The fight against ignorance gets violent!

The BBQ Pit
1

Well, not really. Close though.

Today Ginger and I traveled to NYC with her parents who are in town from western Canada for the holidays. One of the things that mom wanted to see was ground zero, so we stashed the car in the Battery Park Garage and walked a few blocks over to the former site of the World Trade Center. I was packing our infant son in the Baby Bjorn, he was all wrapped up snug and warm against my chest, which was good because it was pretty damn cold in lower Manhattan today.
Anyway, we came upon the site from Greenwich Street, looked down at the MTA reconstruction, and then slowly walked around the site, reading the information plaques posted on the fences surrounding the hole. I’ve been here several times since 9/11, but it’s one of those places that I think will always be able to put me in an introspective move. We had moved around the corner onto the Church St. sidewalks, just across from the Century 21 department store. Walking along, planning to go into Century 21 to pick up an additional pair of socks for baby’s feet, I overheard what the guy next to me was saying to his friends. “There were no Jews, you know. No Jews were killed in the attack, they were warned to stay away”

Suddenly, this guy has a finger being waved angrily in his face. “That’s a fucking lie!”, someone is yelling, “it’s been disproveen again and again. It’s a fucking racist propaganda lie!”

Oh dear, that’s my finger. That’s me yelling at him. I appear to be quite angry. Hmmm.

The guy is agitated (and objectively, who can blame him? He’s talking to his friends, and suddenly a stranger is all in his face screaming at him. ) He waves his arms and shouts at me “The Jews do it! They were warned away!”.

“That’s bullshit!” I yell back, “I have a Jewish friend who was in the second tower when the first was hit!” (This is actually a lie. The only friend I had on site on 9/11 was Vix, and to the best of my knowledge, she’s not Jewish. It doesn’t matter. There were plenty of Jews there, plenty of Jews who died that day. This guy is a moron and a racist)

“I have friend die too!” he screams. Not that it makes a bit of difference, but the guy did have an Eastern European or Middle Eastern accent. If I had to guess, I’d put his nationality at Iranian, but one who has been here for a while, likely one of the many Iranians who emigrated after the Shah was overthrown to become Americans. He looks like he wants to hit me, which is when I realize that I am wearing a baby, and that is likely stopping him. (I guess you could call this the Greg Stillson defense, cowards take note for future use) I tone it down just a tiny bit. “It’s a damn ignorant, racist, genocidal lie. You should be ashamed of yourself for spreading it” I retort, and then stomp off to the department store and buy Jimmy’s socks.

It takes me a while to cool down. I shouldn’t get that angry, but what was I gonna do, link him to Snopes? It boggles my mind how many people are still willing to swallow that Protocols garbage and similar idiocy , stubbornly ignorant in the face of all facts. A group that has as one of it’s stated purposes the extermination of all the Jews in the Middle East attacks the civilian population of Israel’s staunchest ally, and members of that civilian population who suffered because of the attack still find ways to blame “the Jews”. Madness, sheer madness.

2

Ow. That kind of thing… it just turns my stomach. :frowning:

3

Arggggg.
What ,we used our Secret Jew Decoder Rings to figure out the secret clues in the NY times that morning? Rabbis passed along the word at every schule in the five boroughs? A council of Jewish Elders met over a tombstone to discuss the attack?

Gods, how can people even believe this shit?

4

Good for you for sticking up for what’s true and what’s right. It’s hard to believe that there’s so much racism, intolerance, and plain pure hate out there that starts with ignorance. It’s insane. People like you are helping to change it bit by bit, though, and the rest of us appreciate it whether we realize it or not. Every one of us will experience ignorant and inexplicable hate from another based solely on our color, race, sex, sexual orientation, or creed. But we can all take small steps like this, yelling out in the face of ignorance, and maybe someday our children’s children will make a more cohesive world.
Thanks for helping out with that.

5

Dave, I have a guy at work that is so right-wing that he actually calls me a liberal, and during our regularly scheduled 8 hours together likes to hold court on all manner of things. His favorite pet peeve is “the fucking queers” (BTW, for the record, he’s a civilian contract guard, not that I would expect anything different from the military people I work with).

Here we are, holding loaded weapons, and he’s ranting like a stark raving lunatic, like Hitler at Nuremburg, and I have to sit there and take it, because to tell you the truth, as nice a man as I am told he is, I’m thinking that this guy is nutters, and I don’t want to chance getting plugged over nothing.

The point. Ah, yes, the point. You have your kid and your wife with you in a rather large city noted not just for its goodwill on 9/11 but for crime and assorted other unsavory things. Just as I hold my tongue with my coworker chucklehead, I would suggest that you bite down really fucking hard on that tongue, because you never can tell what someone will do to you. I’ve seen fights start over much less than what you did. The possibility of you ever convincing the man that the Jews aren’t responsible for his poor lot in life is minimal. The chance that he goes psycho on you is much greater.

Keep that in the back of your mind, because if anything were to happen to you, Ginger, Matthew, or James, I’d be on the hunt for the motherfucker that did it, and I don’t want to have to do that over something as ridiculous as a fight over whether the Jews run the world.

Besides, we all know that it’s true. Damn, dude. Where have you been? :stuck_out_tongue:

6

Once more: I’m truly sorry Weirddave. :frowning: Racists are everywhere, but I’m sorry you had to run into one.

Like Airman Doors, USAF said: Please take care of yourself and your family. Bigoted nutcases tend to slit your throat if you disagree with them.

7

The sad thing is that in many places that have “solved” the “Jewish problem”, there are still people who blame the Jews for their lot in life. If they don’t have any live Jews to point to, they accuse their enemies of being “secret Jews” or agents of the International Zionist Conspiracy. They are so disconnected from conventional reality that I’m tempted to write them off as mentally ill, but they are considered normal members of their society.

8

Fighting ignorance with lies? :dubious:

9

In this case, I think it was acceptable.

10

The Jew hater might have thought the same thing. He might have known that Jews were killed, but thought that it was acceptable in this case to lie, just as Bush thought it was acceptable in this case to lie about Iraq. When you open a door, all and sundry may pass through.

11

Nope, slippery slope argument won’t work here, especially if we’ve adopted a Machiavellian perspective.
Lying to dispel a hurtful and destructive stereotype =/= lying to support a hurtful and destructive stereotype.

12

You probably deserved to get popped for that one. I lived in New York for years and that kind of behavior from you shows you really need to learn the folkways of the city a bit more before you run loose.

As it is I find it annoying we people care so much about things like this and get indignant. I’d think the guy was an idiot, but to me activism in private life is one of the great evils, because it goes against my inherent apathy when it comes to my private civilian life.

13

Do you know what the queers are doing to the soil?
:wink:

14

Well, I was a block away and could easily have been there if I decided to browse through Borders at 5WTC that morning.

I guess no one warned Abraham Zelmanowitz that morning (who lived only half a block from where I now live). He even stayed behind to be with a (non-Jewish) paraplegic co-worker who couldn’t escape.

I suppose no one told Shimmy Biegeleisen, another Jew, to stay away that morning either.

There were no doubt others as well, but those are the first two that come to mind.

Zev Steinhardt

15

It was really disturbing. My quiet Canadian parents were shocked, but didn’t hear what the man had said. I told Mom later when she asked, and she was just disgusted. She didn’t believe anyone could be so horribly bigoted.

16

Off topic, but we are not! New York is safer than Dave’s town and possibly yours, too. The first precinct, where the trade center was located, has a full time population of about 50,000 and a daytime population of over 500,000 not including tourists and has seen all of four murders in the last three years.

I think your general advice about talking to nutters is good, but if anything the nutters are less likely to go wild on you in New York (and at ground zero specifically, as the place is overrun by law enforcement officer) than other places.

17

I’m glad you yelled at the asshole.

Even if what you said wasn’t true, his lie was bigger and had malicious intent. He probably didn’t change his mind but the people he was talking to will probably doubt his story.

18

I would usually agree with you and Liberal, at least in principle, but in this case the only thing I lied about was the “friend” part. The Jewish person I was thinking of who was there is the cousin of a client. “Friend” is a little easier to say rather than a convoluted explaination of our relationship.

Gee, thanks for the tip. Here in Baltimore it’s commonplace to fly off the handle at strangers, we usually do it in the evening after we’ve mucked out the stables and spread lime on the waste in the latrines to keep the flies down. Do you have a point, or at least any evidence that 1) there is somnething unique about the rules of civilized behavior in NYC or 2) that my OP is somehow attempting to excuse or brag about my flying off the handle?

Kitty Genovese, we have your answer!

19

It was not a slippery slope argument. Slippery slope is of the form, ((A & B) -> C) -> ((A -> C) V (B -> C)).

But you are defining both hurtful and destructive to suit yourself. Bush and the Jew haters do the same thing.

20

I don’t know why you have such a penchant for trying to explain things with mathamatical equations, but it strikes me as kinda batty.
YMMV of course.

Moreoever, the claim that lying to dispell a hurtful and bigoted premise somehow means that lying to start a hurtful and bigoted situation is okay? In my mind, that’s the very definition of a ‘slippery slope’ argument. That once the ball starts rolling, the gates of hell come open and anything is cool.

Bullshit.
Any untrue and hateful system of belief designed to demonize a group of people is hurtful and destructive. I’m not sure if you’re suggesting I only feel that way because there are Jews involved, but if you are, you’re dead wrong.