[continued from previous message]   
      
   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.   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)