Thursday, May 02, 2002
[posted by jaed at 11:07 PM]The monster under the bed:
A 37-year-old British Jew speaks:
I could not imagine anything more fanciful than the idea that my countrymen might turn on me. I am the third generation of my family to be born here and as British as anyone. Israel is an idea, and a country, which I support; but it is a foreign country with whose citizens I have nothing more in common than a shared religion.
I now know different.
Yeah. The rest of us are starting to figure it out as well.
We didn't kill Nazism half a century ago. We thought we had. We thought this evil, at least, had been driven out of the world forever. There are plenty of other evils still active, but this particular toxin was dead, dead, dead.
But I've been reading about the synagogue burnings and Jews being beaten up on the streets in France. And the Saudis printing the blood libel. And some fool clergyman in Scotland deciding Easter was a good time to call the Israelis "Christ-killers" in the form of a mural. And Hamas talking openly about how many Jews they can kill, and no one sounding horrified or even surprised about that. And...and....
...and I am starting to feel the way Sigourney Weaver felt at the end of Alien when, safe in her emergency shuttle, having escaped from her ship, she suddenly noticed a shadow behind some machinery and saw the alien, still alive, uncoiling itself up from the floor, rising to nine feet in height and looking at her.
I'm starting to have the dreadful feeling that fifty-seven years ago, we didn't kill Nazism after all. It just went underground.
