Anti-Semites masquerading as Germans?

Because Emma was not eating at all, was barely drinking, and was barely able to move around without become completely disoriented, Chris and I decided that it would be cruel to wait until Saturday to put her to sleep. We went to the vet on Friday morning. The vet gave her a narcotic that made her sleep, we petted her, cried a whole heck of a lot, and said our goodbyes. The doctor came and collected her and gave her something ending her life, and put her in a box.

We decided to bury Emma in my Schrebergarten. It took us nearly two hours to dig a whole deep enough for her (the ground in the Schwarzwald is as hard as stone, because so much of it is made up of just that.) I said a prayer, read “The Runaway” by Robert Frost and “Going to Heaven” by Emily Dickinson and we covered her body with earth and planted sunflower seeds on top.


As one may expect, the news about the conflict taking place between Hezbollah and Israel is headlining the news here. What is most interesting, though, is how much the slant is against anything, and I mean anything, that Israel does. A notorious hick and the son of a Czech farmer, one of the long-time members of our chorus was informing me of why exactly everything that Israel was doing was horrible. I asked him, since he seemed to be an expert on Israel, how many Jews there are in the Czech Republic. His response of “many” intrigued me enough to dig up some statistics.

The Jewish Virtual Library, using its 2005 estimates, say that the Czech Republic, a country of 10,241,138 citizens has 3,072 Jews. This means that Jews make up 0.03% of the Czech population. This certainly begs the question ‘what does “many” mean, then’?

Germany, in 1901, had 56,400,000 total citizenrs of which 586,948 were Jewish. (At that time, 1% of the population.) Today, Germany has 82,431,390 citizens, 107,160 of whom are Jewish, bringing their percentage down to 0.13%.

Hitler’s “final solution” sought to bring Jewish culture to an abrupt end by simply eliminating every last Jew in his over-reaching territories. The holocaust saw the murder of 6,500,000 Jews, bringing, both by his immediate actions and those that followed, the percentage of German Jews down from 1% of the population to 0.13%. As sick as it sounds, he succeeded, at least partly, with his goal.

What is even scarier than the numbers is that the people who are most hardcore against just about everything that Israel does are the Germans that I come into contact with at my job. And, as a side note, because there are no Jews left here, they have no idea about Jewish culture whatsoever. They don’t know what a Yarmulke is, or a Bris. Astounding as it may be, the typical German doesn’t even know what a Bar Mitzvah is.

The ultraconservative bass in the choir who was born and bred in this little town showed his real colors yesterday, proclaiming that the rising gas prices were because of the Jews. The funny thing is, these people think that they’re not being racist in any way by being completely prejudiced against the State of Israel, because they don’t say things like “the gas is going up because of the Jews.” No, no, that would be too obvious. Instead they say “yeah, and look at the gas prices, that’s because of the Israelis.” Hmmm. Doesn’t take a total genius to read through that.

I don’t agree with everything that Israel has done in this conflict. (I especially do not agree with the shelling of Beirut.) But, the Jews are surrounded by a bunch of third world people who would like nothing better than to see every Jew wiped from the face of the Earth. Hezbollah is funded by Iran, a country whose president has said publicly that the holocaust did not even happen. When their soldiers come across the border and kidnap Israeli soldiers to use as ransom, there should be no big surprise that a strong response came from Israel.

Can you imagine what would happen if Mexico were harboring thousands and thousands of terrorists on the US border, and some of them came across, killed some US soldiers and took several others as hostage? Yes, we would be pissed as hell and bomb the shit out of them. And, you know what, they would deserve it, in my opinion.

Yes, it has gone too far and Israel has been a bit too over-bearing. That being said, let’s not forget that it was not Israel that crossed Lebanon’s border, it was the other way around.