Let’s have some anti-semitism for Christmas!
In the pluralistic society that is the United States, where people of differing cultures and religions can all celebrate—and share—their traditions, it is perhaps natural that specific references to any one religion are scaled back. My prospective employer, who I’m interviewing with in March, sent me a card wishing “every happiness this holiday season”. My view, for what it’s worth, is that this is natural and to be expected. Wishing someone “happy holidays” is not a threat to those person’s beliefs. For all they know, I’m Jewish—wishing me a “merry Christmas” might be a faux pas to avoid. Or perhaps I’m a practicing Muslim. As it stands, I’m an atheist, but I figure that Christmas is a secular holiday anyway. I treat Christmas as a celebration of capitalism, not a celebration of Christ. We buy gifts for one another to celebrate our ability, as people living in a wealthy capitalist society, to expend economic resources not only on unneeded items, but on unneeded items for other people.
But not everyone sees things as I do. An irritatingly large number of right-wing Christians—and make no mistake: the religious right, for all their ranting about “Judeo-Christian values”, have no concern for the Jews or their values—have decided that there is only room for one culture and one religious tradition in our society. This is the reason for all the whining about “happy holidays”. These people want to exterminate every competing holiday just so they can feel more comfortable wishing everyone a “merry Christmas”. And it’s not enough that it’s the happy secular Christmas that most of us celebrate. No, it has to be a consciously religious Christmas that’s focused not on our society’s prosperity, not on family and friends, not on bringing people together in celebration during the darkest days of winter, but rather on the birth of a mythical god-man who was not even born in late December to begin with. (As an aside: why celebrate it in late December then? The pagans always had celebrations in late December, so the Christians decided to co-opt these celebrations during their rise as the predominant religion in Europe, and in this fashion, they succeeded in destroying every other cultural and religious tradition.)
The most popular right-wing Christian tactic by far is to cloak their attempts at cultural domination in a flurry of complaints that they, themselves, are being persecuted. True, these people do control the entire federal government, a large number of mostly Southern states, and the Kansas State Board of Education, but let’s set that aside for now. I’m going to quote one of these simpletons so we can see who these paranoid schizophrenics think they’re being oppressed by. This is a quote by John Gibson, of Fox News Channel, in his book The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought. Allow me to clarify this: this following quote is something that John Gibson didn’t just say off the cuff, he wrote it down, probably keeping it on his PC for weeks, even months, before submitting it to a publisher so hundreds of thousands of books could be printed with this statement. So let’s presume, for a moment, that the following exact quote expresses the genuine sentiments of John Gibson:
The wagers of this war on Christmas are a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians - not just Jewish people.
Most of us can plainly see what’s wrong with this statement, but since it’s a well-established fact that right-wing Christians are idiots (exhibit A: “intelligent design”), let me point it more clearly. According to Gibson, it’s pretty well established that the Jews are after you, so you don’t even have to accuse them directly. To John Gibson, there is no honest disagreement or difference of opinion here. Contrary to popular belief, Jewish people don’t want you to wish them a “merry Christmas” because they don’t celebrate it—it’s because they’re just going out of their way to wage a war on it! This is a rather stunning claim, but the scary thing is that Gibson doesn’t just make this claim. He makes it as an aside, devoting the main thrust of his argument to attacking other groups. These groups, similarly, don’t have an honest difference of opinion about the issue. Nope, all these secularists and trial lawyers are in a “cabal” with the Jews to persecute the god-fearing Christians out there!
If it doesn’t scare the shit out of you that views like this are popular in this country, you need to read some more history.
Tags: anti-semitism, christmas, religion
“The wagers of this war on Christmas are a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians - not just Jewish people.”
Except that quote was taken out of context. He could have spent half the book before this blaming it on the Jews, then broadens his attack. While I do not agree with him, it isn’t clear from this sentence that he thinks “it’s pretty well established that the Jews are after you, so you don’t even have to accuse them directly.”
Doug
Explain what else he could have possibly meant by “not just Jewish people”. Anyone trying to avoid the appearance of anti-Semitism, even if they were anti-Semitic, wouldn’t accuse them of being in a “cabal” to ware a “war on Christmas”.
Explain to me what possible context could justify that sort of statement.
“The Jewish do this, the Jews do that. The Jews attack Christmas this way, the Jews attack Christmas that way. But Don’t think the Jews are alone in this. “The wagers of this war on Christmas are a cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians - not just Jewish people.” And so-on…
If in that context, while still anti-semetic, the quote does not mean he just automatically assumes that Jewish wage a war on Christmas as an aside. It means that he just made his case about Jewish people waging this war, and now he’s moving onto something else. That was the point I was trying to make. If he had just said this, in an interview or as the first sentence in the book, then yes your point is valid. But if it comes elsewhere in the book where he would have been talking about Jewish people beforehand, the quote is taken out of context. It changes the meaning of the quote.
OK…so either way he’s an anti-Semite. What’s your point?