Editorial note: Frequent TOO contributor Tom Sunic replies to Joel Stern’s letter to several writers associated with TOO and TOQ. (For Stern’s letter, see Alex Kurtagic’s “Narcissism” blog which also comments on Stern.)

Dear Mr. Stern:

Thank you for your comments. I appreciate  your concern for the future of  the Jewish people, and I’d also like to extend  my condolences  regarding the loss of your family . 

Of course, I speak in my own name, not on behalf of my TOO colleagues, all of them being outstanding intellectuals and tolerant people. I hope you have read Prof. MacDonald’s work — in which you won’t find any Jew baiting, but rather serious analyses of this most important issue of our times. 

Any lumping together of Christian identitarians and National Alliance hotheads with TOO is groundless.  

I respect your concerns for the real or hypothetical attacks on your victimhood. But I also expect from you some respect for my own, including respect for the historical memory of my people and my race —  wherever they may reside. It would be commendable on your part to extend sympathies to many of my relatives who perished anonymously in communist terror after 1945. While many Jews in America take for granted that non-Jews will constantly reminisce about Jewish victimology and hypothetical threats to the Jewry, few Jews seem to be concerned with the plight of non-Jews under communism in East Europe. 

The fact that Jewish intellectuals played a formidable role on the eve and during the Bolshevik seizure of power — however good or bad their intentions may have been — remains a topic that needs to be addressed in detail. This might help us avoid future mass killings and pogroms and secure, more or less, some semblance of cohabitation.

Yet, something tells me that neither myself nor yourself seriously believe in this static scenario.

One of the reasons anti-Semitism occurs is due to the lack of open debate about mutual perceptions and self-perceptions of Jews vs. non-Jews.  Hatred of Jews is prevalent among  those who mimic Semitism, people who subconsciously try to be more Jewish than Jews themselves. This is part and parcel of ‘genealogical proximity’, between Christians and Jews, and which has historically resulted in mutual hatred. This is a neurotic dilemma of a person wishing to replace his Sameness by someone else’s, i.e. Jewish/Christian Otherness. The classic example of this neurotic mindset are Christian Zionists. 

Your concerns reflect standard self-induced fears and self-fulfilling prophecies about anti-Semitic demons — who, as a rule, must sooner or later materialize.  The demon architects are not those you suspect of anti-Semitism, but those who claim to be your friends now. 

Sincerely,

Dr. Tom Sunic

www.tomsunic.info

Croatia