Deconstructing Antisemitism

In recent years we have seen much agitation against the Jews. Some people think that such opinions should be censored. I believe in free speech, and not even Nazis should be censored. They can however be met with viable refutations.

One of their claims is that the Jews are in control. If the Jews were in control – and if Jews were evil – then these people would be facing a firing squad. That they are instead free to spread their nonsense shows either that Jews are not in control, or that the Jews are so good that they would even let live the people who want them dead.

Another claim is that Holocaust is a hoax perpetrated by Jewish media. I spent the first 12 years of my life in the Soviet Union. The media there were not Jewish, but they carried extensive accounts of the Holocaust and of the Nazi invasion into the Soviet Union that cost 20 million Soviet lives, most of them not Jewish.

Then there is the claim that Jews killed Jesus. I have two responses to that claim. One is that Jesus asked God to forgive his executioners, which means that we have to as well. The other is that the Jews living now had nothing to do with it. The white people do not like being taken to task for their much more recent, and much greater, crimes of slave trade and colonialism. They can start by forgiving Jews their execution of Jesus.

We also have people bringing up atrocities that had some Jewish participants and blaming the whole thing on the Jews. They do that with slave trade, with Stalin's atrocities, with human trafficking. In fact most of these atrocities had both Jewish and non-Jewish participants. As for the Jews, most of them are innocent of any such thing.

If you are German, you do not need to go to Nazism or anything similar in order to feel proud. Germany has many legitimate accomplishments. The German people do not need to look back to the darkest time in their history for national pride. If you are American, or British, or Russian, the Nazis were your enemies. Your grandparents died fighting them. Siding with the enemies of your country is called treason. You dishonor your grandparents by affiliating yourselves with Nazism.

I do not need political correctness to defend me as a Jew. I can do so myself. Wrong ideas should not be censored; they can however be refuted. I hope that more people get the intellectual courage to confront wrongful attitudes such as anti-semitism. And I am willing to do my part.