If I live to be 150 years old I'll never understand the world's seething hatred of the Jews. It makes no sense.
Cindie
Well, actually some of the posts here illustrate one of the reasons. If your religion tells you that YOU are the chosen people, and some other group claims IT is the chosen people, and then moves in next door to you, the seeds of conflict are pretty irrevocably sown, and somebody's got to go, or at least get pummeled into submission eventually.
In Europe the roots of anti-Semitism had a more economic component and the insular, exclusive, and mutually-promoting ways of the Jewish community (Going along with the whole 'Chosen' belief) fostered a lot of pushback, which always intensified when times were tough...when any kind of wealth gets concentrated in a minority that strongly pursues taking care of its own as a primary value, any propagation of that wealth gets plowed back in to selectively benefit that community first and foremost, and enables it to further accelerate concentration of wealth in itself. This results in the rest of the populace feeling like they are getting screwed for the benefit of that minority, even if their own leaders set up a lot of the conditions that created the situation -- not unlike the history of affirmative action here in the US, and how many fans of that are there here? A lot of that situation was indeed created by the European Gentiles, for instance the religious ban on usury for Christians greatly facilitated the growth of Jewish banking and financial organizations, and religious-based prohibitions on Jewish participation in some professions or Christian participation in others also naturally led to a predominance of one group or the other in particular fields that outlived the twilight of the religious proscriptions.
In modern times the economic pace and scale, plus the nature and scope of opportunities to make one's way in the world, have pretty much obviated the reasons that gave birth to European anti-Semitism, though of course there is a cultural remnant of it lingering. Not so the friciton between competing 'Chosen' peoples, which will inevitably result in bloodshed whenever two mutually exclusive groups with the same religious conviction about their destinies rub up against each other.
I personally set no stock in anybody being chosen myself, and regard religion as a disaster-seeking basis for foreign policy decisions. Democracies have allies, not 'Friends,' and those alliances last as long as there is a mutual value in it and not a moment beyond. Since the end of the Cold War, the policy basis for our relations in the ME somewhat murky, and currently it's not all cut-and-dired as to whether backstopping Israel is helping us or hurting us in a big-picture, long-run way. Supporting them means being on the wrong side with a large majority of the population in the area (including the guys sitting on all the oil) and occasional outbreaks of localized blood-spilling, while backing out entirely would tend to encourage large-scale overt and covert adventurism by Syria and Iran (from the current cast of characters) with consequences that could easily escalate to regional nuclear war, so I see us keeping up our semi-alliance with Israel in the interests of holding down a lid on the region to prevent large-scale hostilites, which would be very bad for everybody includng us.
