What Hamas did last week should have sparked a robust debate about -oh, I don't know- the rules of war, the role of Antisemitism, and the resurgence of the barbarian.Why should it? Nothing has changed. Hamas is still a bunch of terrorists and Netanyahu is still an idiot — heck, this underlines it.
In this, our own free and tolerant land, where wars have been waged and constitutions violated for the benefit of the African negro, the descendants of barbarian tribes who for four thousand years have contributed nothing to, though in close contact with, the civilization of mankind, save as the Helots contributed an example to the Spartan youth, and where laws and partisan courts alike have been used to force him into an equality with those whom he could not equal, we have seen Jews, educated and respectable men, descendants of those from whom we derive our civilization, kinsmen, after the flesh, of Him whom we esteem as the Son of God and Saviour of men, ignominiously ejected from hotels and watering places as unworthy the association of men who had grown rich by the sale of a new brand of soap or an improved patent rat trap!This speech does not elaborate on any specific parallels between Civil War and wars that Jews had had to fight, but by painting the character of the Jews in a light that one might find easier to identify with, it does whip up the sentiment that the supposed injustice that the Confederates have to suffer is something like the suffering of the Jews.
[...]
The popular habit is to regard an injury done to one by a man of different creed as a double wrong; to me it seems that the wrong is the greater coming from my own. To hold also, as some do, that the sins of all people are due to their creeds, would leave the sins of the sinners of my creed quite imaccounted for. With some faith of a scoundrel is all important; it is not so with me.
[...]
[Jews] have managed to endure with long-suffering patience the knout of the Czar and the bow-string of the Turk, but they have fled for life from the presence of the wooden nutmegs and the left-handed gimlets of Jonathan. Is there any man who hears me to-night who, if a Yankee and a Jew were to "lock horns" in a regular encounter of conmiercial wits, would not give large odds on the Yankee? My own opinion is that the genuine "guessing" Yankee, with a jack-knife and a pine shingle, could in two hours' time whittle the smartest Jew in New York out of his home-stead in the Abrahamic covenant.
Monument to Confederate governor who loved Jews is coming down in Asheville, NCQuite instructive to read more closely about Wilmington insurrection, definitely a blueprint for Jan 6, 2021.
Complicated legacy of Zebulon Vance — US senator, North Carolina governor, defender of the Jewish people and white supremacist — is reexamined by a town and its Jewish mayor
[...]
As to why Vance wrote ["Scattered Nation"], one reason might lie in his membership in the Masons, a group that readily accepted Jews. Another, [a local Jewish heritage leader] Rogoff says, may have been the Confederacy’s view of itself as suffering Israelites. In this trope, the Confederates cast themselves as Israel, escaping the “pharaoh” Lincoln and his tyranny of oppression, even as they defend slavery.
In 1876, Vance won back his old job as governor of North Carolina. That sent a message to anyone in the state who might support racial equality.
“What a powerful symbol,” said Tom Hanchett, a community historian in Charlotte. “The rebels of the Confederacy are coming back into power, their ‘rightful’ place.”
Bringing back as much of the old system as possible was the instinctive response of defeated Confederates, adds Harry Watson, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“If you couldn’t hang onto slavery, the idea was to reinvent white supremacy so that it existed without actual enslavement,” Watson said.
Three years later, Vance was elected to the Senate, where he served until his death in 1894.
There was no mention of his passing in the Jewish press. The Vance Monument was dedicated in Asheville in 1897. The following year, North Carolina was host to the only armed coup d’etat in US history when white residents in Wilmington overthrew a democratically elected, biracial government.
The bloody frenzy had been planned for months. White insurrectionists forced Black leaders and their allies to flee the city. They shot into Black residents’ homes. They burned down the local Black-owned newspaper office. It’s believed that some 60 people were murdered, possibly more.
“You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about.
War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it … Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors.
You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.”
― William T. Sherman