[Congressional Record Volume 140, Number 70 (Wednesday, June 8, 1994)]
[Senate]
[Page S]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Printing Office [www.gpo.gov]


[Congressional Record: June 8, 1994]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]

 
                          SINKING INTO THE MUD

 Mr. SIMON. Mr. President, hatreds hurt everyone, and they 
distort our thinking. When a person is hated, it is easy to hate in 
return.
  In reading the Jerusalem Report the other day, I came across a column 
by Anne Roiphe with the heading ``Sinking Into the Mud'' and the 
subhead: ``One of the terrible things about this round of anti-Semitism 
is that it makes me hate back and just as widely, just as ignorantly.''
  It is sad to note that hatred toward groups, of whatever background, 
seems to be rising in our country.
  I urge my colleagues to read the column by Anne Roiphe, and I ask 
that it be inserted into the Record at this point.
  The column follows:

                          Sinking Into the Mud

       Louis Farrakhan is not the last Haman or even the most 
     remarkable but he does break the heart. ``Again,'' we sigh, 
     ``You,'' we think, ``not you too,'' as images of Abraham 
     Joshua Heschel standing at the side of Martin Luther King, 
     and Schwerner and Goodman lying dead in a Southern ditch 
     float through our heads. Farrakhan referred to the ``narrow-
     minded common Jew'' and stated, ``The Jews cannot defeat me. 
     I will grind them and crush them into little bits.''
       We don't believe that major programs will spill out of 
     Harlem (Crown Heights was most likely a singular event). But 
     we do know that Farrakhan stirs up hatred, that he repeats 
     and his followers repeat every vile anti-Semitic smear known 
     to history and some that are reinvented for our time. Steve 
     Cokely, a Farrakhan sympathizer, a black activist in Chicago, 
     gave a series of lectures in which he said that Jewish 
     doctors have deliberately injected black children with the 
     AIDS virus. How many times in our history have we been 
     accused of starting or spreading plague, small-pox, typhus 
     etc? AIDS intentionally spread by Jewish doctors is just the 
     newest form of the oldest blood libel. We really shouldn't be 
     surprised but we are.
       Now I am in the bus and I see the well-dressed, mild-
     looking black man opposite me pull out of his briefcase a 
     book called ``The Protocols of Zion,'' or I overhear on the 
     subway a young black man complaining about Jewish control of 
     the movies, and I sit silently, look away, feel afraid. I 
     have a friend who no longer wants her seven-year-old son to 
     wear his yarmulke on Broadway. She thinks that with his 
     yarmulke on he is a target for a crazy black person. The air 
     we breathe, the communal air of our cities has been poisoned. 
     This does not mean that every black looks at every jew with 
     hatred but enough do. The American pluralistic song begins to 
     offend the ear with its sour notes. I begin to believe as I 
     shop at the Korean vegetable store, as I head off to the 
     bookstore, as I go downtown to the dentist, that I am moving 
     through a fog of innuendo, bigotry and hatred.
       This is new to America, well perhaps not entirely new; 
     Father Coughlin, Bilbo, the great anti-Semites of the 
     desperate 1930s probably had a similar effect in the 
     metropolis. But it's new for me, born in 1936. I always felt 
     safe here as a Jew. The polite anti-Semitism of the social 
     sort, country clubs closed, restricted apartments, never 
     seemed to affect the way we lived and what we did with our 
     minds. I always felt that the European barbarism would not 
     cross the ocean. I believed that equality and brotherly love, 
     if not yet in every mind, was a social goal that we were 
     always steadily if slowly approaching. Hah! (Yes, I know 
     Herzl told me so a long time ago.)
       And of course my own dormant racism rises to the bait. Now 
     I look at a gaggle of black teenagers waiting in line ahead 
     of me at the movies and I don't think of their academic 
     ambitions, nor am I amused by their young hormones racing as 
     they tease one another. I avoid eye contact. I wonder if 
     they're carrying drugs or guns. I do not think of them as 
     colleagues on my life journey. One of the terrible things 
     about this round of anti-Semitism is that it makes me hate 
     back and just as widely, just as ignorantly.
       There has always been anti-shwartze feeling in the Jewish 
     world. It came from the mouths of a generation imitating the 
     worst in a profoundly racist American community. It was an 
     infection caught from the American social grid. Now it has 
     flared up in response to Farrakhan and his well-dressed 
     followers who like undertakers come to bury us. The shock we 
     feel about comparing catastrophes, defending ourselves 
     against accusations of greediness or slave-trading, has left 
     us numb, turning inward.
       So while the historians and sociologists pundit on about 
     the tribal nature of man and the root causes of the fires of 
     bigotry, we who live on day to day in this ragged American 
     dream, attempt to find personal ways to hold on to our 
     balance, continue to care for the child who needs a better 
     school or a better health clinic, remember that we had a 
     vision of a good life, decent housing, fair opportunity, and 
     that vision was not just for ourselves and was never intended 
     to fence anyone out. I will not let Farrakhan take from me my 
     stand with Abraham Joshua Heschel and my old-fashioned desire 
     to overcome everyone's anguish. I don't want to be dragged 
     into the mud. Will I be able to help it?

                          ____________________