McGrath of Harlow;

Did you notice who the author of the magazine article was. His official position does not mean that he shuold not be believed but oly that one should question his conclusions whihc happen to be self-serving. The self-serving is not meant as a value judgment, just as a statement.

His conclusion that the popular culture of the US depicts Arabs the same way they were depicted in Nazi Germany and in Tsarist Russia. I do not know whether that is the case with RUssia because I can't recall seeing such materials but I question his comparison with Nazi Germany. There Jews were considered officially, by the government, as rats infesting the state. They were depicted as leeches living off the body politic of the Aryan nation. The least physically attractive of them were held up a specimens of their people. The govenment told lies about them. It was a stated policy to encourage their isolation, impoverishment and eventual destruction.

I do agree that Arabs have been treated badly in popular culture, especially in more recent years. They have become an easy symbol, a kind of shorthand for hack writers/producers to draw on. There has been a slow recognition that the Persian Gulf nations have us held by bonds of our addction to oil and I believe that there is an expression of resentment of their power over us. AMerica's power has led us to be regarded with dislike, fear and hatred by some other countries who realize that decisions made in Washington or in American corprate boardrooms have more influence on their lives than do the decisions of their own leaders.

However, there has never been in the United States the kind of concentrated official hatred of Arabs that Zogby is trying to hold up as comparable to what went on in Nazi Germany. I think that kind of over-statement is counter productive but I do agree, vigorously, that encouraging prejudice against any ethnic or cultural group needs has to be opposed by all thinking, fair minded people. I am convinced that a lack of social justice must ultimately breed hatred and rebellion. Just don't stretch the truth for "extra points".

One more thing but on a diofferent topic, although I have never read this anywhere, I don't think Jews are a Semitic people in the sense of race. One reason for the hatred of them that was encouraged by the early Christian church was that there was a fight for souls going on. There were I believe at least for a while, a great deal of conversions to Judiasm going on. I think that there was a kingdom in Russia that mass-converted to Judaism. Certainly, the progenitors of the many blue-eyed, fair skinned Jews of Eastern Europe must have had roots somewhere else than beside the Mediterranean.

Growing up in New Hampshire, I knew a woman, a Polish Jewess, who had been in the Warsaw Ghetto during the battle there. She had gone through the sewers several times carrying jewelry and cash to buy guns and bring them back to the fighters inside the walls. She was ten years old but her blonde hair, blue eyes and fair skin gave her an Aryan look. She could pass for a Nordic type as she moved through the armed forces who had pledged loyalty to a man who looked far more semitic than she did.

Sourdough