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COLUMN SEVENTY, APRIL 1, 2002
(Copyright © 2002 The Blacklisted Journalist)

SCAPEGOATING THE JEWS

Subject: Re: IS THIS YOUR CORRECT E ADDRESS?
Date: Mon, 11 Feb 2002 15:17:14 -0500
From: "BEN DEMOTT " <BDEMOTT@CMMB.ORG>
To: info@blacklistedjournalist.com  

The Circulating Gifts of Anti-Semitism
1st Of The Month

By Charles Keil

Looking at the debacle in Durban where 6000 delegates from 170 countries couldn't make progress on racism over nine days because anti-Semitism got in the way, I am so amazed at how scapegoating Jews works personally, locally, globally at so many levels to soothe the egos of so many people, generation after generation, across so many dominant cultures. And now it works on five continents!  What a gift to fragile egos and insecure elites with criminal records everywhere.  What a gift to racist nationalisms much more vicious than anything the Israelis or the Palestinians have created.

This global anti-Semitism is now like a giant Melanisian kula ring of reciprocal gifts (see Malinowski's report) where the major horrors inside dozens of nation states can be covered over and forgotten while we roll all blames into one and pin them on everyone's favorite scapegoat---Israel.

What a gift to the USA to have the biggest gulag in the world go uninspected.  About 2 million people in prison and Blacks, Latins, Native Americans there in disproportionately huge numbers.

What a gift to India to have the thriving caste system and the daily sufferings of a hundred million dark untouchables taken off the agenda. (Just to compare one aspect of these gifts for a minute: India has 22 people per 100,000 in prison, the USA has almost 4000 black men per 100,000 in prison---no I didn't misplace a zero or a decimal point some place).

What a gift to Sudan where a corrupt Muslim elite have murdered or starved to death well over a million black pagans and Christians the past twenty years while a few missionaries, anthropologists, and relief workers were wringing their hands, shouting, getting no response.

What a gift to Indonesia that no one wants to talk about that huge massacre of Chinese in the 1960s, or the more recent massacres (Aceh, Moluccas, Borneo) and the elimination of about one quarter of the East Timorese population.

What a gift to the Hutu genocidaires that managed the most efficient mass murder in history.

What a gift to the seven African countries with armies in the Kongo doing murder and mayhem.  News broadcasters say a million civilians dead here but they must be exaggerating or surely this would be at the top of the agenda in Durban next door to the slaughter.

What a gift to the Arab world, every single country a patriarchal, single party dictatorship---whether Baathist, or Islamic fundamentalist, or oil-drenched benign feudalism---where no one thinks of apologizing for a millennium of slave holding institutions.

What a double gift to the slaving Western world and the slaving Arab world each of which has mishandled about 15 to 25 million Africans over the centuries.  Any chance of equal reparations from both the Western banks and corporations AND the oil rich Arabs? None whatever.

What about the African slavers and slave dealers who rounded up the victims and pocketed profits for two centuries?

Does anyone remember Saddam Hussein poison-gassing entire Kurdish villages in the 1980s?

What a gift to Algeria where Berbers are gunned down in the streets. What a gift to Brazil where children are gunned down in the streets. What a gift to Turkey where the Armenian massacres that opened this century of cleansings will not have to be noticed or apologized for and the murderous repression of Kurds the past decade can be ignored.

What a gift to Afghanistan and the Taliban.

What a gift to little Slobodan Milosovich whose mischief in Bosnia will not be the center of attention in Durban.

Every small country can participate in this gifting and we can stop looking at those handless children in Sierra Leone.

And to complete the circle with the biggest participants, no one will ask if Russianism was racism in Chechnya or Chinesism was racism in Tibet.  For as long as we marvel over "Zionism is racism? we will not have to examine 'sharia as apartheid? in any Moslem land either.

Isn't Tibet much more occupied than Palestine?  Did international treaties establish China in Tibet?  International treaties established Israel in the same way that international treaties established Greece, Turkey, Jordan, etc. etc. all the states that were once the Ottoman Empire. Am I missing something?  Or are all the more virulent and quantitatively awful forms of racism being ignored while we focus on the exceptionally persecuted Palestinians and the exceptionally disappointing Jews?  How is Zionism more racist than the racisms of 50 other nations I could mention?

In this kula ring of exchanging anti-Semitic gifts it is Christmas all year round as everyone gets something for nothing if we can just stay focused on the Jews.  Hey, serves "em right for inventing that punishing patriarchal sky god who could give us only two sons, Jesus and Muhammad, and no daughters, not even a nice niece.  ##  

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