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The Big Lie Returns

(Commentary) Ben Cohen - Claims of anti-Semitism are so often disputed, scorned, and denied outright. Unlike blacks, Muslims, Hispanics, or any other religious or ethnic group, Jews alone are now told by their enemies who does and who does not hate them. It is being determined that Jews, in contrast to nearly every other minority group, sit squarely on the wrong side of the oppressor/oppressed dynamic and thereby make any Jewish complaints about bigotry inherently suspect. This leads to a conclusion with a distinctly postmodern twist: Those who truly suffer from anti-Semitism today are not Jews, but those who are accused of being anti-Semitic. Since the Holocaust, Jewish communities have mistakenly concluded that the relative absence of anti-Semitism reflects a greater awareness that anti-Semitism, as understood and experienced by Jews themselves, is a grave social ill. There is no basis to think that anymore. As long as the adversaries and enemies of the Jews control the meaning of the term "anti-Semitism," Jews will remain vulnerable to that most sacred of anti-Semitic calumnies: that they alone are the authors of their own misfortune.
2012-01-27 00:00:00
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