Respect

This is my heavy-duty response to the clueless woman in the Denver suburbs from "Dear Amy," exacerbated by comments from a discussion at Epinions Addicts and this piece of news from the BBC:

London's mayor has been suspended from office on full pay for four weeks for comparing a Jewish journalist to a concentration camp guard.

Here is Livingstone's statement, with some context:

Their papers were not, as some have reported, guilty of "a brief flirtation" with Adolf Hitler in the l930s.

In truth these papers were the leading advocates of anti-Semitism in Britain for half a century.

Beginning a hundred years ago with their campaign to stop Jewish refugees fleeing to Britain from Russia they carried on right the way through the rise of Hitler and even after the start of World War II still felt free to peddle the lie that Germany's Jews had brought the holocaust upon themselves.

I have set out in detail the record of the Daily Mail group in my formal response to the London Assembly.

Whilst it is true the Mail group no longer smears Jews as bringing crime and disease to the UK it is only because they have moved on.

After a decade of pandering to racism against our citizens of Black and Irish origin they have moved on and now describe asylum seekers and Muslims in similar terms.

For the Mail group the victims may change but the intolerance, hatred and fear pervade every issue of the papers.

This ties in with the brouhaha over the Danish newspaper cartoons. This article from the Seattle Times discusses the reactions of some moderate Muslim Americans:

"The cartoons border on hate speech. If people depicted Jews in that light, people would be very upset. If you look at them, they are very similar to cartoons drawn of Jews in Nazi Germany," said Dega Muna, 40, a Somali-born Muslim who grew up mostly in the U.S. and Canada and who coordinates a "progressive Muslim" group that meets weekly in New York City.

"I agree it's free speech, but with free speech comes responsibility, and knowing the consequences of your actions. They were provoking ... and this is the reaction they got. Unfortunately, it kind of proves their point, that Muslims are violent."

I might point out that the Islamic press portrays Jews in that light and worse on a regular basis. I don't recall hearing reports of Israelis burning the Egyptian embassy, or threatening to behead Syrian journalists.

After thinking about this a bit, I still see this as a veiled threat. What they're saying, in effect, is "cater to our sensibilities, change your own traditions and customs to suit us, and we won't burn you out. Maybe."

What it boils down to is that political correctness is running amok. Everyone's personal sensibilities take precedence (hence the suburban lady with the gay neighbors), which obviously is a situation that's not going to work. That's why we have right-wing Christians claiming to be persecuted in a country that they are running. Why? Because other people get a hearing. That's why people can be tried for anti-gay remarks in Canada -- because someone's offended. That's why outraged Muslims can burn Danish embassies and have ready-made apologists blaming the Danes. (And the apologists are not necessarily Muslim themselves.)

And people will use this, as we can see from the cartoon riots. They're offended. Y'know what? That's the price of democracy. As someone said (and I wish I could remember who -- it might have been Andrew Sullivan, or someone he quoted), living in a democracy takes a thick skin. Get over yourselves.

My take: Everyone gets a certain amount of respect just for surviving as long as they have. You deal like a real mensch -- fairly, honestly, with dignity and respect for others -- and you get to keep it, and maybe earn more. You come on like an asshole, and it's gone. Getting it back is the devil's own work, because at that point, I know you're an asshole and you have to prove that you're not.

Not easy.

(The picture? Completely off-topic. Or maybe just a reminder about what's really important in the world: it's Barkeria spectabilis, a Mexican orchid that grows in near-desert conditions, related to Epidendrum, Cattleya and that whole group. I needed something that was not going to make me angry.)