response to Dima on the pogrom by extremist Jews in East Jerusalem

Dima wrote:

Walter,
Your choice of words is sad. A group of people who want to get revenge for the slaughter of students in a neighborhood that was jubilant over the event is perhaps not just but I wouldn't really call it a pogrom.

You must also agree with the use of the word Holocaust to describe the unfortunate killing of 20-50 civilians who were caught in the line of fire between IDF and terrorists who seek to inflict damage on civilians.

-Dima

So, Dima, when Russian mobs smashed up Jewish houses (and much worse) in Czarist time, you call it a "pogrom" but when Jewish mobs do the same to Palestinians, you find it "sad" that I use the same word to describe it? What other word to use to describe the act of an out of control mob that attacks a town and smashes, burns and loots?

Lets look at the definition:

[Origin: 1880–85; (< Yiddish) < Russ pogróm lit., destruction, devastation (of a town, country, etc., as in war), n. deriv. of pogromít’, equiv. to po- perfective prefix + gromít’ to destroy, devastate, deriv. of grom thunder]

—Synonyms slaughter, butchery.

Well, that is what occured when goyische mobs smashed up Jewish towns and shtetls while the police looked the other way and that is what happened when the Jewish mob smashed up the Arab neighborhood of Jabal Mukhabar while the police looked the other way. Thankfully, it didnt get to the level of "slaughter and butchery" but that is likely because the residents of the neighborhood hid in their houses, knowing they would have been risking their very lives confronting a hateful mob that was heavily armed.

Dima, It is absolutely inadmissable by any standard of Jewish morality to claim that it is OK for Jews to smash up the homes and property of innocent non-Jews because the perpetrator of the massacre at Mercaz Harav happened to have lived in the neighborhood. And of course, I mourn deeply for the Israelis killed by rocket fire in Sderot and in the north of the country in 2006. I have loved ones who live in a kibbutz which was shelled during that war. But I also mourn for the larger number of Palestinian civilians killed in the IDF military response to the rocket fire. Each human life is precious, Jewish and Palestinian, alike.

Walter

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my response to Dima concerning Rev. Wright

Dima wrote:

Walter,
If you said the things this racist pig has said and substituted "black people" for "white people" you would be shot the next day. I for example had nothing to do with slavery yet am being discriminated because of the color of my skin. I hope you're writing this stuff to get a rise out of people and don't really believe this.
-Dima

Dima,
Of course I mean what I wrote. This country that you and I love, and which Obama loves and I believe, Rev. Wright loves as well despite his justifiable anger, has a hideous, murderous history in regard to its treatment of black people--quite analogous in its own way to Germany's genocide of the Jews. Beofre you get too bent out of shape at that comment, ask yourself how many milllions of blacks died during the 'middle passage' on the slave ships from Africa to America over 200 years, and from being worked to death on plantations. We dont know for sure, but I believe the numbers equal or surpass six million. That is a bitter legacy that all Americans have an obligation to work to repair whether they were born here as I was or came as immigrants as Dima and many of the readers of this blog did. Having been born elsewhere doesnt absolve you of that responsibility, Dima. You moved to America and became an American citizen, and in doing so you assumed the responsibility that all Americans bear. But you are hardly the only one who doesnt want to deal with the responsibility of that historyt, which the Germans, to their credit, have taken up to try to make recompense to the Jews for the genocide their fathers and grandfathers committed. If America was facing its moral responsibilities in the same way, there would be a National Slavery Museum in Washington, as well as a National Holocaust Museum. But of course, it is easier to decry a genocide committed by another nation (the Germans) than one committed by the Good Old USA.

And we are not only talking of the times of slavery. Dima, as I've written here before, when I was 9 years old in 1959 and travelled to Virginia for the first time with my parents and went to the Mens's Room in the diner where we stopped that morning, I was stunned to find out that there were 4 bathrooms there; for White Men, Colored Men, White Women and Colored Women. 1959 aint that long ago, Dima. As Obama said in his brilliant and inspirational speech, Rev. Wright and his generation all lived through that and much much worse and of course they are still angry. Yes, as Obama also said, there HAS been undeniable progress on race relations in this country over the past 20-30 years, but we still have a long long way to go. Dima, who lives in worse conditions; the Russian Jews of Brighton beach or the African-Americans of Coney Island. So where do you get off claiming to be the one who is "discriminated against"?

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pogrom in Jabal Mukhaber

Please read the editorial in today's Haaretz that narrates how the Jerusalem police allowed a group of extreme-right wing youth to break into the Arab neighborhood of Jabal Mukhater, smash windows and damage cars. The residents of the neighborhood sensibly chose to stay in their homes, thereby preventing massive bloodletting between the two groups. The attackers were enraged that the murderer of eight Jewish students at the Mercaz Harav recently came from the enighborhood and that fliers had been pasted up in the area extolling the killing. So because of that, thugs should be given free run of a neighborhood, to threaten terrified men, women and children who had nothing to do with the killing or putting up the leaflets? So that is Jewish justice circa 2008; collective punishment carried out by a mob while the police shamefully look the other way?

As Haaretz notes, how laughable the claim that Arab residents of Jerusalem receive equal protection under the law. Their very lives can be put at risk by young Jewish thugs blowing off steam and the keystone cops of Jerusalem somehow cannot manage to prevent these people from reaching their targets.

As Haaretz notes, if a Jewish neighborhood anywhere in the world had suffered such an attack, Israel and Jewish organizations everywhere would rightfully be shouting that this is intolerable; that an attack on one Jew anywhere is an attack on all Jews everywhere. Yet a pogrom carried out by Jews meets largely with silence with the exception of a few brave voices like Haaretz. Question: What have we as a people come to that we would find such behavior by our own compatriots to be understandable and quasi-acceptable; so understandable and quasi acceptable that the police allow it to happen--just as they have allowed settler hooligans to beat and even kill West Bank Arabs for decades? Where is the Jewish conscience?

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Rev. Wright and America's Amnesia

The radio talk show hosts are up in arms about Rev. Jeremiah's Wright's assorted sermons over the years and poor Barack Obama has to deliver a strong denounciation of his pastor in order to maintain his credibility with the voters in the middle. Some of Wright's gestures have indeed been injudicious--such as his lifetime achievement award to Louis Farrakhan--although most mainstream blacks credit the Nation of Islam for getitng untold thousands of black men off drugs and their lives straightened out.

But, here is what Wright said that forced Barack to pull the plug on him:

"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."

You know what, a lot of that is true (though I don't know what he meant by 'Its in the Bible.' I guess he means that the Ten Commandments say: 'Thou Shalt Not Kill" and white America has been killing and enslaving and persecuting black people since the first slave ship pulled into Jamestown harbor in 1619). And yes, as Wright said, America does keep building bigher and bigger prisons and has locked up one young black man in 8. Yes indeed America has treated black people as less than human for almost its entire history. It held black people as slaves for 250 years (1619-1865) and then another 100 years of eighth class citizenship with segregation, disenfranchisement and lynchings. Thats 350 years of being treated like shit and only the last 40 years or so trending toward toward equality, that is if you overlook de- facto segreegation, redlining, 'driving while black', the imprisonment of much black youth and so much more.


Indeed, on what basis should a black person say, 'God Bless America'? Should he bless this country for enslaving African-Americans for generations and rendering the lives of countless generations a living hell? Yes, thank God, America is finally, finally beginning to come around, beginning to atone for 350 years of brutal oppression, but it has a very long way to go. And it is very sad and telling that in all the expressions of outrage at Wright and insistence that Obama distance himself, not one commentator I have seen has acknowledged that yes, America enslaved and brutalized black people. Maybe, just maybe, we are about to do something enormously important as a nation and elect a black president. But even if it happens, half of black America will continue to subsist in poverty, despair and isolation from the rest of the country.

So, it is a shame that Barack Obama cant express his real feelings at this moment and say, "I may not agree with everything my pastor has said, but he uttered some powerful truths." The truth is that America still has to pay some heavy debts to its black citizens to the point where many of them will finally be able to say 'God Bless America' and really mean it.http://rubyjewsday.blogspot.com/

Continued...