The usual argument might be very long, and may sport elaborate flowers and
designs, but it can always be reduced to something like this:
"It is wrong to generalize about Jews. It is prejudice. It is bigotry.
It is hate. I'm Jewish, I'm not rich, I don't support Israel, you misrepresent
me personally, and your stereotyping is thereby evil in intent."
The fundamental basis in this kind of complaint is that generalizations
are, as a genre, ethically bankrupt and have no verifiable basis in perceptual
reality. There is an entire pantheon of codified terms (which have become
-- themselves --stereotypical) that exemplify this terrain: "prejudice,"
"bias," "prejudgement," and the rest. These are words
-- tools, actually -- used to assail and anesthetize negative (read
CRITICAL) opinion. Ironically, there is a presumptive guideline (yes, a
grim "prejudgement") that fuels this world view: that negative
opinion (particularly of religious, ethnic, or racial peoples) is always
wrong. More than that: it is obscene. Negative opinion is categorically
considered to be baseless, even if it is based upon studious research or
extensive personal experience -- experience which, if indeed negative, is
deemed to be a skewed, inaccurate, slice of the real world. (* Note: the
only exception to this rule is the "White"/"WASP" genre
-- "White power," "Protestant establishment," etc.,
wherein a hostile opinion against this ethnicity has been popularly championed
for decades now as an ethical endeavor of pan-human, universalistic leveraging).
By Orwellian design, we are all forbidden to address the world views of
religious, racial, and ethnic communities unless we singularly express the
moral and intellectual equivalent of a Hallmark Greeting Card.
We live in an age where four men with red caps in a sea of blue fedoras
can indignantly claim that they are falsely misrepresented, declaring that
even if 4,000 blue hats stuff a room like a block of ice, it is incorrect
to state that it is a room of blue hats. If there are a few red exceptions
to the verifiable norm, it is demanded that we MUST pay homage to this ANOMALY,
wherein the minority --the EXCEPTION -- is afforded conceptual balance with
the overwhelming majority. Sensitivity to the "minority," however
conceived, becomes the Golden Rule of acceptable public perception. The
anomaly thereby serves to PERCEPTUALLY DIFFUSE THE THRUST OF THE MAINSTREAM,
causing a kind of inertia in beholding the central current. One cannot publicly
act, in any sense, upon the room full of blue hats, unless the unique four
are accommodated on equal terms as the other 4,000. This attitude is socially
declared, and enforced, by our educational and legal apparatus, to be rational.
To perceive the four red hats, conceptually speaking, as irrelevant to the
implications of the central current of blue is declared to be a "biased,"
and, hence, irrational view. Noting the dominance of 4,000 blue hats is
deemed injustice to, and misrepresentation of, the dissenting four. In political
terms, this equates to an enforced impotence in engaging the real world.
In today's politically-correct scenario, the obverse of "biased/prejudiced"
is "tolerance." Tolerance infers an openness to other peoples,
no matter how peculiar or grating (or contemptuous of others) their habits
or customs. If someone spits on the tolerant person and the convictions
he believes in (including the very precepts of "tolerance"), such
a tolerant person, by definition, doesn't spit back. He, of course, "tolerates"
the intolerant. The American people (and others, mostly in the West) have
been socialized to be "tolerant" of other peoples and cultures,
some which have become subgroups within the American politic. This culture
of tolerance, of course, represents a profound paradox for it demands that
one sits silent to absorb the ethnocentric habits, and sometimes assaults
and insults, of other social groups, groups for which "tolerance"
is not necessarily part of their own social vocabulary. A good case in point
is Jews. Jewish community INtolerance has been famed throughout the
centuries, regularly discussed by Jewish scholars, and justifiably perceived
as intolerant by religions, ideologies, and social classes of all sorts,
spanning both the globe and history. Of course we live in a time when it
is deemed a moral crime to state this, even if it is true.
The culture of tolerance is at a severe disadvantage in the innate competition
of various peoples. For, if a class of people is comfortable --as a collective
ideology -- in heralding ethnocentric INTOLERANCE as a legitimate anchor
of group identity and expression, the "tolerant" group has no
means to cope with it. The "tolerant" group defers to the push
of the intolerant, always, as a matter, now, of robotic -- bureaucratic
-- procedure. And if this class of INTOLERANT people have a tiny minority
within it that dissent from its central expression of INTOLERANCE, it's
all the better -- protectively-speaking; for the existence of the dissenting
minority within the intolerant entity serves, within a "tolerant"
society, to posture the ENTIRE group to be IMMUNE from criticism (complaints
which will only be defined as "bias," "prejudice," and
the like). For, after all, it IS indeed true that NOT EVERY SINGLE INDIVIDUAL
with allegiance, or root, to the intolerant group acts upon its collective
INTOLERANT will. Furthermore, it is an obvious truism that no two people
in any social group think 100% alike on all things under the sun, and this
is used as a ploy to obfuscate what indeed they DO hold in common, per their
mutual social congruence and collective identity.
Those in the vanguard of exploiting this bizarre tolerant-intolerant dialectic
are largely Jewish. Most champions of "tolerance" and zealous
monitors of "hate groups" (where, to loosely paraphrase former
Israeli prime minister and Irgun "terrorist" Menachem Begin, one
man's "hater" is another man's "freedom fighter") are
Jewish in control or influence -- the Anti-Defamation League, the Simon
Wiesenthal Center, the Southern Poverty Law Center, etc. Seeking comfortable
nests for Jewish ethnocentrism and racist Zionism in the "tolerant"
American politic, these Judeo-centric organizations are typically two-faced:
on one hand they champion "tolerance" (i.e., a kind of privilege
to be "different") for minorities (of which major benefactors
include of course Jews). On the other hand, they are stone silent about
the increasingly problematic Jewish appendage across the world: Israel,
and, many such hypocritical multi-million dollar champions of "tolerance"
perpetrate fraud: actively SUPPORTING and defending the brutal, racist Jewish
nation, condemned as such the world over.
The forging of "tolerance" as a kind of Thought Police has a long
Jewish history in America, stemming from Jewish Americans fears of spreading
Aryan fascism during World War II. It was a grave concern. How could the
Jewish community best fend off anti-Jewish hostility in the West, without
drawing too much attention, and hostility, to itself in the process? A vast
"educational" project was decided upon, appealing to non-Jewish
sympathies for the plight of those brutalized by the Nazi regime on the
other side of the world (later commemorated in the late 1960s as the "Holocaust.")
In the 1950s, Jewish scholars, often under the auspices of the American
Jewish Committee, began pouring out the results of a variety of surveys
and studies of "prejudice," including titles like Anti-Semitism
and Emotional Disorder, Dynamics of Prejudice, Prophets of
Deceit, and The Authoritarian Personality. They were influential
titles in the academic world (in which Jews were increasingly populous),
and appealed to the non-Jewish world's sense of fairness and justice. Of
crucial importance in this promotion was a diverse, "multicultural"
approach. Although Jewish concerns about "anti-Semitism" were
sometimes highlighted, the generic subject of "prejudice" more
often served as the subject of study. This was recognized to be a better
strategy, for Jewry was not nakedly highlighted in such a discussion, and
the championing of "tolerance" for other ethnic minorities (like
impoverished African-Americans) also benefited the Jewish community (eventually
to be the wealthiest ethnic group in America) just as well.
The irony in all this of course, is that traditional Jewish identity exemplifies
the epitome of "intolerance." The "Chosen People" concept
-- bedrock of Jewish identity, still welded in various forms to the communal
spine -- is antithetical to the very principles of universalism and pan-human
democracy. When we find ourselves today afraid to speak publicly the forbidden
"J" word in virtually any critical context, we sense the censorial
powers at work here. In a genuinely free society -- a democracy -- ANY subject
is fair game for critical inquiry and public forum. It is an article of
democratic TRUST that in the public examination of any topic, the truth
will be known. This faith in people's collective power to discern the right
and true from nonsense is the founding premise of democracy itself. Anything
less is a subsuming to dictatorial special interest groups that seek to
shape civil (and personal!) policy, wherein a truly democratic open forum
is replaced with the omnipresent bubble of public (and self-) censorship.
The ideology that demands the necessity of policing thought about ethnic,
racial, and religious organizations has zero faith in the open spirit of
man to discern true justice, and righteousness, from the airy feast of facts
set upon the table. In honest, open forum, the unjust will be exposed as
unjust, the fraudster revealed.
If, in our Alice in Wonderland world, the free thinker is continuously declared
a bigot for ascribing ANY generalization whatsoever to an ethnic group (particularly
belief systems and life styles that traditionally identify and DEFINE these
groups), what, then, is the rational purpose of words of distinction like
"Jew," "Muslim," "Tibetan," "Senegalese,"
"Methodist," or "French?" If they are all the same,
clones all, entirely saintly, each categorically beyond reproach, why have
names of specificity today to describe them? Must we redefine each as vague
lumps of cheese, emptied -- against the very principles of history and existence
-- of specific taste and feel, save for the requisite halos welded to each
and all? If all peoples think the same thing, or if exemplary mass identity
markers are routinely excepted and veiled by the fluke, and if there are
no grounds for debate between where you (in, say, Uruguay) and I (say, in
Uganda) are socially, politically, and historically standing, we may all
hand in our playing cards this moment, and call the whole of human ascension
done, for there is nothing left to debate between peoples. If a man cannot
freely criticize belief systems of any and all kinds, especially that realm
where religious, ethnic, racial, identity, and political activism entwine
and interlap, what fraud are we parading as a "free society" and
"democracy?" And if entire world views of ethnic, religious, and
racial groups are rooted like foundation timbers in an ancient house buffered
by the veiling New, what right has anyone to impugn the honest historian
for daring to attempt to map them?
The man of genuine "prejudice" is the one who slams the door shut
to an inquiry of any community's collective allegiance and principles. The
man of true "bias" is the one who refuses the innate right of
anyone to criticize ANYTHING. The man of true "intolerance" militantly
demands only the illusory reflections of Smiley Smile buttons in the testy
world of social and political relations. Only a monolithic "bigot"
fears public inquiry of that which he believes, and that which his commune
-- even with hallowed exceptions-- definitively heralds.
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