Playing the Jew card

Was Harry S. Truman an anti-semite? More specifically, are notes from a 1947 diary anti-semitic, as the Washington Post claims. Truman's newly-discovered diary (it was 'hidden' in his presidential library) includes the following, quoted by the Post:

"The Jews, I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."

Now, this is not a flattering or sympathetic passage. It criticizes the post-War Jews of Europe for their self-interested lobbying. In particular, comparing Hitler and Stalin favorably to 'former underdogs' is hyperbolic at best. However, Truman doesn't make the comparison to Jews directly, and qualifies the term underdog by listing a range of groups. Truman is critical of post-war European Jews, but to me that doesn't make him anti-semitic. He's criticizing them for their actions; not for being Jewish. He has no desire to see them treated badly, only to see equal treatment of Eastern Europeans.

The Post's knee-jerk use of the term "anti-semitism" is both cheapening to the term and symptomatic of our culture's tendancy to fixate on the atrocities committed against the Jews during World War II. In London, at the Imperial War Museum, I was very offended to see the figure 6,000,000 as the human cost of the Holocaust. As any student of the Holocaust knows, 14,000,000 people were murdered, 6,000,000 of them Jews. Poland alone lost 6,000,000 citizens - half Jews, half ethnic Poles.

It is very true that the genocide against the Jews is comparable only to that against the Gypsies, but that fact is too often allowed to diminish the massive loss of life by many Eastern European countries. Unfortunately, there is an extreme disparity between the voice of Jews and that of Eastern Europeans or Gypsies in the West. Thus, while we have become aptly aware of the crime perpetrated against European Jewry (and are politically sensitive towards Israel and Jews as a result), we remain quite ignorant of the crimes against many other groups.

This is truly unfortunate, for though the attempted eradication of the Jews - the chilling "final solution" - was the worst of the Holocaust, the rest wasn't a whole lot better. And in my opinion, we are much more likely as a society to ostracize and take rights from those of unpopular political or religious views, not those of one race or other. As always, the only way to redeem past atrocities is to learn never to repeat them.