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Behind the Aegis

(53,833 posts)
Thu Jan 18, 2018, 05:57 PM Jan 2018

A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews

Last edited Fri Jan 19, 2018, 01:35 AM - Edit history (1)

(Note: Yes, the title is provocative, click-bait, if you will, but this article is not the title. READ IT!)

Until his dying day, my dad’s Uncle Bern was a communist sympathizer. I remember him as an affable old man with a gracious wife who made a modest living selling antique lace. He probably wouldn’t have hurt a fly. Yet he found much to admire in the most murderous ideology of the 20th century, responsible for tens of millions of deaths from the killing fields of Cambodia to the gulags of Murmansk.

If you’re Jewish in America, chances are there’s at least one Uncle Bern somewhere in your family tree. As the scholar Ruth Wisse noted last year in Tablet magazine, Jewish intellectual life in the 1930s and 40s was largely defined by one’s stance toward one thing: The Party. Historians reckon that Jews accounted for nearly half the Communist Party’s total membership in those years, while many other Jews were close fellow travelers.

---snip---

Crime? In 1908, the New York City police commissioner, Theodore Bingham, caused a public uproar (for which he later apologized) when he claimed that half the city’s criminals were Jews. The truth was closer to the opposite: Jewish crime rates, at about 16 percent, were considerably lower than their roughly 25 percent share of New York’s overall population. The same goes today, when, contrary to much Trumpian propaganda, incarceration rates for immigrants are nearly half what they are for native-born Americans.

---snip--

Assimilation? This week, Attorney General Jeff Sessions asked, in an interview with Fox News, “What good does it do to bring in somebody who’s illiterate in their own country, has no skills and is going to struggle in our country and not be successful?” That seems to be the general way of thinking in this administration.

Now compare that to a 1907 article in McClure’s magazine, titled “The Great Jewish Invasion,” which observed of Russian Jews, “no people have had a more inadequate preparation, educational and economic, for American citizenship.” Henry Adams, the great American patrician, wrote of “furtive Yacoob or Ysaac still reeking of the ghetto, snarling a weird Yiddish.” In 1914, Edward Alsworth Ross, the famous progressive sociologist from the University of Wisconsin, called Jews “moral cripples” whose “tribal spirit intensified by social isolation prompts them to rush to the rescue of the caught rascal of their own race.”

more...

Those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it...and we are seeing it NOW!

elleng

Also related...I'm watching the "Jews for Dreamers" being arrested at the Capitol (UPDATED)




ETA: Dozens of Jewish activists arrested at protest urging Congress to protect Dreamers
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A Modest Immigration Proposal: Ban Jews (Original Post) Behind the Aegis Jan 2018 OP
Post removed Post removed Jan 2018 #1
Democrats do not discriminate against Jews. Nitram Jan 2018 #2
Title is a take-off of satirical 1729 title of Swift pamphlet about Ireland Bernardo de La Paz Jan 2018 #3

Response to Behind the Aegis (Original post)

Nitram

(22,671 posts)
2. Democrats do not discriminate against Jews.
Fri Jan 19, 2018, 10:57 AM
Jan 2018

Are you confusing being against Israeli policies against Palestinians with being anti-Semitic?

Bernardo de La Paz

(48,788 posts)
3. Title is a take-off of satirical 1729 title of Swift pamphlet about Ireland
Fri Jan 19, 2018, 11:07 AM
Jan 2018

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal



Swift suggested that the impoverished Irish might ease their economic troubles by selling their children as food for rich gentlemen and ladies. His work encouraged positive development for those that suffered from famishment and financial maladies, and urged the aristocratic landlords to lower their taxes, so as to not further starve the country of its food and coin. This satirical hyperbole mocked heartless attitudes towards the poor, as well as British policy toward the Irish in general. The primary target of Swift's satire was the rationalism of modern economics, and the growth of rationalistic modes of thinking in modern life at the expense of more traditional human values.
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