available living Jews, they are reduced to the less-than-satisfying expedient of toppling the tombstones of the Jewish dead; of which, fortunately, there are plenty.
This is an appropriate place to tie together the growing phenomenon of Black Anti-Semitism, with the thesis of a Human Pecking Order. Until fairly recently American-Africans perceived themselves as being at the bottom of the American socio-economic order. However, by playing their roles as Oppressed Victims astutely, they are now witnessing a shift of power in their direction. Savoring this sudden good fortune, they are further emboldened to reveal all the resentments and envy they have harbored since slavery.
Who better to target with this hostility than those they regard as being only one rung above them in the Pecking Order; and handiest for the venting of all their accumulated resentments - the Jews? The greater the distance between two positions in the Order, the more courage is required on the part of those below to display their true feelings openly. Certainly at the present time there is little stomach on the part of American-Africans to challenge the White Protestants or Catholics.
