Last night there was another arson attack against a mosque in Houston. Every day there is more hatred expressed toward American Muslims. Our “leaders” guide the haters. It’s hard for me to admit that most whites in my state (Texas) do hate Muslims.
This seems to have happened so fast- just eighteen months or a couple years. before, there were a few loud haters, but the proverbial “man on the street didn’t really” express true hatred until pretty recently.
Anyway two years ago I visited my old home of Minneapolis to catch up with my old motorcycle/anarchist buddies. Visited my friend Rocky Wittkovsky, who plays in Klezmer and swing bands. He had a freind over who is a Jewish historian-activist…
We spent a long evening in front of the wood fire letting the conversation roam, from the history of jazz music, to the relatives, to the old country… I talked about my ancestors who were linen weavers in Greifswald, and about our parents who’d been in WWII…about kibbutzim in the 60s...
History and politics. Someone talked about a certain minor novel written in Germany, about a man who’d been a war hero in 1917, and had gotten the Iron Cross, but was killed in the camps when he was 45 years old. That led to talk about a whole people being killed, rich and poor, educated and unschooled, good and bad, old and young…Rocky’s father had been a American bomber crewman in the war and was killed. He had long thought that all the Wittcoffs had been killed by the Germans, but found when he was fifty that he had whole families of living relatives in Argentina, stories like that.
I told about my great uncle who was a welder in the German Luftwaffe, and had been captured in Africa by the Americans. I told about my childish childhood ideas about him- “He was probably just a kid who loved airplanes, and enlisted to get a technical education. He just couldn’t have been a Nazi.”, long stories like that. Rocky told about his great- grandfather in Koenigsburg who was a Zionist- 1899. Stories of personal history that connect to the big history of our world.
Suddenly our guest blurted out “The Jews in American are here on sufferance”. He pointed out how quickly it had happened in the old country, just a few years till 1933 ocurred. He said that at any charged political moment, the same thing could happen here- “all it would take is some loud puffed up racist with a war fetish- he’d turn on us. Blame us for the Mideast wars, like.”
This guy is sort of extreme, what I would call a radical. Rocky and I looked at each other. No, we thought, Jews are an integral part of American society, not the dark “other” that they were in Eastern Europe a century ago. “This is a representative democracy, forget it, man”.
Now every single day the news tells us about Muslims being attacked, insulted on the street, their homes and mosques vandalized, job and educational discrimination. It just happened so fast! Not just the Republican political leaders, but average working Americans, shouting into the cameras that they hate Muslims, turning out for mass anti-Muslim rallies, telling the poll takers about their hate.
It just happened so fast!
I don’t know what large conclusions I can draw from my ideas, or from the news I see around me. At the coffee shop here, (west Texas village), it is nearly universally held that Muslims are a threat to our society. One or two whites here disagree. But the majority opinion goes with expulsion and supression of Muslims. Same in most of rural America, far as I can tell.
I don’t really know what conclusions I can draw now, or what actions it would be practical to take.
