Deja Vu, All Over Again...

I get lots of unsolicited email. Some of it is serious; some is salacious; and some is just plain silly. Lately, though, I’ve received an increasing number of troubling messages advancing a similar argument. Typical was one I got today entitled, “All European Life Died in Auschwitz.” Purportedly written by a Spanish writer, and translated into English, it went like this:

“I walked down the street in Barcelona, and suddenly discovered a terrible truth - Europe died in Auschwitz. We killed six million Jews and replaced them with 20 million Muslims. In Auschwitz we burned a culture, thought, creativity, talent. We destroyed the chosen people, truly chosen, because they produced great and wonderful people who changed the world. The contribution of this people is felt in all areas of life: science, art, international trade, and above all, as the conscience of the world. These are the people we burned.

“And under the pretense of tolerance, and because we wanted to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism, we opened our gates to 20 million Muslims, who brought us stupidity and ignorance, religious extremism and lack of tolerance, crime and poverty due to an unwillingness to work and support their families with pride. They have turned our beautiful Spanish cities into the third world, drowning in filth and crime. Shut up in the apartments they receive free from the government, they plan the murder and destruction of their naive hosts.

“And thus, in our misery, we have exchanged culture for fanatical hatred, creative skill for destructive skill, intelligence for backwardness and superstition. We have exchanged the pursuit of peace of the Jews of Europe and their talent for hoping for a better future for their children, their determined clinging to life because life is holy, for those who pursue death, for people consumed by the desire for death for themselves and others, for our children and theirs. What a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe.”

The first time I received such an email, I had to reread it to assure myself I hasn’t misread its intent. To my dismay, I found I hadn’t.

Let me be clear: I don’t abide sweeping, negative assertions made about any group of people. In a post 9/11 world, especially, it’s become far too easy to blame Europe’s problems on its Muslim population.

That’s not my only problem with the email, alas. As a Jew, I have other concerns:

First, I find the email’s statements disturbingly familiar. All you need to do is replace the word Muslim with Jew, and you could be reading the work product of Joseph Goebbels. The description of the “other” (in this case Muslims) as a host society’s tolerated “guests”, the offending, parasitic, race who now seek the “murder and destruction of their naïve hosts”… It all begins to sound awfully familiar. From such thoughts, it’s not a stretch to start talking about what we need to do with those who threaten our way of life.

Second, I recognize that the piece actually impugns Jews even when it seems to be heaping praise. How so? It describes Jews as the “chosen people” – charged language, to be sure – whose existence and experience in World War II created a sense of guilt so strong that it caused Europeans to need “to prove to ourselves that we were cured of the disease of racism.” In other words, if we hadn’t been feeling so guilty about the fate of the Jews, it never would have occurred to us to be nice to the Muslims… See where trying to be nice gets you?

Last, I probably would have hit “delete” and not wasted my time reading such garbage, but for one fact: the email as sent to me by a Jewish friend. I think I know why; such emails borrow from the “self-congratulatory” genre, e.g. long lists of Nobel laureates we’ve produced, proportionately far in excess of what you might expect given our meager numbers. While there’s nothing wrong is being proud of our people’s accomplishments, such lists rarely circulate without a control group for comparison. Sometimes it’s “your grandparents were living in the caves of Northern Europe while mine were earning Nobel prizes…” but at other times, as here, it’s an even more invidious comparison: “my people are positive, life affirming folk, while yours are destructive, superstitious, death worshippers.” While this article’s authorship by a third party might lend it some kind of perspective, it can’t redeem it from its rightful genre: hate literature.

Rather than lament the Muslim presence in Europe (are we to assume that if we had burned Muslims instead of Jews during World War II, Europe would be better off?), whoever wrote “what a terrible mistake was made by miserable Europe” had best take a less passive role in current affairs. Otherwise, we may well be reading his grandchildren lamenting the odious presence of yet another immigrant group. And for us here on the “home front”, we might well take notice at how easy it is to blame the “other” for one’s problems, to point a finger at the immigrant as the root of all evil. Beginning to sound familiar?

DBC