Andrew L. Urban.
I had just re-watched British director Alan Parker’s outstanding 1988 film, Mississippi Burning, inspired by events in the 1960s, when two FBI agents (played by Gene Hackman and Willem Dafoe) arrive in Mississippi to investigate the disappearance of three civil rights activists. As I watched the film, I couldn’t escape the tragic conclusion that the behaviour of racists of that era is echoed by the behaviour of antisemites today.
The behaviour of those vile racists in the bad old American South seems even worse in hindsight than I remember from my history lessons. Callous disregard for human decency, from nasty name calling and social exclusion to brutal beatings and murder were daily events, all driven by a hatred of blacks. Those racists were akin to the Islamic teachers who, driven by hatred of Jews, today make comparisons of Jews with apes, pigs, rats and filthy animals to portray Jews as less than human or undeserving of ordinary human dignity. Just replace ‘Jews’ with ‘blacks’.
Islamic extremists want to eliminate (exterminate?) Jews just as the KKK’s mission was to execute blacks, pretty much at random. Mississippi Burning brought home to me how violent racism against blacks has the same characteristics as violent hatred of Jews.
Imagine my shocked surprise when just days later, the Green Party in the UK endorsed as official party policy that Zionism is racism. The juxtaposition of Mississippi Burning and that news on my TV sharpened my perception, the film delivering the visual impact with cinematic force.
It is not my intention to draw deep parallels but only to note the similar physical manifestations of these two irrational hatreds.
Andrew: Palestinians are Semites-we agree..My time in Heidelberg wasn’t a total waste after all..! The Israelites i know are of no doubt – the Palestinians Semites are fully entitled to live in the Levant. Is that an obsession?
Obsession reference is to your repeated insistence that Palestinians are Semites – as if that knowledge would somehow impact current events.
Andrew: The Palestinians are Semites! Anyone who denies that fact and the tribes of the Levant – is a silly racist person..or just a blockheaded ignoramus.
The Zionists are not always a bunch of “goody two shoes – beyond a bit of naughtiness at times since 1948…I’m a bit of a Zionist myself – but not of the
ku klux klan genre..To me- the whole stinking squabble is totally a religious one -and bloody EVIL..
Your obsession about Palestinians being Semites deserves an answer (once again, hopefully for last time), since I have previously ignored such comments (out of an attempt to protect readers from boredom). According to my research (which I urge you to conduct for yourself) Palestinians are Semites in the standard linguistic and ethnographic sense of the term. “Semite” primarily denotes speakers of Semitic languages, a branch of the Afro-Asiatic family that includes Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, and ancient languages such as Akkadian, Phoenician, and Canaanite. The term antisemitism is used to specify anti-Jewish ideology.