It's scary out there (and I haven't even left the house)

As Debra gets more and more into social media, I decided I should become a little more in touch with the blogosphere. I've been using Google's Blogsearch with terms like shamanic healing, Jewish healing, Jewish spirituality, and the like. I'm trying to find out where like minded people are hanging out online and what they are writing about.

What I've found is that there are very few people who think like I do and are interested in Jewish spirituality similar to mine. Or at least they aren't writing about it online. In fact, there really isn't anyone who's using the same language I do, so my next step is to find the terms that they do use to talk about it.

But what I did find, in over-abundance, was virulently antisemitic blogs, often in the first page of results. They ranged from being slightly antisemitic and wildly anti-Israel to being straight out rehashes of classical antisemitic viewpoints and anti-Israel in the context of the hatred. They write of Jews as being the occupiers of Palestine (ok, I understand where that comes from) and then add that the Talmud is the source of all destructive energy in the world because the Jews are fundamentally insane (WTF?!?). It goes on from there to how Jews are responsible for the current fiscal crisis and have been responsible for all of the world's genocides, all of them, for the past 4000 years! Holy shit!

I grew up pretty sheltered in a town with a 20% Jewish population and, luckily, antisemitism has largely been absent from my life. But over the past hour or two of researching the web, I've come across 20 or more hate sites. Apparently, I'm the spawn of the Devil and am in control of everything, everywhere. If so, why do I allow these paranoid haters to continue to exist? Why haven't they been forced to live off the grid so the overlords can no longer find them? Oh, that's right, there are no overlords, and these people are just insane.

The last site I looked at condemned all the Zionist racism which were then followed by the most racist remarks about Jews. I guess the author was not really trying to find a coherent logical point.

In the end, it just makes me sad. I don't understand why people hate us. I understand people having political problems with the current state of Israel. Heck, I do too. But why they make the jump to all the antisemitic stereotypes is beyond me. I guess I just don't hate enough. I still think the Palestinians aren't inherently Evil (though I'm not convinced that Hamas isn't). I don't jump from having problems with their political actions to hating them and lumping them all into a group that is basically flawed. I guess that haters missed the talk about how if you stereotype one, you stereotype all.

I know that there will always be people like this in the world. There will always be those who feel good about themselves by hating others. But it scares me when the person they hate is me. (In truth, it scares me when they hate anyone.) We still live in the shadow of Hitler and the specter of fully assimilated Germans being sent to camps haunts me.

"In Germany, they came first for the Communists,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist;

And then they came for the trade unionists,
And I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist;

And then they came for the Jews,
And I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew;

And then . . . they came for me . . .
And by that time there was no one left to speak up."

- Pastor Martin Niemoller, Germany 1946

The Internet is a great equalizer. When the hater would stand on the soap-box, their message would only carry as far as their voice. Now, with the Internet, the voice can carry all over the planet. It's an instant megaphone for the masses. We, humanity, can use it to fight tyranny or to destroy ourselves. I guess these people have made their choice in which direction they want the world to go.

There is a movie I once saw called "The Infiltrator" based on the true story of an Israeli American Journalist named Yaron Svoray who infiltrated into the neo-Nazi movement in Germany. At the end of the movie, as the fictional Svoray is fist fighting with the head neo-Nazi, the neo-Nazi says to him: You can beat me, but there are a lot of people like me out there. To which Platt replies: Yeah, but there are even more people like me out there.

I guess that's the thought I need to keep in mind, for however many haters are out there, there are more fighting for love than for hate.