Where Are My Teeth?

Juden Raus

Today was an interesting day to go to the mailbox. Along with the bills and fliers and stuff was a small, thick bulk mail envelope from some outfit called Progressive Vision International, of Anaheim. "OK," I thought, "so I've gotten on another lefty mailing list."

Nuh-uh. Inside was the "New Millenium 7th Edition" of Let My People Go, subtitled "the struggle of the american jew to come home to israel". The 170 pages of this tract are, so it says, devoted to convincing jews around the globe that they should leave their current residences and head for the Holy Land with all deliberate speed.

One reason for this departure, writes the "Christian Zionist" author, is that only by gathering all jews to its rocky bosom will Israel be able to become the beacon of light to the rest of the world required to bring about the (second) coming of the Messiah.

Another is that it just isn't safe for jews anywhere else, yaknowhatimean? There's antisemitism sweeping Europe, and hard times coming in the U.S., and distressing though it may be for the author of the book's foreword to point this out, christian nations' favorite scapegoat for market crashes, depressions and wars is almost always "The Jew." (In case you don't read too well, the cover has a picture of a red-headed jew trying to free himself from ropes tethering him to a lamp post that bears the street sign, "Wall Street".)

To those who protest "it can't happen here" he responds that jews in Germany thought just the same thing. Best for christians and jews both to read the book and get with the program: namely getting all six-million-odd jews out of the US and "back" to Israel where they belong. The author and his pals aren't antisemites, of course; they have the deepest possible concern for the welfare of jews. In their place.

I have to say that I haven't read this weirdass piece of crap in any depth. I skimmed the beginning, and some of the part about how jews in New York were held captive (by their materialism) in the modern Babylon, and something about how god meant the World Trade Center Attacks as a wake-up call for jews to get out while they still could.

The last time I felt the hair starting to prickle on the back of my neck like that was on my first visit to Berlin back in 1990, when my sister and I were sitting in a real estate agent's office talking about the possible value of my grandparents' old house, and the little guy across the table from us began a riff about how the jews were coming back to Berlin. They were buying up some of the buildings that they had owned before the war (always "before the war" or just "before", never "before they were stripped of their property, evicted from their homes and killed"). They were buying the buildings, he said, and raising the rents, and drawing onto themselves the same resentment that they had in the past...

I'm sure that if I'd suggested to that man that he was an antisemite he would have been shocked at the thought. Why, there he was talking perfectly comfortably to people two of whose greatgrandparents had been jews. He was just explaining how today's jews were setting the stage for bad things to happen to them. (Indeed, by bringing the matter up at all I would have been proving just how hypersensitive some jews still are.)

When you live in enclaves of people who aren't religious nutcases, it's easy to forget that there are other enclaves all across the country of people who are. I don't know what mailing list these folks got my name from (the address was wrong in a particular way that might be possible to trace), but I guess I should thank them in a way. They spent a fair chunk of money that could have gone to advancing their cause to remind me of the clear and present danger that such would-be theocrats pose to life and liberty.

Posted by wallich at April 2, 2004 05:02 PM