A new girlfriend got upset for days after I said I wanted to hurt her a little bit (with her full consent and knowledge).
“Why would you want to hurt me?” she said days later with tears in her eyes.
“We all, at times, want to hurt the ones we love,” I said. “If you can’t acknowledge that, you’re not in touch with yourself. You can’t have a relationship without regularly wanting to hurt your partner. If you expect to have a boyfriend who never wants to hurt you, then you want a relationship with a robot. I’m an ethical guy. I’m telling you what I want, and I’m seeking your permission. You, at times, get so pissed at me that you punch me. You do that because you want to hurt me. The amount of suffering I want to inflict on you is considerably less than what a punch from you feels like.”
If a non-Jew never has negative feelings about Jews, never has any desire to hurt them or restrict their freedoms, he’s not being honest with himself, just as every Jew, at times, has negative feelings about non-Jews and at times wants to hurt them or restrict their freedoms.
If you are true to your religion, every other religion in the world seems at best weird, and at worst, evil.
This is why decrying “anti-Semitism” don’t grab my attention. In certain situations, negative feelings about Jews are likely to lead to the physical harming of Jews, but 999 times out of 1000, they are not going to lead to any harm of Jews. So what matters is clarity about genuine conflicts of interests between groups over scarce resources, and when the conflicts become severe enough, we need to face that there’s likely to be harm done.
