Blaming People

I sat in on my wife's Holocaust Class last evening, courtesy of the Professor. This is my wife's second pass through this class, this time for credit. I was there for the last hour and the issue was how prejudice against the Jews was not new with Adolph Hitler, but stretched back to the late 1800s and back to the Reformation and back to the Middle Ages and back even further. Someone in the class brought up that the German anti-Semitism didn't seem so bad in 1900, compared to France, with the shameful Dreyfus Affair. For me, one of the most interesting things was that noted History Professor Heinrich von Treitschke, in a 1890 book, made anti-Semitism "socially acceptable" in Germany.

So, now comes Professor Glenn Reynolds, the Inspaundit, with this comment

“A poll commissioned by the ADL shows that 33% of Europeans blame the Jews for the financial meltdown. A mind-boggling 74% Spaniards think so.” Pathetic. No wonder they caved so easily to al Qaeda.

While this may be a little unfair to the Spanish, it makes one wonder, especially when a DNA analysis shows that "about 20 percent of the current population of the Iberian Peninsula has Sephardic Jewish ancestry." Go figure.

Various European nations are cracking down on anti-Muslin talk, but anti-Semitism seems to endure in Europe.

Just to be clear, anti-Semitism is bad.

Regards  --  Cliff