I like to relax by reading up on sports and fitness; my wife, celebrity gossip. (This may be a gender trend, though of course there is no clear demarcation on this one, as she also knows sports as well as I do, she just ran a half-marathon, and she certainly could manage the bullpen better than Girardi.)
She’s pointed out a more disquieting trend to me today: Whenever Hollywood blogs mention Jews, or Israel, or anti-Semitism, or in this specific instance, Hitler, it’s just a matter of time before a commenter accuses the Jews of genocide.
“Miley to perform at Bar Mitzvah?” Comment 37: “Sharon was a butcher, nuff said”
“Amare Stoudamire exploring his Jewish heritage”? Comment 43: “Israel just acts like they can do whatev they want because of Holocost, it’s f***d up.”
Today we’ve got “Banned Cannes director Lars Von Trier explains his Nazi rant“, and it only takes until comment 15 this time, so I’m going to have to run the math by William Briggs for probabilities. But I think we have an amendment to Godwin’s Law here.
The world’s oldest hatred is alive and well. We should be under no misapprehensions to the contrary. And the blurring of international frontiers, thanks to the internet, means that parts of the world where such hatred is de rigeur (read “the Muslim world”) can export such expression anywhere.
Given the growth of Palestinian populations since 1967, whatever the Israelis are doing, it’s not genocide.
One of the parties to the conflict, however, does speak often and officially about wiping out the other–not its polities but the people themselves. But I don’t see anyone talking about the “genocidal Palestinians.” I wonder why.