Why is the Radical Right trying to be Jewish all of a sudden? First it was Sarah Palin accusing her critics of "manufactur[ing] a blood libel" against her. Now the Washington Times is saying the outcry over that term amounts to a "pogrom" against conservatives:
This is simply the latest round of an ongoing pogrom against conservative thinkers. Washington Times editorial 12 Jan 2011
A pogrom, let us be clear, is a physically violent attack by an organized mob, explicitly or implicitly backed by the government, against a minority group. It leaves in its wake murder, mayhem, fire and destruction. And its most common targets have been Jews.
And the Washington Times editors say that is what Palin is going through.
The word pogrom (Russian: погром) comes, according to Wikipedia and other sources, from the Russian verb громить (gramit'): to destroy, to smash, rout, lay waste. As a Yiddish word brought into English, it described the officially condoned mob violence against Jews living in Tsarist Russia. The Tsar and his government had encouraged pogroms partly to distract peasants' attention from their condition and partly out of plain old anti-Semitism (and there are other factors).
Although the word has been used to describe attacks on other ethnic groups besides Jews, it always describes an organized, violent assault on an ethnic minority, with the emphasis on violence: Murder, rape, fire, general slaughter.
After the 1904 pogrom in Kishinev (in modern Moldova), the Hebrew poet Hayyim Nachman Bialik wrote one of his most moving works, בעיר ההרגה (B'Ir Haharegah), In the City of Slaughter:
Behold on tree, on stone, on fence, on mural clay
The spattered blood and dried brains of the dead.
...
Upon the mound lie two, and both are headless -
A Jew and his hound.
The self-same axe struck both, and both were flung
Upon the self-same heap where swine seek dung.
...
A tale of cloven belly, feather-filled;
Of nostrils nailed, of skull-bones bashed and spilled;
Of murdered men who from the beams were hung,
And of a babe beside its mother flung,
Its mother speared, the poor chick finding rest
Upon its mother's cold and milkless breast.
...
Leave now this place at twilight to return
And to behold these creatures who arose
In terror at dawn, at dusk now, drowsing, worn
With weeping, broken in spirit, in darkness shut.
That is a pogrom. Yet the Washington Times thinks that calling Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck "hatemongers" or complaining about Sarah Palin's use of gunsight imagery is somehow the same as what happened to the Jews of Kishinev.
In earlier discussions about Palin's misappropriation of the "blood libel," I took issue with one comment that Jews should not think we "own" the term. I said that, unfortunately, we do. Blood libel is a specific slander that accuses the Jews of the monstrous crime of murdering Christian children to use their blood to make matzoh. And it was often used as the trigger for a pogrom.
Language changes, of course. Though blood libel, I submit, has not changed its meaning, "pogrom" has over time outgrown its Russian/Yiddish origin and come to include organized attacks on ethnic minorities other than Jews. But always it means a vicious, violent swath of physical destruction. It is vicious, it is unprincipled, and it preys on the innocent who have done nothing but be in the wrong place at the wrong time, wearing the wrong identity.
In recent years we have seen the Radical Right go to war on words; "liberal" and now "progressive" have become, in their mouths, words of opprobium, disgust, even treason. We have also seen them twist facts, deny facts, invent facts.
Why do they now want to reinvent themselves as the new Jews? Well, actually, I'm not sure they realize that's what they are doing. But two things come to mind.
First, Christianity claims to be the "New Judaism," to have supplanted Judaism and taken on (we would say, usurped) Jews' relationship with God. Second is that for almost 2000 years Jews were persecuted by these same Christians for refusing to go along with this usurpation. The persecution of the Jews has become, especially in this post-Holocaust age, a paradigm for noble suffering.
You won't hear any Jew call it that, but I vividly remember Cardinal O'Connor speaking of the Jews' "gift of suffering to the world" some years ago, and I remember the outcry that followed it.
Psychology speaks of a "persecution complex" or "martyr complex" - someone sees himself as a noble victim suffering slings and arrows for his ideas, for the truth. Real victims of persecution never feel this way. But it is clear, to this Jew, that the Radical Right is claiming the mantle of the martyr, and is doing so by claiming, in effect, to be "just like the Jews."
They don't deserve it. They need to be called on it, the country needs to be ashamed of them for doing it (I won't waste my breath trying to make them themselves feel shame); their misuse of language, of history, needs to be challenged at every turn.
I'd better stop here. I'm upset and not as coherent as I should be.
Update [2011-1-14 20:14:12 by DanK Is Back]: I know I'm supposed to monitor my diaries, especially a rec list one, but we have to go now to a birthday dinner. I'll check in later.
Update [2011-1-15 0:45:17 by DanK Is Back]: Some of the comments brought up a point that I want to touch on: Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords happens to be Jewish.
That's relevant for a couple of reasons. One is that, initially, this was not considered relevant, either positively or negatively; it happened to come out when there was some mention of where she went to worship. This is, in some small way, a heartening sign: Her Jewishness was treated, is being treated, as just one more fact about her, like the color of her hair or where she went to college.
On the other hand, it makes Palin's and the Washington Tinmes' misuse of language even more reprehensible. The primary victim, the specifically intended target, of that gunman's rage and hate was Jewish (though, so far as we know, that was not a factor in his attacking her), and these self-centered people turned an attack on a Jew into an attack on them, as though they were the Jews, not her. Not only are they denying her status as victim, they are denying another element of her identity.
To be expected. From their perspective, it's about them. It's always about them. And only them.