Just came home from dinner with a buddy of mine that is Armenian and we were discussing bigotry in general and the different types of bigotry that have impacted on our lives and our families (I'm Jewish). My friend's family, with the exception of his father, was largely wiped out in the Armenian Holocaust. His father was in Dachau and managed to escape when he was sent to Vienna on a slave labor detail and a bomb hit a bank and he scooped up enough currency in the confusion to split and make it to Switzerland. My friend's father met his mother in a DP camp outside of Rome and that is were John was born, a few years later his sister was born in their next home...a DP camp outside of Stuttgart. Finally Ellis Island and the US and the American Dream. We both were laughing at the fact that, unless a Jew is orthodox you can't tell if there Jewish or not. Last names are seldom a way to tell any longer for American Jews, although Armenian names are easily identifiable if you know what they are, and, unless you are throwing around Yiddish (a language that will probably die with my generation) there is no way to tell. So as members of two very distinct minorities (one Christian one not) we have gotten use to listening to idiots go on and on about subjects they really no nothing about. I think it is because they are bigots and cowards. Here is what I mean by that: the two groups I have mentioned are an extremely small subsection of the total world's population so they figure they can be macho at no personal risk. I would like to see him running his mouth like that in Haifia, Tel Aviv or Armenia. Of course he wouldn't. People that are idiots will be idiots when they think they can do so without risk.
