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Esbe believes that "Jews run the media," and posts as much on this valuable progressive site, along with other rambling anti-Semitic comments. Actually, it's a good example of something "everybody knows" that's wrong. The media are controlled by bankers and big corporate stockholders, most of whom are as White Anglo-Saxon Protestant as they come, some of whom are Jews, some Japanese, some Germans, etc. They are not controlled by the high-profile public media figures the public is more familiar with, a large minority of whom are, it is true, Jewish--a fact that inspires hysteria in minds that judge people in categories. Just imagine if people got all worked up about seeing a large number of Anglo-Saxons in a particular field of endeavor. "Look at those WASPs--they're taking everything over!" There'd be a lot of such "takeovers" to perceive. The fundamental issue is that some people are supposed to be entitled to control things and some are not. African-Americans know this bitter truth through their historical and ongoing experience. Jews used to be among those who were not entitled, but the ruling establishment has largely transferred them into the "privileged" group, while still keeping them out of certain social clubs. However, not everybody accepts this change. For some, it means that Jews have overrun everything and now have a stranglehold on the very system that used to lock them out. I point this out neither to validate that imperialist system nor the set of privileges and exclusions involved. It is precisely these things that need to be attacked--not Jews, not Anglo-Saxons, not any other ethnicity or religious group. Of course Jewish people don't deserve to be privileged over brown-skinned people. Neither did they deserve to be lumped in with them as inferiors, as they used to be. Some decades ago, African-Americans and Jews were routinely maligned in public discourse. This was accepted. After the winning of many civil rights battles in the sixties and seventies, it thankfully became unacceptable. Then came the era of syndicated talk radio in the reactionary nineties, and open bigotry began creeping back into public life. But it returned mostly against blacks and immigrants, not so much against Jews. That's largely because, although Jews are the most Democratic demographic group after blacks, a certain number of Jewish figures had inserted themselves into powerful positions in the Republican hierarchy, whether as office-holders, donors, or intellectuals; and, also, because most of the Right is dogmatically pro-Israel. Hence, the emergence of a situation in which Jews are immune from overtly expressed prejudice in the media, and people of color are not. Esbe takes this to be censorship of prejudice, when any person of progressive conscience would see it as a disturbing breakdown of the always-precarious barriers that had been erected against prejudice. Prejudice, privilege, and the power structure make up the problem. Posts like Esbe's do not contribute anything to a solution.
