The Things I Do Not Know

I do not know why this article by UCLA literature professor Saree Makdisi hits me so hard. It hits me harder than most others which are just like it, and that is a large number, to be sure. Hatred of Jews is not in short supply these days, and articles like this one come frequently, and more frequently as time goes by.

He is not saying anything which hasn’t been said before, or even recently, and he contributes nothing original to the current wave of Jew-Hatred. He is only harping on the same Neo-Nazi talking points which have made the rounds from Gaza and Jeddah to Paris and D.C. and back. The media closes the loop for this self-reinforcing putrid system of fevered beliefs, but this has not always been the case.

I do not know why the current round of Jew-Hatred has sprung up so quickly, or why it has done so now as opposed to some other time. I suppose it has to do with other global tensions, but this disease seems not to require a predicate. We might just as well pin it on the fictitious Man-Made Global Warming as on any other world syndrome–this is a phenomenon which occurs in lean times as well as fat, in peacetime as well as war, and in dictatorships as well as democracies.

It has been around as long as Jewry and Judaism have. “Anti-Semitism” is hardly a modern problem, and it does not need the 24-hr news cycle in order to spread. But that is its vector in the Western world these days. And as Jew Hatred has been around for as long as Jews have, it seems that only sometimes does it flare up, become malignant, metastasize. In our time, the media serve as gatekeepers, like it or not, of ideas admitted to the public discussion. But in this, the media are only a reflection of ourselves, of course. We are uneducated and proud, lazy and defiant, ignorant and smug, uncritical and unapologetic. We as a global society can no longer tell good sense from horse[poop] without somebody telling us which is which. And because the media reflect us, and because we follow the media, we have become lost. Nobody is minding the store.

Now all sorts of madness are discussed in reasonable terms, desperate battles of honorable men are debated and denigrated by cowards in places of respect, and piece by piece, each layer of our global civilization is eroded for want of maintenance, for want of defense, and exposes the layer beneath it.

The slippery slope does not lead away. It leads inward, and each time we fail to do the right thing, fail to take a risk for the sake of our way of life, fail to take a malcontent to task for disrupting the system which protects us all, we allow another of the million minor Satans to advance a step further down the slope, into our heart. [I think I swiped that from Solzhenitsyn, not sure -- bdb 2023]

As a man goes, so goes his society. Seen individually, there are more pressing and more dire problems than “Anti-Semitism”. Millions have died in North Korea, while a handful have died from Jew Hatred in the same period. Birthrates alone pose a far greater challenge to the longevity of Western Civilization than any particular ideology, no matter how malign. And in fact, the Earth may be getting hotter, say due to the Sun, and things may get quite unpleasant on this planet for every living thing.

But looking at problems individually is the recipe for failure. When humanity stops defending itself against suicidal ideas, Anti-Semitism is the vanguard. Whenever the Hatred of Jews becomes something otherwise rational people debate calmly, the entire world is in for a bad time.

I am not a Christian, or a Jew, or any other religion for that matter. I’m what you might call a “show-me” fundamentalist. But one thing my scientific outlook has shown me is that there is a Hell, it exists on Earth, it is created by man, and good people must fight evil or it will kill us all.

Using this article as a barometer, Hell is coming back.

And I don’t know why.

I was right.