I WRITE A NEWSPAPER COLUMN, to which I append my e-mail address. For the most part, it’s a joy to get reader reaction, pro and con. The pro mail makes you feel wonderful and the con makes you feel like you’ve at least disturbed the comfortable thought processes of people who disagree with you.
About two years ago, something changed. I began receiving e-mail that can only be described as Jew-hating in the extreme.
Now, anti-Semitic mail is nothing new for me or any other writer with a Jewish-sounding name. Such mail, when it’s delivered not by the Internet but the Postal Service, is usually so delusional that there’s nothing all that worrisome about it.
The e-mail I’ve been receiving isn’t delusional. It’s evil. In the past year alone, I’ve received at least 200 anti-Semitic e-mails. They are well written and poorly written, stupid and clever, Buchananite and leftist, European and American. But in terms of sheer numbers, the outpouring of a hatred whose capacity for murderous carnage became everywhere known only six decades ago is staggering.
A floodgate has opened, and while the brackish water is pouring mainly on the heads of Israelis and Paul Wolfowitz, a tributary flows regularly into my inbox as well.
Some of them are of the traditional “why don’t you go back to Israel where you belong” variety, ripe with accusations of dual loyalty. The e-mailers clearly feel their anger is righteous–that they are defending their nation or the Palestinian people from a dangerous force that seeks to undermine America and kill innocent women and children.
I decided that I would not let these foul words go unremarked upon, that to do so would be to act as though it were acceptable to write and speak in this manner. So I have, from time to time, engaged in bizarre correspondences.
When I write back to the e-mailers and say they have crossed a line by hurling the classic anti-Semitic accusation that Jews can never be true countrymen, they often respond with anger. “You can be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic,” they say.
That’s certainly true. But I’ve noticed that almost everybody who invokes this argument on his own behalf is, in fact, an anti-Semite. “I wish that all Zionist [sic] like you would emigrate to the Fatherland ASAP,” writes one frequent pen pal. “It disgusts me that dual agents like you have so much power here. After seeing the emergence of the American Zionists . . . I have a new insight into why Jews have gotten into so much trouble everywhere they have lived.”
I stopped arguing with people like this. I would instead send them an Amazon link to “Mein Kampf” with a note saying I’d found their favorite book on the Internet.
Those e-mailers seem almost quaint by comparison with the ones who liken Israel to Nazi Germany and dub Jews “Zionazis.” I note that the people who send these e-mails often have a very poor command of rudimentary grammar and spelling, so I will at times suggest they should attend first grade again before they try and put their thoughts to paper.
Then there are the e-mails that basically accuse me, my family, and the Jewish people in general of defiling the earth. These seem to come primarily from angry white males. I say this only because the writers make a point of complaining about how they’re angry, white, and male.
Then, last week, in response to a column in which I suggested Peter Arnett might be guilty of treason, I received the following: “Actually, Pod-whore-etz, if this were the America of our forebears, you would have been propped up against a wall and shot for treason years ago.” The same creep had e-mailed me a news story about Rachel Corrie, the pro-Palestinian activist who fell down and was run over by an Israeli bulldozer. “FILTHY JEW KIKES MURDER AMERICAN COLLEGE GIRL” was how he described it.
I finally lost it. “Nobody would bother to shoot you for anything,” I wrote back. “You are a speck of s— dumped by a chihuahua outside a half-wide in your miserable little trailer park of a soul.”
My wife was furious with me when she found out I’d done this. He could be dangerous. Why sink to his level?
The act of responding with vicious invective gave me the tiniest sense that I wasn’t simply letting this man’s evil go unanswered. But she was right, of course. He deserves nothing but silence, and that is what his kind will get from me from now on.
Or at least, that’s what I want them to think. Maybe I will get together with my pals in the Elders of Zion and cancel all their bank accounts, ruin their credit ratings, and seize their lands through the mysterious power of usury. That’d teach ’em.
–John Podhoretz
