Reply #107: In Your No. 92 Above, Q.

[The Magistrate]

You have gone beyond the traditional grouping of apples with oranges, into what might best be called a case of blueberries and potatoes. Your grounds, apparently, for equating Zionists with Jew-haters is that, in your view, they have done harm to Judaism, amd you adduce the likes of Bin Laden and Robertson as doing similar harm to Islam and Christianity.

But even you seem aware that neither of these are like those bigoted against those religions: you have not likened Robertson to an anti-Christian bigot, as you have likened Zionists to Anti-Semites. Neither Robertson nor Bin Laden conceives of himself as doing harm to his religion. Rather, each holds himself to be exalting and vindicating it, and that against vile opposition to it from unbelievers. Neither is particularly concerned that those who do not share his faith do not approve of what he does; each is concerned rather to rally those who adhere to his faith, and steel them to struggle against those who, by his view of things, seek to destroy it. No one who views himself at war is much concerned by the enemy's view of his actions.

The fact is, you rather enjoy making absurd and sweeping charges against Zionists, and the impudence of likening them Anti-Semites, like the impudence of comparing the founding of Israel to the massacre of European Jewry, appeals to you, for reasons you are probably best qualified to disclose. You have said that your views on this matter are conditioned by feelings of personal guilt for the actions of England and the United States, though the most important acts of the former in this matter took place before your birth, and you have no responsibility whatever for any action of either. Emotion is not the best guide to this sort of thing.