Could Jeremiah Wright have picked a worse time?

In the recent interview in which President Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright complained that "them Jews" are keeping  him from seeing President Obama, he added that:

Ethnic cleansing is going on in Gaza. Ethnic cleansing [by] the Zionist is a sin and a crime against humanity, and they don't want Barack talking like that because that's anti-Israel...

Israel waged an unjust war and used force that exceeded legitimate self-defense needs. Israel's continued refusal to negotiate seriously on outstanding issues was another reason that the situation with Gaza deteriorated into another war.

However, calling what Israel did in Gaza "ethnic cleansing" is hateful, evil, vile, and demeans the real ethnic cleansing that has occurred in the past and continues to this day as in Darfur.

If Israel was engaged in ethnic cleansing, the populations of Gaza and the West Bank would not continue to grow under occupation, blockade, and continuing violence. That the Palestinian population is able to grow under Israeli rule is a rebuttal to charges of ethnic cleansing but in no way a justification for Israeli policies.

When ethnic cleansing occurs, vast areas are without their former populations, for example the areas of Europe without any significant Jewish population after the Nazi Holocaust or the areas of Turkey without any significant Armenian population after the Armenian genocide.

Israel can justifiably be accused of many things. "Ethnic cleansing" is not one of them.

Wright's statements become even more shameful as they were made almost at the same time as an African-American security guard died defending the U.S. Holocaust Memorial and Museum against an attack by a anti-Semitic white supremacist.

Anti-Semitism and Madoff's Ponzi scheme?

A rise in anti-Semitic comments has been reported in the wake of Madoff's Ponzi scheme. Such commentators ignore that many of his victims are Jewish, including Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel's foundation. Madoff is a criminal predator whose evil knew no bounds and who happened to be a Jewish-American.

Anti-Semitic attacks ignores the complete history of European Jews involvement in finances.

Christians are directly responsible for the the involvement of Jews in finance. First, medieval European Christians prohibited Jews from owning land and from many occupations. Then Christians adopted an extreme interpretation of the Bible that Christians could not charge each other interest. When they realized that economies cannot function without credit, they decided it would be alright if they borrowed money from Jews. As a direct result Jews became skilled at finances.

Michael Hirsch writes in his review of Niall Fergonson new book, The Ascent of Money:

“Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret,” Ferguson says. He goes into fascinating detail about how “it was Nathan Roth­schild as much as the Duke of Wellington who defeated Napoleon at Waterloo” by selling bonds and stockpiling gold for the British Army. The richest bankers on the Continent in the 19th century, the Rothschilds became known as die Finanzbonaparten (the Bonapartes of finance). And, as Ferguson argues, they also played a crucial part in the South’s defeat in the Civil War by declining to invest in Confederate cotton-­collateralized bonds.

The defeat of both Napoleon and of the Confederacy were two extremely positive events that benefited the world and were directly related to the financial skills an English financier who also happened to be Jewish.