For the past 300 years in the West, Jews have often had incentives to side with the fringe against the core. Now that the fringe (including blacks, latinos, and Muslims) is more anti-Jewish than the white core, that might change. Jews, like blacks, respond to incentives. If Jews in Europe keep getting slaughtered by Muslims, Jews will increasingly side with the anti-Muslim nationalist core (National Front in France, etc).
If people are rewarded for pointing out all the flaws in the majority, they’ll keep doing it. If they are punished, they’ll stop.
In strongly Muslim countries such as Saudi Arabia, there’s no incentive for Muslims to criticize Muslims. That’s not tolerated.
Every functioning society has to have taboos. The flag was a sacred object in America, for instance. The more Jewish Israel gets, the less permissible it will be to trash Jews and Judaism there. The more Jewish the Jew, the less interested he is in hearing criticism of Jews. Orthodox Jews tend to be more Jewishly nationalistic and chauvinist than Reform and secular Jews. If you want to get along in Orthodox life, you don’t trash Jews and Judaism.
The main reason blacks love Obama is that they see him as black. The main reason many non-blacks hate Obama is because they see him as black.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — As he left Martha Lou’s Kitchen, a soul food institution here on Wednesday, Edward Gadsden expressed irritation about the Republican determination to block President Obama from selecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s replacement on the Supreme Court.
“They’ve been fighting that man since he’s been there,” Mr. Gadsden, who is African-American, said of Mr. Obama, before pointing at his forearm to explain what he said was driving the Republican opposition: “The color of his skin, that’s all, the color of his skin.”
When Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, said after Mr. Scalia’s death on Saturday that the next president, rather than Mr. Obama, should select a successor, the senator’s words struck a familiar and painful chord with many black voters.
After years of watching political opponents question the president’s birthplace and his faith, and hearing a member of Congress shout “You lie!” at him from the House floor, some African-Americans saw the move by Senate Republicans as another attempt to deny the legitimacy of the country’s first black president. And they call it increasingly infuriating after Mr. Obama has spent seven years in the White House and won two resounding election victories.
