Subject:
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Re: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.off-topic.debate
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Date:
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Fri, 26 Oct 2001 21:25:40 GMT
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Viewed:
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198 times
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In lugnet.off-topic.debate, Horst Lehner writes:
>
> This article certainly has some reason on its side, yet I can't help but
> suspect its goal is to preserve US support for Zionism.
I think that the author may have a bit of an under-siege mentality, but I found
at least one of his points very important. There have been, as the author
pointed out, a lot of condescending statments such as "You realize why they hate
you, don't you?" made to Americans since 9/11. That sounds like something a
mean child would say to another. America needs to examine its foreign policy,
and often, but I think that it is mean-spirited and cowardly to gloat over
someone's misfortune, and i have taken personal offense as an American citizen
over some of the (albeit rare) smugness from people whose governments have
historically been no less saintly than my own.
> We in Germany are pretty well aware of the fact that it is almost impossible to >reason against the "less wise" portions of Israel's action without being >suspected of
> anti-Semitism.
In that vein, I just came across another article in the Chronicle of Higher
Education from 10/19/01 called "German Intellectuals, Jewish Victims: a
Politically Correct Solidarity". In it, the author, Mark Anderson, a Professor
of Germanic Languages at Columbia University, writes:
For they know [his German colleagues] that open, critical discussion of Jews in
Germany today is virtually impossible. Whether conservative or liberal, a
contemporary German intellectual who says anything outside of a narrowly defined
spectrum of codified pieties about Jews, the Holocaust, and its postwar effects
on German Society runs the risk of professional and social suicide. To an
American observer used to seeing hard-hitting, open debate about such issues in
the US (by Jews and non-Jews alike), the degree of conformity, timidy, awkward
silence, or self-denigrating philo-Semitism that besets Germans is striking.
Conformity on this version of German political correctness comes close to
defining what it is to be a "good German."
> After 911, the same pattern is now tried in order to suspect
> all people who dare to criticize the US, it seems. But, may t some extent be
> an applicable analogy for Nazis and anti-American terrorists, is not
> necessarily also true for today's German population, nor for people who
> happen to think that the US is not perfect.
Right. I agree.
james
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: Anti-Semitism and Anti-Americanism
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| This article certainly has some reason on its side, yet I can't help but suspect its goal is to preserve US support for Zionism. We in Germany are pretty well aware of the fact that it is almost impossible to reason against the "less wise" portions (...) (23 years ago, 26-Oct-01, to lugnet.off-topic.debate)
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