In Madoff Scandal, Jews Feel an Acute Betrayal - NYTimes.com

There are people who make a media based living by claiming that Jews control the media and the world banking system. These people (who shall remain nameless here) and their ideas have so much traction in the public mind that I can read all about their work in the New York Times, along with all the rest of the news that's fit to print.

This alleged vast Jewish conspiracy has so much traction in public discourse that a major US national daily can find Jewish commentators of every stripe who feel compelled to quote scripture and bear witness to a sort of collective shame to be Jewish.

Why all this recent fuss in the media? Because a Jewish banker turned out to be a fraud.

Jews who assume a mantle of guilt and shame because of Bernard Madoff's fiduciary sins, are laying claim to a sad history on several fronts. Mainly, they are suggesting that as Jews, they bear part of the shame of Madoff's actions, because he is Jewish.

Anti-Semites who confer the mantle of guilt and shame upon all Jews because of Bernard Madoff's fiduciary sins, are also laying claim to a sad history. In the present and recent past, this principle of collective guilt has been extended to the principle of collective punishment.

But, we live in a period of history that has outlawed collective punishment, through the dictums of the Geneva Conventions.

Therefore the casual observer may legitimately wonder about a situation that pits Jews and anti-Semites not against each other, but allies them in a holy confederacy against common sense and naked self-interest.

It's hard to find evidence that people who check the box labelled White on their census forms feel any form of collective guilt if one of their fellows say, fakes evidence of an offensive military first strike capability by say, Saddam Hussein, and then uses this faked evidence to engineer the wholesale theft of the resources of say, Iraq.

But it's easy to find evidence that people who check the box labelled Black on their census forms feel a momentary tinge of panic when the newsflash about the latest violent escaped felon carries the addendum, the suspect is black, male, considered armed and dangerous.

And the New York Times has ably demonstrated that it's easy to find Jews who feel that sting when one of their fellows from the international banking system robs the place blind.

We'll leave these companion assertions to further debate later, but for now we can say that it seems that the public is afraid to be tarred with the same brush as someone who commits a shameful act.

Given the history of collective punishment, there's a good reason for this.

In the near future, this situation may begin to unravel like a DNA strand on a criminalist's work desk.

In the increasingly brown world, how will we measure group membership when the group's members are hard to identify? The current President Elect of the United States of America is generally seen as Black. But only one of his parents is directly descended from Africans.

If Barak Hussein Obama is photographed smoking crack cocaine behind the White House toolshed, who if anyone, should feel the most shame?

If Barak Hussein Obama is ever accused and found guilty of confining and raping one Jewish White and one Muslim Black woman in the aft washrooms of Air Force One, who will bear the brunt of any collective punishment?

Tags: BarakObama, Bernard Madoff, fraud, crack coaine, conspiracy

April 18 appeared on the calendar.

Like a ghost, redacted appeared to me on the street. She looked lost, and was reluctant to speak to me, and we exchanged only stiff hellos.

Soon, it would be two months after the Queen Street Fire of 2008, and still no cause had been announced by the fire department.

There were still many rumours in play, most of which continued to make no sense at all.

There were suggestions that redacted bore ultimate responsibility for the fire, either through direct acts, or failures to act.

There were suggestions that angry neighbours collaborated with the police to eliminate the problems associated with certain businesses and residents living in the fire zone.

There were suggestions that the fire had been set to consummate a real estate deal of some kind.

My favourite was the rat theory. In this scenario, a rodent with the word infamy written on its back, chewed through faulty wiring in the building, sufficiently to short out live wires, providing a source of ignition that resulted in the fire.

The most sinister, was a theory that supposed a disgruntled resident, with an axe to grind against redacted, started the fire whilst intoxicates with the fumes of the crack pipe. This theory worked nicely for me, because it explained the seeming irrationality of the act.

I found it difficult to see how the fire benefited anyone financially or otherwise. So if it had been deliberately set, then it must have been done by someone who was not well grounded in consensual reality when they committed the act.

As well, the possibility remained open, that a simple innocuous, accidental root cause had destroyed most of a city block in downtown Toronto on a cold, cold February morning. That would make the fire, almost routine.

But if this had been a routine fire, then a cause would have quickly been found and assigned to the event, wouldn’t it? But the smell on my coat two months later reminds me that this had been no routine fire.

And my last conversation with the lead investigator, had suggested to me that there were still questions at 14 Division, over what roles had been played by all the moving parts, in the events immediately leading up to time the fire was noticed and reported.