More from the Haaretz piece linked above

During the course of 2005, 225 racially-motivated incidents directed at Arab citizens were reported to the center or in the media. The center believes that less than 20 percent of attacks or other incidents are ever reported.
Seventy-fire percent of the reports on racist incidents came from institutional sources such as government ministries, government companies or publicly-elected officials.
The poll further revealed that 63 percent of Jewish Israelis agree with the statement, “Arabs are a security and demographic threat to the state.” Thirty-one percent of Jews did not agree. Agreement with the statement was strongest among Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews and low-income earners.
Forty percent of Jews believe “the state needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens” and just 52 percent don’t agree with the statement.
Thirty-four percent also agreed with the statement that “Arab culture is inferior to Israeli culture.” Fifty-seven percent did not agree with the statement.

To me that sounds like Germany short before the Reichskristallnacht.
Can, please, someone explain to me why nearly a majority of the people in Israel are trying to repeat what has been done to their people.
In the Warsaw ghetto the jews were starved by the Germans (before they were killed). For 44 days, until yesterday, Israel did not allow ANY transport from or into the Gaza strip. People there need 70 tons of flour each day. They didn´t get a gramm. Olmert only reluctantly allowed a few trucks in after serious pressure from the US.
But when a youth gang in France kidnapped and killed some boy because they thought his parents had money, the press was full of French=anti-semitism. Yes the boy was jewish but that was not the point in that case.

Posted by: b | Mar 22 2006 21:05 utc | 4

Completely beside the point, and allowing for the fact that in French perhaps the distinctions are clear, what would be the difference between ‘somewhat’, ‘a bit’, and ‘not very’ (or, for that matter, ‘not’ and ‘not… at all’) in the first poll? In English at least that only comes across as 2 choices: not racist or a little racist. Again, beside the point and no big deal, but it’s hard to take seriously as written.

Posted by: mats | Mar 22 2006 21:28 utc | 6

Here’s a gentle satire on racism from the Broadway musical Avenue Q, a grown-up take-off on Sesame Street.
Here at the Moon, we’re all black on pale blue. I’m not even sure of some of y’all’s gender.

Posted by: catlady | Mar 22 2006 22:16 utc | 8

One small exception to the color rule for getting pulled over:
I discovered a few years back when settling a fender bender with cash that a white person driving into a non-white neighborhood early in the morning will also get you pulled over.
What else would a white person be doing there but buying drugs? Natch!
Oy.

Posted by: citizen | Mar 22 2006 23:23 utc | 10

“To me that sounds like Germany short before the Reichskristallnacht.
Can, please, someone explain to me why nearly a majority of the people in Israel are trying to repeat what has been done to their people.”

“But Bernhard, surely you know that when the Jews were killed, it was a great tragedy, because they are God’s Chosen People. But the Palestinians? Come now…. You must know that they are not even a real people. There were no Palestinians before Jews settled the land. “A land without a people, for a people without a land,” Golda told us. Now, there was a Bubbe you could trust!
The Palestinians, they settled upon our skin like a bunch of blood-thirsty sand fleas. Their own cousins would not take that shiftless bunch in. We gave them jobs in Israel, when there weren’t even enough for us, and how did they show their gratitude? By blowing us up! What more can we do for them? They are no good I tell you, schnorrers, all of them. If they want to mooch, let them mooch off of someone else.
Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch, that’s all they do, with their false land claims and cacamaimey “memories” of a past that never existed. Then there are the endless schmutzy babies, all crying and drekking all over the place; they all want care. They all want something I tell you, and we don’t even have enough for our own here.
They’re bringing down the IQ of the neighborhood, I tell you. We Jews, we discovered the “Theory of Relativity,” and even Niels Bohr, who discovered the atom, was half-Jewish, but of course that was easier because it’s a much smaller thing. What did the Palestinians ever discover? Sand! Is there a Nobel prize for sand? Well, if there was, I’m sure some nice young Jewish Doctor would have discovered it. He’d probably be smart enough to put a patent on it too, and make lots of money.
And their thirst! They could drink more water than a camel, and with far less use. A camel provides milk and cheese and transportation, but a Palestinian, huh, what does he provide. He cannot do even the simplest job right. I tell you, just the other day I hired one of them to repair this stone wall, and look at it, crumbling already… They can’t even make their little toy Kassam rockets fly right; why they kill more of their own people fiddling with them, than us, Baruch Hashem, bless G-d.
And I don’t have to tell you about the corruption of their leaders. Arafat going about in that stinky Kaffiyeh, I don’t think he changed that do-rag once in thirty five years, I mean that dirty little homunculus never shvitsted, not once. While his wife was running around Paris spending money faster than we can mint Shekels. And their legendary shortsightedness. You know that “they never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” It takes more than a schlemazel to bring such tsures upon themselves.
Listen, you know me, I love everyone. Look I even learned to accept those “Swartzer” Ethiopian Falasha stick figures when that nutcase Peres let them in. I taught them in school; they were even allowed to attend a regular school, though God knows why, they eat with their fingers and use their bread for a tablecloth. When that fursluggeneh Rabbi declared that THEY were Jewish, who knew? Look at me, that was when my hair turned grey.
I even tried to make friends with a Palestinian once, back in grade school. I invited her over after to school to play, and when I turned my back on her, my mother, my very own mother, bless her soul, caught her trying to steal the silverware. You never saw such mishigas in your life as when she caught that little ganif and forced her to confess.
So, what can I do? I pray. I pray that maybe the Holy One, blessed be he, would give them some brains. Then maybe they would be smart enough to realize that they are not wanted here, and go away. Let them play with the stinky Egyptians, or else let them move to Jordan. You know, there’s a lot of money there since the Americans stated bringing Democracy to the neighborhood.
Anyway, we have the pushy Russians to take care of, and now those frum Brooklyners, with their high airs, that they know the Torah better than we do! Hummmm!
At least I know that Hashem is gazing down upon me, and seeing what I have to deal with. You know some days, I just don’t know how I put up with all this mishegas, I just don’t know…”

Besides the pain and the fear, and the uncertain knowlege that one day your own life as an activist might one day be called to account, I must say that watching fascism take root is a very interesting process.
I find myself much more interested in reading accounts of Germany between the wars. And now I find that I understand the German people and what they went through and have much more sympathy for them.
The conditions are ripe in much the same way: The gradual loss of power and economic standing of a people, as their ruling class grasps at increasingly more violent “solutions” to maintain its power.
Simply put, while one cannot excuse the actions of the ’30’s Germans or the present day Israelis or Americans, these are policies consciously implemented from the top down. I’m sure everyone here is familiar with the notorious Goebbels quote about how easy it is to control people, but, he’s right, it is very easy to do so. We live in highly specialized societies, where mastering some abstruse niche of knowledge is considered education. But it isn’t. Very few people understand how societies actually work, how they are run, governed, how decisions and plans are actually made and by whom, how News is carefully manufactured and brightly packaged, and how soft opinions are delicately molded to fit the fashions and constraints of the times.
Maybe this is a good time to quote a piece that made a big impression on my life when I first read it almost 15 years ago.
It’s by the Libertarian, Southern columnist, Charley Reese. I don’t agree with many of his political prescriptions, but he is brutally honest, and has hammered Bush from day one.

HOW TO CONTROL PEOPLE
by Charley Reese
The difference between true education and vocational training has been cleverly blurred. Here are a few tips on how smart people can control other people. If any of this rings a bell – Well, then wake up!
The first principle of people control is not to let them know you are controlling them. If people knew, this knowledge will breed resentment and possibly rebellion, which would then require brute force and terror, and old fashioned, expensive and not 100 % certain method of control.
It is easier than you think to control people indirectly, to manipulate them into thinking what you want them to think and doing what you want them to do.
One basic technique is to keep them ignorant. Educated people are not as easy to manipulate. Abolishing public education or restricting access to education would be the direct approach. That would spill the beans. The indirect approach is to control the education they receive.
It’s possible to be a Ph.D., doctor, lawyer, businessman, journalist, or an accountant, just to name a few examples, and at the same time be an uneducated person. The difference between true education and vocational training has been cleverly blurred in our time so that we have people successfully practicing their vocations while at the same time being totally ignorant of the larger issues of the world in which they live.
The most obvious symptom is their absence of original thought. Ask them a question and they will end up reciting what someone else thinks or thought the answer was. What do they think Well, they never thought about it. Their education consisted of learning how to use the library and cite sources.
That greatly simplifies things for the controller because with lots of money, university endowments, foundations, grants, and ownership of media, it is relatively easy to control who they will think of as authorities to cite in lieu of doing their own thinking.
Another technique is to keep them entertained. Roman emperors did not stage circuses and gladiator contests because they didn’t have television. We have television because we don’t have circuses and gladiator events. Either way, the purpose is to keep the people’s minds focused on entertainment, sports, and peripheral political issues. This way you won’t have to worry that they will ever figure out the real issues that allow you to control them.
Just as a truly educated person is difficult to control, so too is an economically independent person. Therefore, you want to create conditions that will produce people who work for wages, since wage earners have little control over their economic destiny. You’ll also want to control the monetary, credit, and banking systems. This will allow you to inflate the currency and make it next to impossible for wage earners to accumulate capital. You can also cause periodic deflation to collapse the
family businesses, family farms, and entrepreneurs, including independent community banks.
To keep trade unions under control, you just promote a scheme that allows you to shift production jobs out of the country and bring back the products as imports (it is called free trade). This way you will end up with no unions or docile unions.
Another technique is to buy both political parties so that after a while people will feel that no matter whether they vote for Candidate A or Candidate B, they will get the same policies. This will create great apathy and a belief that the political process is useless for effecting real change.
Pretty soon you will have a population that feels completely helpless, and thinks the bad things happening to them are nobody in particular’s fault, just a result of global forces or evolution or some other disembodied abstract concept. If necessary, you can offer scapegoats.
Then you can bleed them dry without having to worry overly much that one of them will sneak into your house one night and cut your throat. If you do it right, they won’t even know whose throat they are cutting.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 22 2006 23:49 utc | 12

Addition:
Kvetch, kvetch, kvetch, that’s all they do, with their false land claims and cacamaimey “memories” of a past that never existed. You know, one day, one of them came up to my own house with a key that he claimed would fit the lock, and before I could stop him, he stuck it in and turned it and the door opened. That little Rasputin claimed he had lived in my very own house once, and that it was really his, the nerve of him. Why, he couldn’t pay this mortgage in his dreams! Then there are the endless schmutzy babies, all crying and drekking all over the place; they all want care. They all want something I tell you, and we don’t even have enough for our own here.

Posted by: Malooga | Mar 22 2006 23:59 utc | 14

Linguistic Chauvinism
documents an encounter a couple of years or so back, with a fervent zionist who believes that Arabic is inherently an inferior language to Hebrew. this kind of thinking recurs across cultures and epochs…

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 23 2006 1:46 utc | 16

askod- i was taking some of those exams earlier this afternoon & was pondering whether to work that link into a comment. you beat me to it 🙂
i don’t see that anyone has brought up the institutional & systemic components of racism yet. racism, hate & fear are all social experiences; they are learned behaviors, reinforced through the structural ordering of one’s reality. heirarchical societies enforce institutional delineations of command and obedience. think about how the breakdown of social ties based on kinship, which had served to decentralize the self, have led to its replacement by either strong class affiliation or – esp when capitalism becomes not only an economic ordering, but a social way of mentalizing life – identity with-and-of commodities. the modern human becomes self-centered – further removed from experience – as communites become atomized. the organization of city-states required this debasing of human experience to function, separating humans not only from their natural settings, but also from each other. class societies. slavery. the institutionalized other. no longer are those populations who are different from the rulers just an enemy to be conquered or driven back; they are objects to be exploited, subhumans to be dominated, scapegoats for easy victimization, lesser valued lives. those people.
the notion of biological inferiority – as if someone whose physical features are different is of a lesser species – build & resonate in organized societies as a method of justifying large-scale crimes & attrocities. one need look no further back than the settlement of the americas, esp the northern half of the continent. the rationale that enabled the genocide of the existing inhabitants was not just the act of racist individuals & professional indian-haters – it was institutionally & culturally implemented and then reinforced across all levels of daily life. we can see the same structures in place in israel. we’re talking about a settler nation whose policies are committed to an ongoing genocide of the long-time, darker-skinned occupants of those very lands. was there any doubt that large contingents of its citizenry understand that they hold deep prejudices & animosity toward arabs? if enough people were opposed to those sentiments, those structural policies would not exist. there would not be a genocide taking place at this moment.
the fact that institutions permeate our era is not irreversible. but it will take a lot more openness than either poll indicates.

Posted by: b real | Mar 23 2006 5:44 utc | 18

Can, please, someone explain to me why nearly a majority of the people in Israel are trying to repeat what has been done to their people.

B, firstly thank you for that link to “Raising Yousuf: a diary of a mother under occupation”, most interesting. Secondly, the question you pose is one that I’ve been wondering about myself for a long time. Beats me. Israeli Politicians fly around the world to open ever new Holocaust memorials and museums, and upon returning home they give orders to assassinate Palestinians, build ghettos for them and as in the case of Gaza, nearly starve those people. What goes on in their heads I don’t know. I believe there is some kind of corelation though between what happened to the Jewish people of central Europe 70 years ago and the plight the Palestinians suffer at the hand of the Israelis today. The Jews back then were powerless against the Nazi machine, a feeling the survivors didn’t forget. Thus their determination to be now the ones with power.
On top of that I believe that the hate that the persecution and killings of so many Jews would have caused in the ones who survived the ordeal is being vented at the Palestinians, serving as proxies for the Nazis which they couldn’t get revenge on, along the line of ‘Nazis were against us, Palestinians are against us, ergo Palestinians are Nazis’, and therefore deserve the cruelty that is being dished out to them, you know, an eye for an eye, or in this case a Warsaw for a Gaza. That many Israelis themselves become in parts like the Nazis doesn’t occur to them, as in their minds they are fighting a just war for the promised land. Also, like Malooga pointed out in his comment, many Jews see themselves as superior to pretty much all other races, especially the Palestinians, who in their heads occupy a status closer to animal than human, Undermenschen so to say, another set of believes that shows that they are actually mentally not that far apart from the Nazis. Sad, very sad, but also very true.

Posted by: Feelgood | Mar 23 2006 7:39 utc | 20

I love being quoted, but not misquoted: I proposed that “every nationality is equally racist”.
Growing up in Gary, Indiana, I experienced “blockbusting” in two different neighborhoods. The first black families to move in always seemed to correspond to everybody’s preconceived notion of what was going to happen when they allowed “them” into the neighborhood: kids running wild, bicycles disappearing, noise, trash, etc.
Within months, most the whites had sold out at a loss and moved on. We were too poor to afford to move at first and stayed on as a minority. All the other black families that moved in were nice folks and decent neighbors. Some became my good friends. But the real estate companies had managed to turn over almost all the properties in a big hurry.

Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 23 2006 14:35 utc | 22

tgs,
one can argue that it is better to deal with an open & honest racist than with a concealed & conniving one: remember Willie Horton?

Posted by: ralphieboy | Mar 23 2006 17:30 utc | 24

Malooga,
I for one liked your skit but I certainly don’t have the writing ability to comment on something as profound and provocative as that. we all walk on eggshells when it comes to that argument and you are the only one who can really tear into it.

Posted by: dan of steele | Mar 23 2006 20:59 utc | 26

I don’t find Israeli mirroring of Nazi offences surprising at all. Many paedophiles were molested themselves as children; many batterers were beaten themselves as children. You could say that the survivors of European pogroms and the Nazi horror had a traumatic learning experience from which they took, depending on personality and circs, two different lessons. Some became deeply committed to justice and nonviolence, some concluded that the world is a Hobbesian jungle and the only way to survive is to be the meanest SOB in the valley, as the cheesy old T shirt has it.
Are the Likud in Israel so different from the American daddy or mummy who goes out and buys a 3 tonne SUV so that in a car wreck, his/her kids will be the survivors and the other person’s kids will die? And as with the SUV owner, the notion that the grossly heavy and ruinously costly armoured vehicle (gated community, walled ghetto, fortress nation, bunker mentality) is actually creating more danger not only for others but for the family, is dismissed as counterintuitive and nonsensical.
This is imho a classic case of failing to solve the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and it happens all the time. We’ve had a similar discussion in the past which led me to quote Auden and I will, with apologies for repetition, do so again:
I and the public know
what all schoolchildren learn:
those who whom evil is done
do evil in return.

Posted by: DeAnander | Mar 23 2006 21:14 utc | 28

I am White(Caucasian) mixed w/ some Indian, Black Irish & German and I am no where near racist. I respect all people (well those who will respect me back). I wish people would stop dwelling on the past and move on. This world would be so much better (in that case) if people would actually do that.

Posted by: Haley | Sep 10 2006 5:02 utc | 30

I havn’t read all coments, but this is my 2 cents. Everyone is racist to some degree after being exposed to the world and watching news. Racism is the outcome of difference of cultures. I myself am racist, only towards a specific target audience, in my case it’s most African Americans, those who live poorly and don’t seem to want to get out of poverty and cherish education, their slang language and oppressive ways insult me, on the contrary to most African descendants from outside of the U.S who seem very literate and appreciative of different cultures, they are also aware of things other than 50 cents and celebrities, and dont ignore you and push you while standing in line. That’s my opinion since i’ve never lived or been an African American, i’d like to hear a response from the other side. All issues present, and remember the specific target audience I refer to.

Posted by: Leo | Oct 31 2006 1:54 utc | 32