That Which is Hateful to Oneself…

So I was getting ready to write about the Charlie Ebdo shootings and subsequent PEN award given to the magazine and the “>Pamela Geller’s crass provocation, the “Muhammad Art Exhibit & Contest” in which participants were invited to caricature the prophet Mohammed and where two men who fired guns at a security guard at the exhibit were themselves shot and killed.  Now, we have “>counter protesters, including Jews, decrying bigotry and defending actual religious freedom (that is, the freedom to observe one’s own faith, not the freedom to discriminate against others.)

And now I have to admit: there’s something worse than the kind of analytical flaccidity which confuses getting everybody mad with balance or complexity: that worse thing would be straight-up bigotry.  That worse thing is devoting huge chunks of one’s life to relentless efforts at marginalizing and terrorizing people based on a categorical prejudice against their race or religion; efforts aimed ultimately at driving them out of (at least public) existence.
No, that’s not even a little hyperbolic.  Jon Ritzheimer, an organizer of the biker “protest” who encouraged his followers to pack whatever heat they felt necessary in order to feel safe from worshippers bowed in prayer, showed up wearing a t-shirt with “F@k Islam” emblazoned on the front.  Ritzheimer assures “>fellow Jews, such as those of the New Israel Fund, who fail to share her animosity and prefer to work for peace and interfaith cooperation. Geller likes to refer to “liberal” Jews–who are, one presumes, all Jews to her left–as “neo-kapos.” That’s some nerve of the part of a pundit who named her blog (Atlas Shrugs) after an especially damp and bloated novel by the E.L. James of philosophy, Ayn Rand, the former Alisa Rosenbaum who made a public show of dumping Judaism and created a secular cult around herself.

While we should never overestimate the impact or importance of provocateurs like Geller and Ritzheimer, we also cannot fail to differentiate ourselves from them.  All we need do is think about what we Jews want from our own neighbors when we are attacked and then behave that way when the vitriol is aimed at others.  When mosques are threatened, we need to show up and stand for religious freedom.  When Muslims are insulted in public we need to speak up for them. Today, this is still a country in which, at least on paper, we are all free to observe our religions as we choose.  Each of us can find something to do in order to keep it that way.