Just gonna keep pointing to the part in Asimov’s auto biography I Asimov, where he talks about antisemitism (cause it’s all really good stuff even all these years later), but I’m once again gonna just share the last 3 paragraphs cause… well you tell me they’re not relevant to this post and relevant all these years after he wrote them:
Even as I write, Jews are immigrating from the former Soviet Union into Israel. They are fleeing their country because they fear religious persecution. But the moment they set foot on Israeli soil, they become Zionist extremists who are merciless toward the Palestinians. They change from persecuted to persecutors in the blink of an eye.
That said, the Jews are not alone in this. If I’m sensitive to this particular problem, it’s because I’m Jewish myself. In fact, this phenomenon is universal. In Roman times, when the first Christians were persecuted, they pleaded for tolerance. But when Christianity prevailed, did tolerance reign? Not on your life. Instead, persecution was soon going on in the opposite direction. Or take the case of the Bulgarians, who demanded freedom from their dictatorial regime, but once they had it used it to aggress against their Turkish minority. Or the people of Azerbaijan, who demanded of the Soviet Union the freedom denied it by the central government, only to immediately attack the Armenian minority.
The Bible teaches that the victims of persecution must in no circumstances become persecutors in their turn: “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.”(Exodus 22:21). But who follows this teaching? Personally, whenever I try to spread the word, I get hostile looks and make myself unpopular….
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