Quite a few TZP posts since the first of the year have looked at bigotry against Jews. It’s dangerous. It’s growing. And unfortunately it’s no surprise.
But there’s one good thing about hatred of Jews: decent, educated human beings in the Western world know how wrong and deadly it is.
There are other kinds of bigotry, on the other hand, that are becoming acceptable. Worse, they’re becoming especially acceptable to the very people who ought to know better: young, well-educated Americans.
Take, for example, Ms Andrea Grimes. Earlier this month this lefty ‘zine editor and prolific social media user advocated taking firearms away from all white men.
Her long-term goal is to take away everybody’s guns (I invite you, Ms Grimes, to come to my house and try it). But for now, just white males.
She envisions all the white guys weeping as they line up to turn in their weapons. (Apparently a desire to make men cry is somewhat of a meme among feminists. And apparently Ms Grimes has no freakin’ clue as to who’d end up crying — and bleeding — in the future she envisions.)
Unfortunately, she’s not just part of some uninfluential fringe. Everywhere on the left, bigotry against some group or another is being not only excused but justified. The respected “progressive” journal, The Daily Kos is one of many that has twisted reality to “prove” that only whites can be racist. A prominent Georgetown University professor teaches the same bilge
In this thinking (if I may call it thinking at all), if a black or Hispanic or Asian person hates whites, it’s somehow okay. Or at least not as bad. (Never mind that every form of racial hatred can be deadly.) The idea is that only powerful people can be racist, and somehow all whites (even blue-collar bottom-of-the-heapers) are powerful, while all chosen minorities (even professors, lawyers, lobbyists, and journalists) are powerless. Basically, the whole notion boils down to “if any designated minority has hateful thoughts, white people, especially white males, caused it.”
Of course, this very broad brush of bigotry against white people or white males also encompasses most Jewish people and most Jewish males. But the real problem isn’t which group it’s “okay” to hate and who is included in the target group.
The problem is the mainstreaming of bigotry — and more scarily, the mainstreaming of bigotry in influential media and in the academic world.
People are so willfully short-sighted! When they want to smear a particular group — whether it be blacks or males or Jews or women or redheads or whatever — they choose not to see that the very act of hating people just because they belong to some group by birth or culture is wrong. It’s wrong no matter what group you choose to revile.
Justifying your own bigotry on the grounds that someone else was bigoted first just perpetuates the vicious cycle. And educated people should know this.
Once you’ve said “group hatred is okay” you’ve declared on principle that bigotry is acceptable. That discrimination is okay.* That depriving entire classes of people of their rights is just fine. You have, in short, opened the gates of hell — and you’d better not be surprised at what comes pouring through.
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* This was really a terrible word choice on my part and has led some readers to believe that I’m against freedom of association. For the record, it’s obvious to me that in a free society individuals and individual businesses have every right to discriminate in any way they wish and others have a right to respond. I’m upset that this one ill-written, ill-thought sentence appears to have demolished the real points I was attempting to make in this post.