[continued from previous message]   
      
   >Nazism or Communism, before Zionism or the Middle East conflict. This   
   >week Jews celebrate the festival of Purim, gathering in synagogues to   
   >read the biblical book of Esther. Set in ancient Persia, it tells of   
   >Haman, a powerful royal adviser who is insulted when the Jewish sage   
   >Mordechai refuses to bow down to him. Haman resolves to wipe out the   
   >empire's Jews and makes the case for genocide in an appeal to the king:   
   >   
   >    "There is a certain people scattered and dispersed among . . . all the   
   >provinces of your kingdom, and their laws are different from those of   
   >other peoples, and the king's laws they do not keep, so it is of no   
   >benefit for the king to tolerate them. If it please the king, let it be   
   >written that they be destroyed."   
   >   
   >    When the king agrees, Haman makes plans "to annihilate, to kill and   
   >destroy all the Jews, the young and the elderly, children and women, in   
   >one day . . . and to take their property for plunder."   
   >   
   >    What drives such bloodlust? Haman's indictment accuses the Jews of   
   >lacking national loyalty, of insinuating themselves throughout the   
   >empire, of flouting the king's law. But the Jews of Persia had done   
   >nothing to justify Haman's murderous anti-Semitism - just as Jews in   
   >later ages did nothing that justified their persecution under the Church   
   >or Islam, or their repression at the hands of Russian czars and Soviet   
   >commissars, or their slaughter by Nazi Germany. When the president of   
   >Iran today calls for the extirpation of the Jewish state, when firebombs   
   >are hurled at synagogues in London and Paris and Chicago, it is not   
   >because Jews deserve to be victimized.   
   >   
   >   Many Jews are no saints, but the paranoid frenzy that is anti-Semitism   
   >is not explained by what Jews do, but by what they are. They are the   
   >object of anti-Semitism, not its cause. That is why the haters'   
   >rationales can be so wildly inconsistent and their agendas so   
   >contradictory. What do those who vilify Jews as greedy bankers have in   
   >common with those who revile them as fiendish Bolsheviks? Nothing, save   
   >an irrational obsession with Jews.   
   >   
   >    At one point, Haman lets the mask slip. He boasts to his friends and   
   >family of "the glory of his riches, and the great number of his sons,   
   >and everything in which the king had promoted him and elevated him."   
   >Still, he seethes with rage and frustration: "Yet all this is worthless   
   >to me so long as I see Mordechai the Jew sitting at the king's gate."   
   >That is the unforgivable offense: "Mordechai the Jew" refuses to blend   
   >in, to be just like everyone else. He goes on sitting there -   
   >undigested, unassimilated, and therefore unbearable.   
   >   
   >    Of course Haman had his ostensible reasons for targeting Jews. So did   
   >Hitler and Arafat, so does Ahmadinejad. Sometimes the anti-Semite   
   >focuses on the Jew's religion, sometimes on his laws and lifestyle,   
   >sometimes on his professional achievements. Under it all, however, it is   
   >the Jew's Jewishness that the anti-Semite cannot abide.   
   >   
   >    With all their flaws and failings, the Jewish people endure, their role   
   >in history not yet finished. So the world's oldest hatred endures too,   
   >as obsessive and indestructible - and deadly - as ever.   
      
   A long article isn't needed to explain why there is anti-semitism; jew   
   behavior is the sole reason.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)