Wait,..what?
“If a Jew-hater somewhere, inspired perhaps by The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, sought to invent an individual who symbolizes almost all the anti-Semitic clichés that have dogged the Jewish people throughout history, he could hardly come up with a character more perfect than Sheldon Adelson.”Eric Alterman > Max Blumenthal > Mondoweiss
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This quote is from a piece by Alterman in the Nation, quoted in a piece by Blumenthal at Mondoweiss, around the idea that Alterman's smearing Blumenthal because Alterman says David Duke likes what Blumenthal's doing in his, Blumenthal's, book Goliath.
And since everybody knows Duke's a registered anti-semite, or anti-Semite, or Anti-Semite, or all three, Duke's praise and Alterman's alluding to it, is a smear.
One of the ways you can tell people like Duke are irrationally prejudiced toward Jews is they think people like Adelson, as Alterman describes him, and as both Blumenthal and Mondoweiss evidently concur he does, do exist, and they, anti-Semites, talk about them, people like Adelson, existing, as individuals, and as a type within the collective, Jews.
Alterman seems to be saying that the existence of Sheldon Adelson, and his activities as Sheldon Adelson, are a bad thing for the collective, Jews, because they give fuel to the fire of bigotry, an irrational dangerous bigotry that believes things that aren't true about the collective, Jews.
For instance that people like Sheldon Adelson, a Jewish Republican kingmaker featured prominently in the news during the last US Presidential race, exist and do the things they do.
And it's socially and often legally prohibited, because of the Holocaust, to speak about them as if they do exist, because they don't and it's unfair, because of the Holocaust, to all the decent non-Adelson Jews to say they do. But Alterman is speaking about him.
It's as though Alterman thinks that if it were true that Adelson is who he is and if it were true that he does what he does, it would be bad for the Jews, because it's a negative stereotype right out of the Protocols of The Elders of Zion, and because racists like Duke would then think they were right about Jews.
But wait. Sheldon Adelson really is who he is, and he really does do what he does. And so is, and does, Mel Sembler.
On a less surreal note, both Blumenthal and Phil Weiss and likely other liberal progressive Jews as well, say one main fallacy in the paranoid Zionist mind-set - that festering bigotry against Jews still exists in the US - is refuted by the prosperity and comfort and security and professional and social status currently enjoyed by their peers and relatives. No need for a refuge in Zion.
Something I wish they'd address when they do that is the steep decline in prosperity and well-being of the US middle class and especially the hopelessness-inducing and steadily deteriorating economic conditions in the American underclass. Because that Jewish prosperity they point to would appear to have occurred in near parallel to that precipitous decline for their fellow citizens.
Saying things are great because your people are headed into the 1% in unprecedented numbers, however true, isn't what I'd call a sensible statement at this time.
The Very Thing That Makes You Rich
Has Made Me Poor
