These ongoing pogroms, anti-Semitic attacks, the noisy and often violent demonstrations, and the individual attacks on Jews in Europe and elsewhere, apparently occur in cycles. But they especially explode when Jews fight back and take steps to trounce their tormentors. As Israel is doing now against Hamas in Gaza. How dare they?
Now, as an atheist, I have no special regard for any religion. The one I hate – and I hate it because I fear it, and fear that it is making inroads in my Western culture, because it is a malignant, death-worshipping, nihilist evil – is Islam. All the others, including Judaism, don’t worry me, because not a one of them is telling me to defer to it, walk on the other side of the street, or threatens me with death. All those others exist on the periphery of my consciousness and of my concerns. I try to imagine an Amish farmer in a suicide vest. It doesn’t compute. The idea is laughable. Although I suspect that if Muslims try to collect jizya from the Amish, I think Amish pacifism will come to an end, and Islam will have a problem. I especially look forward to the Quakers’ reaction to submission.
But, I am otherwise indifferent to religion. I was raised in a Catholic household without having become a Catholic. The contradictions, arbitrary restrictions, hypocrisies, scandals, and corruption prevalent in that creed alienated me permanently from any species of mysticism.
Jews? I don’t even regard them, collectively, as a “race.” In my mind, Judaism is a religion, first and foremost. Anyone can become or be a Jew: Caucasians, Latinos, Blacks, Asians. I wouldn’t know a Jew on a street unless he wore his religion on his sleeve, as Hassidic Jews do.
But it is also true of Islam, that it isn’t reserved to a specific race. Except the difference is that Judaism isn’t seeking rabbinical hegemony over the globe. Jews are not telling me that I’d better convert and wear a kippah, or lose my head, or see my daughter raped, or my son’s hands chopped off.
Jews just want to be left alone, and, incidentally, to benefit the rest of the world with their work and humanity.
But no one wants to leave them alone. Jews are the one-size-fits-all historical scapegoats for whatever miseries or catastrophes have beset mankind or brought about on himself. History abounds with instances of how Jews have benefited man, yet were banished or subjected to riotous murder. They have loaned money to bankrupt princes and spendthrift governments, yet were snubbed, insulted, or worse. They have excelled in medical and scientific research and technology, and in business and finance. They are generous to a perilous fault, such as the foolhardy supplying of their enemies in Gaza – and that includes all the hapless shnorers, Hamas’s human shields – with medical supplies, food, and other necessities.
