I hate it when excellent minds merely butt heads. Meryl Y., who's been not only a friend to this deservedly obscure Weblog but a friend to me personally in my family trouble, has written with fearless eloquence and intelligence, and also in a way that warns it's her most sacred, brook-no-debate subject, on the horrors of anti-Semitism and the murder of Daniel Pearl. Mike G. responded with equal honesty from his perspective in South Africa about white-versus-black racism and whether it can ever be anything but, as Meryl wrote, "an exercise in futility to get into a comparison of whose misery goes deeper."
Alas, amid his thousand words of thoughtful argument, Mike made a couple of thoughtless remarks, putting down his passionate counterpart as "the feisty Ms. Yourish" and getting hung up on a semantic squabble about whether it's OK to call the deplorable millions who harbor bigoted views, yet don't actually go around committing physical violence, merely "idiots" instead of "murderers." Meryl is furious, and now one of my must-read Weblogs is harping on "idiots" and spitting sarcasm in a way that makes me wince. Between this and Burningbird's taking a hiatus, the Weblog world is bleaker and colder than it was a week ago.
I don't have any wise compromise or Solomonic solution. Looking at the Middle East these days tears my heart out: I bow my head before the horrific history of anti-Semitism, and I agree and grieve with Meryl that there are monsters in the world who would kill her for being a Jew (which does not preclude my grieving that there are others who would kill her or me for being Americans, or still others for having black skin). The right of Israel to exist is absolute, non-negotiable, in my book. I also believe the policies of Ariel Sharon are bestial; I will concede that anti-Zionism is often a mask for anti-Semitism but I will not concede my right to criticize a government that bulldozes people from their homes and turns artillery on refugee camps, nor my fear that such insane actions will cause Americans to conclude that both leaders are basically terrorists, withdrawing their support of Israel, emboldening her enemies to attempt her destruction, causing the ultimate triumph of hate in a nuclear firestorm to make God weep. Then the idiots will all be murderers, and the murderers will all be idiots.
Am I sour? Sorry; I just got back from giving my sister's eulogy. Don't ever get a reputation as "good with words" or any better than most amateurs' stammering silence at public speaking; you'll be asked to speak when you don't feel like breathing.
9:01:57 AM 
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