“Posted at 04:00 PM ET, 10/17/2011
Occupy Wall Street: Does anyone care about the anti-Semitism?
In the millions of pixels devoted to the radical Occupy Wall Streeters, virtually nothing has been said about its anti-Semitic elements. The conservative Emergency Committee for Israel is out with an eye-popping ad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=NIlRQCPJcew
Those vile scenes have been noticed in Israel as well. Israel Todayobserves:
A growing number of Israelis and foreign Jewish groups are expressing concern over the anti-Semitic flavor of some of the “Occupy Wall St.” economic protests in the US. . . .
In Los Angeles, California, protester Patricia McAllister, who identified herself as an employee of the Los Angeles Unified School District (we can only hope she is not an educator), had this to say:
“I think that the Zionist Jews, who are running these big banks and our Federal Reserve, which is not run by the federal government… they need to be run out of this country.”
The alarm bells behind Iran’s alleged assassination plot
By Richard Cohen,
Cassi Creek: We operate, or at least try to, as if we are living in a rational, logical, world, and as if we are rational, logical individuals.
In such a world anti-Semitism would not exist, racism would have been eliminated from our culture, and war between nations would be a thing of the past.
Kepler, Galileo, Newton, building on the work of ancient Greeks and on that of Oriental scholars mapped out the beginnings of a logical universe that responds to the laws and theorems proven to be correct by means of replicable observation and experimentation, rather than at the whim of mythical super-beings, no one has ever seen without benefit of mind-altering substances. In many cases, they had to resist the overwhelming amalgam of religious dogma and civil complacency that placed barriers in the path of researchers and experimenters who dared oppose the view of the Church, and who risked a heretic’s agonizing death in search of accurate scientifically derived truth.
Kelvin, Curie, Pascal, Bohr, and a host of others expanded our knowledge of chemistry and physics. Public education systems provided the opportunity to eliminate dogma from the curriculum. Expanding knowledge in the physical sciences spilled over into medicine and other biological disciplines.
This all pointed toward the logical, rational world we need where bigotry and hatred no longer form public and political opinion. However, pointing the way and seeing the way developed and made standard practice are different matters. We’re still a long way from eliminating anti-Semitism. There is sufficient idiocy fueled by dogma to cause Iran to foment religious wars that will only result in the deaths of millions so that thousands can seek martyrdom.
We can find the secrets at the innermost workings of particle physics. We can view the outer edges of the expanding universe. But we can’t defeat stupidity and we can’t overcome irrationality in voters. We can open the universe to explore and to learn from but we can’t keep the believers in fairy tales from trying to turn back the calendar to the days when discovering that the earth circled the sun could result in being burned as a heretic.
Our right wing fanatics rail against the Islamic theocracies in the Middle East, to the point of trying to stir up yet another war against an Islamic nation. Too bad that our homegrown Taliban can’t see the image in the mirror.
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