The Tell-Tale Hate Mail

I almost never post hate mail. The posting of hate mail on blogs is usually a passive-aggressive form of hasty generalization – Ah, look what a bunch of raving lunatics/bigots my detractors are! But occasionally I get a piece that is truly instructive, one that wrings out the very essence of a movement in a way that labored analysis never could. Allow me to share one such epistle, written in mock parody of one of my blogposts:

    Blame the Jews for everything bad on this earth.

    The next tornado, hurricane, road accident. It is always, and will always be the fault of the Jews. The answer is to finish the job Hitler started. Every Jew must be killed. It does not matter how, just kill them all and have done with it. Take their babies and smash their heads, remove their arms and legs and cut out their tongues. This for sure will appease the Moslem benefactors of mankind. The humanitarian Moslems will forever give up all their guns, bombs, nuclear missiles, knives and hatred for everything, everybody, and above all for life itself.

    On the other hand, the Arabs, the Palestinians raise them up. Give them all the wealth of the world. Deny that there is a Christian faith (the Jewish Hebrew Old Testament is now dead and gone forever and was anyway a curse on mankind.)

    All mankind is now Moslem. Mohammed is everywhere, peace reigns. We can all sigh a breath of relief. The bad days are gone forever. By the way, anything and everything Jewish is to be destroyed. All art, literature, music, medicine, science, business, indeed the very concept of God itself as given to the world by the Jewish people, all must be destroyed and never again mentioned or used on this earth. All past knowledge generated by the Jews forever gone. Yes, certain disease will again return to ravage the earth, but that does not matter because Islam is more important than life itself. Remember, we must all be Martyrs for Allah. Hopefully human sacrifice will come back, (oh, it already has, I forgot about the suicide bombers). Jesus in particular because he was a Jew is to be cursed and reviled. Islam the only true religion to be paramount and every day the whole world to bow its head to Mohammed the true prophet of God.

    Ah, peace at last. The Palestinian State a beacon of light to the whole world. Great and wonderful things are coming from them. Science, medicine, learning and compassion.
    Thank God, the Jews, Christians, Hindu’s, Buddhists etc., etc., all gone. Only reigns Allah and peace on earth forever more.

And to what heinous bit of anti-Semitism was this letter a response? This blogpost, which consisted almost entirely of the following quotation from Peter Jones:

    Had Pericles been George Bush on 9/11, he might well have reasoned as follows: ‘If my policy is to ensure that America is never attacked like this again (and it is), and if one of the root causes of the attack is the Palestinian problem (and it probably was), the rational policy is to fix it. Since Israel would not survive without us, it is to Israel that we must look for co-operation. If we do not get it, our support for Israel ends.’ True, had Bush argued like that and kept his word, one wonders what Mossad would have done to him; and what the implications would be for an Israel entirely devoid of American aid. But so what, if it ensured America’s security?

Yes, it’s practically [i]Mein Kampf[/i], wouldn’t you say?

But the really telling part came in a follow-up email from my friend, who, when informed that Jones was merely commenting on the national security implications for the U.S. of funding Israel, replied simply:

    The world owes to Israel much.

It has a familiar ring to it.