It’s true that Jews have won a lot of Nobel prizes, and I think that reflects an emphasis on education in Jewish culture and also the fact that Jews mostly live in wealthy countries, which makes it easier to pursue the kinds of work that might win you a Nobel Prize. I don’t think it’s to anyone’s discredit if their culture or religion doesn’t have a lot of Nobels.
It goes without saying that the email is dumb, but the thing that annoys me about it isn’t just the prejudice against Muslims. I think most of us are used to seeing that, and I’ve seen this email before. What bothers me is the phony nostalgic love for Jews. Europeans - not all of them, of course, but many groups over a long period of time - treated Jews like dirt and almost literally blamed them for everything that went wrong in the world. When someone took that idea to its logical conclusion, the reaction from Europeans was actually sort of mixed. And now we have this author who not only thinks that Jews have been wiped out when they haven’t been, but has the gall to say ‘Now that we’ve exterminated them, I’ve realized they weren’t so bad after all.’ How thoughtful!
Worse than that, maybe, is the fact that when you read the letter and the way he or she talks about Muslim riffraff…
You start to realize that this isn’t very different from how some Europeans talked about Jews 100 years ago (or more), and you might start to think that if this writer had lived back then, he or she would have been saying these kinds of things about Jews instead of Muslims.
Speaking of Nobel Prizes I remember a lecture given by Neil DeGrasse Tyson where he was speaking of the disproportionate number of Nobel Prizes that have been awarded to people who identify as Jewish than to those who identify as Muslim.
The reason he gave was that the Islamic world was a Mecca (excuse the pun) for intellectual learning and discovery during the years 800 AD and 1100 AD. During this time algebra, the Arabic numerals and most of the stars that have names were named. It was a time where free thought was at its best and if this trend had continued Dr. Tyson argued that today almost all Nobel Prizes would be awarded to people from the Islamic world.
He lamented the fact that religious superstition prevented this wonderfully scientific and mathematical culture from blossoming into something spectacular. He lamented all the ideas that may have emerged from this population which consists of 20% of the world simply had the CULTURAL drive to pursue the sciences and the mathematics.
This is the video I was referencing. To get to the part about Nobel Prizes go to 52:20 and watch for about 5 minutes.
Apparently the people pushing that crap think that saying “look, this was published in a newspaper” makes it the summa total of unarguable truth. That mindset reminds me of that website which reads, IIRC,
logically if you applied the percentage of Jews on the Nobel Prize list to the millions who perished in the camps the list would be larger.
Interesting perspective. Despite being hunted for sport across an entire continent they literally rose from the ashes of history to again be productive citizens. You have to ask yourself why? What is it that makes a demographic group of people aspire to greatness despite great adversity?
I can see the attitude behind this existing in some Europeans, and others. Tearing of the hair and rending of clothing because they killed the Jews they could have exploited. And in trying to exploit the Muslims they’ve become infested with terrorists. Obviously the Muslims should be killed and another group brought in to exploit.
And of course I can see small minded Jews seeing this and thinking “See, we are so much better than Muslims”.
