Based on the popularity of hip hop, the NBA and droopy jeans, I'd say that black has been "in" for quite some time. And while the dominant image of the black male as hyped by the media and the advertising, sports and music industries is often less than flattering, the popularity of Will Smith, Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman, to say nothing of Oprah, suggests that indeed blacks have plenty of attractive and positive social models. The ascendancy of Barack Obama to the pinnacle of power is but the apotheosis of a process that has been ongoing ever since Bill Cosby became the first black television hero in "I Spy" in the 1960s. This is an entirely welcome development, and can only be a force for the continued progress of blacks in particular and of society in general.
Sadly, the fortunes of another minority in America and indeed the world may be headed in the opposite direction, at least according to Claudia Rosett, who used to cover the U.N. for the Wall Street Journal and continues to do so now as an independent journalist. (How anyone can cover that byzantine and corrupt institution and remain sane is beyond me, but apparently Ms. Rosett has managed to do so). The endangered minority is of course the Jews, and Ms. Rosett chillingly describes the rise of the "New Anti-Semitism" in a Forbes article of the same name.
The U.N., which was created on the heels of the Holocaust and which was chartered in part to avert the horrors of another such catastrophe, has become the central address for anti-semitic slurs, threats and encomiums. Its Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon makes his predecessor Kofi Annan seem like a Zionist. Ban is on record condemning Israel for attempting to stop once and for all the terrorist attacks on it citizens, and seeks to investigate Israel's actions under U.N. auspices. As evidence of the deep-rooted antipathy against it, Israel has forever been denied a seat on the U.N. Security Council, unlike rogue states like Syria and Libya.
And Iran, which has called for the violent destruction of a U.N. member state--Israel--has been treated with kid gloves while the object of its threats remains the most vilified nation in history.
Rosett chronicles recent attacks against Jews or Jewish properties in France, Britain, Denmark and Sweden, threats hurled in Amsterdam and Miami and vandalism against Jewish institutions in Chicago and Knoxville. When Jews showed up at a demonstration in Britain at which Hamas supporters were dressed as blood-drinking hook-nosed Jews, police told them (the Jews) to put away their Israeli flags so as not to inflame the situation.
The State Department and other authorities have published reports showing worldwide anti-semitic insidents to have surged in the last decade. And what has Israel done to so outrage the world during that time? It withdrew from Lebanon, signed on to the notion of a Palestinan state, and unilaterally evacuated Gaza. And still official media in the Arab world refer to Jews as "apes and pigs."
While Americans, especially American Jews, might dismiss Rosett's concerns as "overwrought," especially given the degree of comfort and relative affluence and power which American Jews enjoy, Rosett reminds us that for 2007 68% of the 1477 religiously motivated hate crimes in the U.S. were anti-Jewish. Rosett sees trouble on the horizon:
There are proliferating signs that in too many places, and too many ways,
the world is tacitly coming to accept not only persecution of the Jews, but the
possibility of a second genocide--not necessarily by way of active complicity,
but under labels familiar from the last century: It was not our fault. There was
nothing we could do.
So while America rightly celebrates the racial barrier that was crossed this week, Rosett wonders whether President Obama will champion the cause of another minority that at the moment finds itself with few advocates. The Jews.
Read the entire article here.
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