YnetNews: Plocker: Because we are Jews

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Because we are Jews
Sever Plocker

Anti-Semitism doesn’t need proof or witnesses on which to base its arguments of hatred

Published: 02.19.07, 10:47 / Israel Opinion

Because we killed Jesus. Because we don't believe in Jesus. Because we gave loans bearing interest. Because we signed a pact with sorcerers and demons. Because we founded the Sanhedrin (supreme judicial body) that is secretly ruling the world. Because we slaughtered animals by kosher slaughter. Because we dreamed of returning to the Holy Land and to Jerusalem. Because we maliciously spread diseases among Christians and Muslims. Because we ate matzoth on Passover. Because we ate matzoth made from the blood of non-Jewish children. Because we brought communism to mankind. Because we brought capitalism. Because we betrayed the countries we lived in, in the Diaspora, such as France, Russia and Iraq. Because we were the fifth column, an isolated and stubborn minority – and also because we tried to become assimilated and to hide our uniqueness. Because we usurped non-Jewish laborers, the non-Jewish industrialists. Because we were dirty and because we were clean. Because we were. Because we are Jews.

Anti-Semitism doesn’t need proof or witnesses on which to base its arguments, and it is not the result of characteristics the Jewish people either have or do not have. As noted by French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre in his renowned essay in 1946 "Reflections on the Jewish Question," anti-Semitism is the mental illness of anti-Semites. It is their escape from the harshness of reality they cannot deal with. The Jews are the scapegoat for the failed and weak, the losers and the cowards. Even if the Jews did not exist, wrote Sartre, anti-Semites would have invented them.

The effort to wipe out anti-Semitism by refuting the arguments of anti-Semites is futile and humiliating. Should we go from the house of one anti-Semite to another to prove that we don't have horns and a tail, and that we don't hold secret rituals by the light of the moon, that the Protocols of Zion are a fabrication, and that we don't slaughter non-Jewish children so that we can use their blood to make Passover matzoth? And that we didn't do so 530 years ago?