The Clare Spark Blog

Haman

A relative of mine surprised me by observing that since the USA is fundamentally a Christian state, so why should not Israel be a Jewish state? (He was reacting to John Kerry’s –and Obama’s–opposition to the notion of a Jewish state in the current “negotiations.”)

During my days at Pacifica radio, there was an anonymous crank caller who started every comment with the allegation that “Western Christian civilization” was in jeopardy if the various 1960s movements made significant headway. I thought then that he was nuts, but now I am coming around to seeing what he meant, and how valid an observation his was.

Take the much vaunted “Judeo-Christian heritage” that supposedly defines this country and its founding. It turns out that such a benign construction of interfaith comity appeared during the 1940s and 1950s, with occasional outcroppings in later years. Such a fantasy could only have taken hold by professional harmonizers (including many assimilated Jews), determined to overlook the degree of antisemitism in the Christian Bible (only “the Gospel according to John,” says Benzion Netanyahu), and in misunderstandings of how ordinary Christians view the Old Testament. Many of those of us descended from immigrant Jews would rather not know for the sake of getting along, even if it means ignoring the growing antisemitism not only after the Great War, but in the lead up and execution of WW2. We are often oblivious to the depraved indifference to the Holocaust in progress, at a point where it could have been stopped or alleviated. We don’t notice that the “atheists” derided by Bill O’Reilly on Fox News have Jewish names. Every single one. And guess who the “secular progressives” signify to such as O’Reilly? (This is a hunch that I cannot prove.)

Here is how I described the “binary opposition” of Christian versus Jew” in another blog describing a Nazi exhibit der ewige Jude in 1937:

No European myth is benign or even neutral with regard to Jews or to the liberal values that “moderates” want to defend, nor can it be otherwise. All Jews, including the “eternal” ones, are “bad”; the antithesis of Christian and Jew corresponds to the antipodes of Christian [organic] conservatism* and Jewish [classical] liberalism: (heartfelt) mysticism and (heartless) science, trust and withering skepticism, loyalty and betrayal, community and mob, busy bee and parasite, garden and wasteland. “Good Jews” like Lessing’s Nathan the Wise, Cumberland’s Sheva, Walker’s Schechem, and Dickens’ Riah who appeared in the humanitarian literature of the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth century were good only because they were more Christian than the bourgeois Christians who were behaving like Shylock and Fagin; capitalism purged of its Judas red-beards would presumably lose its heartless and exploitative character. Christian landlords would never evict a tenant, Christian bankers would never foreclose a mortgage: this demented idea is fundamental to the völkisch revolution of Nazism,[2] but was not their invention. Nazi anti-Semitism, then, was only partly about the considerable material advantages in expropriating Jewish property and expelling Jewish rivals: Nazis, to maintain their credibility as redeemers and protectors, would have to plunge a stake in the heart of the “demon Thought” (to use Byron’s expression). For the antifascist critical mind is not found in a guilt-ridden Adam shrinking from conflict with illegitimate authority or from the perception of other irreconcilable conflicts. Instead, the anti-Semitic/ anti-intellectual mind anxiously mystifies group antagonisms by positing (an unattainable) harmony as “normal.” Brandishing images of solidarity, the fascist bonds people only to “romance” in a false utopia necessarily maintained through deceit, terror and catharsis.

So hip liberal television writers may freely mock Southern conservatives such as the extremist “Sally Langston” in the popular television series Scandal, but ignore the pervasive theme of Amor Vincit Omnia (a habit inculcated in united happy families?) in liberal theories of conflict-resolution.

Enter “hate speech” or “hate crimes”. We should be loving one another, we should be walking in the steps of Christ in all our dealings with “the Other.” “To know all is to forgive all.” And who inflicted repression of “free speech” on us? None other than the putatively Jewish critical theorists, all “Jews” or renegade “Jews” whose chief aim in life is to control “the goyim.” (See https://clarespark.com/2011/10/21/did-frankfurters-kill-the-white-christian-west/.)

Is it any wonder that with all the curriculum reforms urged upon us by liberals, conservatives, and radicals alike, no one is pressing for a systematic study of antisemitism in the West, including the USA, the every-day variety that stops short of mass murder, but feels no compunction about inflicting mild to serious traumas on its “Jews” who remain strangers in a strange land?

Happy Purim, even though the Israeli Left still doesn’t get it: http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/rabbis-round-table/.premium-1.579731. I could have entitled this blog “Is John Kerry the new Haman?”