From Randall Hoven at American Thinker

Graph of the Day December 24,2009

What does it say that this memorial was unveiled in Jerusalem while we still have a hole int he ground?  Remember which side of the ‘fence’ this was built on.

Tips to Letty Kaplan

Many of my conservative readers and colleagues are a bit dismayed on why the Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat.  There are many possible explanations, enough to motivate a book by Jewish conservative Norman Podhoretz to title his latest book, “Why Are Jews Liberal?”

The recent firestorm created by two South Carolina Republican chairmen should give you some insight.  Edwin Merwin and James Ulmer wrote a letter to their local newspaper defending Senator Jim DeMint in response to criticism of the senator for avoiding earmarks.

They commented, “There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves. By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation’s pennies and trying to preserve our country’s wealth and our economy’s viability to give all an opportunity to succeed.”

Since Senator DeMint is not Jewish (he is Presbyterian) it is hard to see the relevance of invoking Jewish penny pinching stereotypes to make their point. I doubt that the Republican chairmen meant the stereotype critically.  Frugality was a virtue of the Puritans and Benjamin Franklin. But whenever you resort to stereotypes, malicious or not, you risk offense.

Years ago, I was waiting in line to pay a traffic ticket and struck up a conversation with a young man in line.  He noticed my Macon Iron (our family owned scrap yard) hat and asked if I worked there.  I acknowledged I did, but did not acknowledge I was an owner. He commented that he had just sold some scrap to Hirsh Metals, a competitor. “He didn’t pay me much,” he said,”but that is probably the Jew in him.”

He played the penny pinching stereotype, but he certainly did not mean it as a compliment.

Growing up I heard all of the jokes about penny pinching Jews. You probably heard the one about the Grand Canyon being made by a Jew who dropped a nickel down a gopher hole. Whenever I expressed offense, the response was always, “I meant it as a compliment. You know the Jews are smart and wise with money.”  Right, how foolish of me to mistake your intent.

A local Jewish friend was approached years ago after a local program by a prominent school board member (a Democrat by the way) who innocently asked, “Where do the Jews get their diamonds?”  She was stunned that he seemed to insinuate that we had some secret to wealth that we are keeping from the general public.

The same stereotype that was meant by one as a compliment is used by another as a derogation and by yet another to invoke a sinister secret or conspiracy.  The cast of the miserly greedy Jew was calcified for generations by the wicked Shylock in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice.  It may be a clumsy compliment for Merwin and Ulmer, but for centuries it was just another reason to despise the Jews.

Stereotypes are dangerous because they isolate groups. The two from South Carolina were only guilty of ignorance which can be corrected.  Bill Nigut, Director with the Southeast Regional Anti Defamation League (ADL- I serve on his board), said a mere apology was not enough; there needed to be a dialogue for the two to understand why the comments were offensive.

I am unsure how to approach such events.  Especially when the offense was not malicious I fear that a heavy handed response creates a defensive wall, leading to further isolation.  While I do not expect my non Jewish friends to be as knowledgeable about our history as we are, I do wish they knew more about their own history with the Jews.

I have struggled to understand anti-Semitism for my whole life and it still baffles me. As I write this I can glance at over two dozen volumes on my book shelves, specifically on anti-Semitism, and that doesn’t include other titles on Israel or Jewish history.

If you are inclined to understand the problem I would recommend “Constantine’s Sword” by James Carroll, a Catholic and ex priest. It details the history of the Church and the Jews in Europe better than any single volume.

I would also recommend reading about the history of Leo Frank.  I recommend “And the Dead Shall Rise” by Steve Oney.  I do not think it was coincidence that the only white man lynched in Georgia during the early twentieth century was a Jew. That stunning legal case was the source of many legal principles instituted to make trials fairer and was also the event that led to the founding of the ADL.

In spite of some instances of violent anti-Semitism in American history, we have averted the catastrophic hatred seen in Europe and the Middle East.  America is a culture that respects the individual.  It is why the Jews have done well here, and it is why ethnic groups from all over the world want to come here.  It is why we can elect a black president with a distinctly ethnic sounding name.

If there is one piece of advice I would give to Merwin and Ulmer, who may feel that they innocently stepped on a stereotype land mine, it would be to consider people as individuals.

Reagan was the last Republican who got substantial Jewish votes (40%).  Conservative commentator Ann Coulter’s comments about Jews being unperfected Christians, may have fit her personal theology but it was offensive. Pat Buchanan has been insensitive to Jews, but he seems to have been somewhat marginalized by the Republican mainstream.

Yet the Democrats have had their own voices that crossed the line.  Jimmy Carter, denials notwithstanding, has clearly crossed the lined from legitimate criticism to anti-Semitism. Liberal feminist Phyllis Chesler expressed her dismay with anti-Semitism among her fellow liberals in “The New Anti-Semitism”.  Do we remember Jesse Jackson’s characterization of New York City as Hymietown? Obama’s reverend Wright’s anti-Semitic comments were ignored by the President’s substantial Jewish supporters and when recently asked if he has spoken with the president since his inauguration Wright said, “them Jews ain’t going to let him talk to me.”

The anti-Semitism coming from the left is not nearly as innocent as the comment from Merwin and Ulmer; it is often hateful and malicious.  Charles Krauthammer noted that we too often invoke outrage at insensitive but non malicious episodes of anti-Semitism or racism, but remain cowardly silent when we confront the real thing.

But while the perpetrators of anti-Semitism on the left are dismissed as a fringe groups (even if it is the President’s ex spiritual mentor or an ex president himself), every insensitive comment from the right is seen as a warning sign that “we do not belong here.”

If this seems unfair to be held to a much higher standard of tolerance, it is. Get used to it. The Jews, of all people, should understand.

“Another factor affecting the nature of anti-Semitic manifestations is cultural in a deeper sense. Some societies value individualism more than communalism, some the other way around. In most Western societies and in American society in particular, the ethos at large sees each individual as a free and autonomous agent, so conformist behavior is less frequent and extreme than in societies in which hierarchy and communal norms prevail. On the other hand, communally oriented societies tend to have stronger control mechanism against antisocial behavior. The result is that individualistic societies tend to produce outlaws and one-off weirdoes, while hierarchical or communal -oriented societies are better at producing mobs. Mobs are better suited for enabling anti-Semitic policies and attitudes. It is no accident that fascism set deeper roots in more communally oriented European societies-Germany, Italy, and Spain- than in more individualistic ones like Britain, Holland, and the Scandinavian countries.”

Adam Garfinkle in “Jewcentricity”

HKO comments-  our individualistic tendencies are not to be taken for granted. It is the reason, in my opinion, that the current administration is getting such strong push back from grand sweeping, seemingly anti-individual solutions.  Ideas such as “It Takes a Village” run against the grain of the American culture.

Today and tomorrow is the anniversary of  Kristallnacht (literally “Crystal night”) or the “Night of Broken Glass”.  In 1938 “99 Jews were murdered and 25,000 to 30,000 were arrested and placed in concentration camps.  267 synagogues were destroyed and thousands of homes and businesses were ransacked. This was done by the Hitler Youth, Gestapo, SS and SA. Kristallnacht also served as a pretext and a means for the wholesale confiscation of firearms from German Jews.”

The premise was “the assassination of German diplomat Ernst vom Rath by Herschel Grynszpan, a German-born Polish Jew.”

This pogram foreshadowed the German war against the Jews, though they had been stripped of common rights before this event. “Kristallnacht also marked a turning point in relations between Nazi Germany and the rest of the world. The brutality of the program and the Nazi government’s deliberate policy of encouraging the violence once it had begun, laid bare the repressive nature and widespread anti-Semitism entrenched in Germany, and turned world opinion sharply against the Nazi regime, with some politicians even calling for war.” The United States recalled its ambassador but maintained diplomatic relations.

November 10 was Martin Luther’s birthday. Martin Luther has called for the burning of synagogues hundreds of years before and some Protestant clergy use his writings to justify the horrendous action.

Some synagogues have been recently rebuilt.

quotes from Wikipedia

It seems that the more I read about customer service the worse it is.

We have progressed from getting accustomed to pumping our own gas, to being our own checkout clerk at the grocery store, to accepting 20 minute waits on the phone to getting issues resolved that used to only take 5 minutes for an average human to do.

We wait in lines to sit in crowded and uncomfortable seats on an airplane after we booked a flight online instead of using a courteous travel agent.

Customer service has gotten so bad that I prefer to buy online whatever I can, but I detest ever having to solve any billing issue. After I select my preference to be English I need to listen to an endless array of choices. I now ignore them all and keep pressing “0″ until I get a human.

While such customer service deterioration has been rationalized in the name of cost cutting, the cost to the companies has been the deterioration of customer loyalty.  Because we as consumers are being treated as a commodity, we now treat you as a commodity.

One credit card company corrected 10 fraudulent charges using over 70 adjustments on 5 consecutive statements. The only reason I haven’t called and bitched is because they have credited over $300 more than they should have.

I have spent 90 minutes ( I always keep a timer by my phone) and spoken with eight different customer reps with another card company getting them to stop charging me $9.95 a month for a service I did not want nor ask for and credit me for the last four months of these charges.

I am ready to shred all of my credit cards and use cash only just to avoid dealing with these fools.

In a footnote in his new book “Saving Israel” author Daniel Gordis notes why he uses the word “Shoah” as opposed to the more common “Holocaust.”

In Hebrew “Shoah” means “calamity”. “Holocaust” is an English word that means “burnt offering” or “sacrifice of God”. The Jews of Europe were not sacrificed, they were murdered; there is big difference.

It seems Jews take their words seriously.

“More than that, no country in the world, not even Germany, would respond “proportionately” if some nonstate militia started rocketing their towns from across some border and killing German citizens.  If a government could not get the state from whose territories the rockets were being fired to take responsibility for ending the threat, then it would have no choice but to silence the threat itself.  Why do German intellectuals, journalists, and politicians expect Israel alone to act differently?  And why do they, of all people, insist that the use of force must always be a last resort in any political confrontation among states, when that kind of thinking is exactly what allowed Hitler to cause the Second World War? Germans frequently talk like Neville Chamberlain at Munich, when they ought to realize that it was Winston Churchill who was right: the readiness to use force in an appropriate and judicious manner is not what causes wars; it is often what prevents them.”

Adam Garfinkle in “Jewcentricity”

From the Wall Street Journal Political Diary-

to subscribe (highly recommended) go HERE.(only $7.95 a month for 5 postings a week- a real bargain.)

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has led a charmed political life. Prior to his current gig, Mr. Emanuel was a senior political aide to President Clinton, a Congressman from Chicago and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006, when Democrats took 30 seats from Republicans and regained control of the House.

Mr. Emanuel has also done better than most at leveraging his public service for personal gain. After quitting the White House in 1998, Mr. Emanuel went to work for famed Wall Street dealmaker Bruce Wasserstein, a big Clinton backer and major Democratic Party donor. And despite no prior experience in banking, Mr. Emanuel became a very wealthy man in a very short period of time.

“Mr. Emanuel earned $16.2 million in a two-year stint working in Chicago for investment-banking firm Wasserstein Perella & Co.,” reported the Wall Street Journal last year. He then ran for Congress and took seats on committees that oversee Wall Street and quickly became a top recipient of campaign donations from the financial industry. In his last House race in 2008, the Journal reported, “Mr. Emanuel collected more money than any other House member from hedge funds, private equity firms and the broader securities and investment industry, even though he faced no serious opposition.”

Mr. Wasserstein, who died unexpectedly last week, went out with a reputation as more than just a big-dollar banker — he was a serious liberal who cared about politics and policy. He also never stopped being a patron to Mr. Emanuel, whom he praised earlier this year as having a “keen understanding of the interplay of regulatory aspects and corporate activity in financial advisory work.”

If by “keen understanding” he also meant Mr. Emanuel had figured out how to make the “interplay” work for him personally, who could argue with that?

HKO comment- Crony Capitalism at its worse!

Col. Richard Kemp on the U.N. Goldstone Report

just curious if anyone has seen this on any major network, even Fox.