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I have to thank you because I missed that
article. It seems that you need a second read, because it is just a collection
of others' quotations. Many of them quite factual and/or authoritative. Did you
check its sources?
Regards.
l.
----- Original Message -----
Sent: Tuesday, October 01, 2002 5:10
AM
Subject: Saima Alvi's Contribution to
Understanding
In the 19th century it was deemed
perfectly acceptable for educated, well-meaning people to make
generalizations about ethnic, religious or national groups along the lines
of: "the Irish are drunkards," or "the Negroes are happy-go-lucky," or "the
X are a commercial race." Then around 60-70 years ago with the rapid rise of
modern racism this began to change. Expressions of this type slowly
disappeared from civilized discourse. It is unimaginable for example, for
someone on this list to utter a sentence like "the blacks are
criminals,'' even though prisons throughout America are filled with black
people.
The piece by Mark Weber which Alvi is disseminating
demonstrates that there is one people about whom such sentences can still
(or again?) be spoken: "the" Jews. The article itself consists of
layers and layers of lies, non sequiturs, and paranoia: in other words the
most standard kind of old-fashioned anti-Semitism, which is apparently
acceptable nowadays in some circles, especially on what might be called "the
stupid left." It is useless to try to disentangle such stuff. One comment
will suffice: Kofi Annan is quoted as saying that "the whole world is
demanding that Israel withdraw [etc., etc.]. I don't think the whole
world...can be wrong." The "whole world" presumably consists of the 191
members of the U.N. Among these are countries such as Libya, Sudan and Syria
which are regarded as perfectly respectable, eligible to serve on the U.N.
Commission on Human Rights, etc. Nothing more needs to be said about "the
world."
But I wish to make a more general contribution to
current discourse on this list and elsewhere. And that is to formulate a set
of modern debating rules. Rule 13a goes like this:
Rule 13a:
If in
the course of a debate participant P states: the X are Y (where for X
substitute a religious, ethnic national or "racial" group and for Y
substitute some attribute, positive or negative) then P is a jerk.
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