Racism Unmasked

In trying to set up meetings with the UN Ambassadors of Peru, Portugal, and Brazil for Mrs. Laurie-Cardoza Moore, Envoy for The World Council of Independent Christian Churches and President/Founder of Proclaiming Justice to the Nations, I recalled the anti-Semitism over the many centuries and that, even today, still overtly exist in some of these countries. When you pull the mask off the face of racism, this is what you see.......when someone hates an individual or group, the legitimacy of their position doesn't exist.

The civil rights movement succeeded because the United States courts eventually recognized the legitimacy of minorities' positions. From that point forward, it was a matter of law. Democracy at work .... equal standing in the eyes of the law for all citizens. If we had only one goal to pursue in the PR war, it would be to ensure that Israel and Jewish and Christian minorities get a full hearing at the United Nations and in the international community... ..leaders and grass roots ... for their positions' legitimacy. That's more easily said than done into today's UN and media climate. But we push forward.

A Convenient Hatred: The History of Anti-Semitism

A Convenient Hatred: The History of Anti-Semitism, an extraordinary new and scholarly book by Phyllis Goldstein, is a must read for all Jewish and Christian people no matter how much they think they know of Jewish history. She presents a comprehensive chronology complete with themes, events, civilizations, characters, and analysis. Having grown up among mostly Christians of all denominations, I have been familiar with much of our deplorable history to one degree or another. However, the manner in which the research has been presented brings me to some new and surprising conclusions.

Whether Persians, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, rulers of the Holy Roman Empire, the Crusaders, the Christian Orthodox Churches, the Vatican, or European and Ottoman imperialists, Jews were expelled, robbed, murdered, repressed, denied, subjugated, and made perpetual scapegoats for every problem that occurred. The Black Death … the Jews did it, poverty .. the Jews again, the 911 attack on the World Trade Towers and so on. Even though some Jews were bankers, traders, merchants, and even advisers to their rulers, they, like all of their fellow Jews, were in such total subjugation that they never achieved equal standing in the eyes of the law for more than a few years, if at all, and only for small number of times. Ironically, the only equality those Jews “enjoyed” was with other Jews when it was time to be expelled, deprived of their wealth and possessions, or be murdered.

Many factors created an environment for the continued persecution of Jews. Some of them we typically don’t consider to be prime factors. But until the Guttenberg printing press was invented, people did not have education or books. They were uneducated and illiterate commoners and serfs …perfect foils for the lies and the programs by their rulers and/or their church clergy, who were the only ones who had access to books and education. Then it should come as no surprise that most people were indoctrinated and all that they were aware of is what was spoken to them from the Bible or the rulers. Consequently, in this fertile environment for hatred, Jews were caught in the shifting control of various rulers and/or or church clergy throughout nearly 2000 years of Islamic and European imperialism.

Hatred of Jews became a pathological obsession and an accepted norm.... hatred spawned from a swamp of fear, anger, jealousy, resentment, ignorance, illiteracy, subjugation, and politics. They all contributed to a poisonous atmosphere. But the prime factors are still infecting the minds of some Christians and many Muslims even today. Perhaps the two most dominant are the libel that Jews were “Christ killers”, and a book , The Protocols of the Elders of Zion*, that maintains that Jews (who collectively had little wealth and even less power) were plotting to subjugate the world.

Jews have been cast as the worst of humanity in holy books that are found in the replacement theology of Christianity and in the Koran. Throughout the countries of Europe and the Middle East/ North Africa, Jews were never given equal standing, because the state was the church and the church was the state Fundamentalism ruled so that if you were not one of them, you were not worthy of existing. Some Jews converted to Christianity or Islam and so did some Christians to Islam, and conversely, but the insanity continued. No Jew should wonder why Europeans handed Jews over to Hitler.

The foreword to this book included this enlightening quote : "As the eighteenth-century author Jonathan Swift wrote, you cannot reason someone out of something he has not been reasoned into." Like the book, it explains so much about the enemy today. As one of my bumper sticker slogans says, “Let’s kill all the Jews.” is not a negotiating position. …Sadly, Swift’s quote also explains some Jews on both the hard right and hard left. In this time of confusion and fear caused by the continued rise of global anti-Semitism (it has never really stopped) and the seeming ambivalence of the current administration, too many of us are divided and misguided, blaming others of us for the worsening conditions, rather than finding the common ground to take on the real enemy. After reading this book, I came to the realization that, with a few rare exceptions, America is probably the only place in history in which Jews have had equal standing in the eyes of the law, and only truly in our lifetimes Throughout history, nearly all other Jews have been expelled, murdered, subjugated, robbed, and, having been the perpetual scapegoat, were held responsible for everything that was wrong and punished for it.

But if you have read this far, here is the revelation. American Jews have become shackled by words. “Anti-Semitism” has been dumbed down and numbed down to a meaning closer to bullying than annihilation, extermination, and genocide. "Never again" focuses the treatment of Jews for 2500+ years on just the Nazi experience, when the Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Europeans, and Ottomans don't have to take a backseat to Hitler. Somewhere along the way, the "Palestinian-Israeli Conflict" paved over the "Arab-Israeli Conflict" like a mosque over a synagogue. We need to redefine the terms of the conversation. We have to replace complacence with craftiness and shrewdness. This isn't a debate; it's a PR war. Jews have been slaughtered by all manner of weapons, but the forces that wielded those weapons were words. Freedom is something you never really have… you have to fight to get it, and fight to keep it. If you ever stop ...it's gone.

* The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a fraudulent, anti-Semitic text purporting to describe a Jewish plan for achieving global domination. It was first published in Russia in 1903, translated into multiple languages, and disseminated internationally in the early part of the 20th century. Henry Ford funded printing of 500,000 copies which were distributed throughout the United States in the 1920s. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis were major proponents of the text: It was studied, as if factual, in German classrooms after the Nazi Party came to power in 1933, despite having been exposed as fraudulent years before. In the opinion of historian Norman Cohn, the Protocols was Hitler's primary justification for initiating the Holocaust — his "warrant for genocide. The Protocols purports to document the minutes of a late 19th-century meeting of Jewish leaders discussing their goal of global Jewish hegemony by subverting the morals of Gentiles, and by controlling the press and the world's economies. It is still widely available today, still presented, typically, as a genuine document, on the Internet and in print, in numerous languages.