I rode on the wild side -- when road rage met anti-Semitism

2007-01-12

I rode on the wild side -- when road rage met anti-Semitism

By Gary Wexler

I am safe on the plane now.

On the way to Los Angeles International Airport this afternoon, I thought I was about to be murdered. In the run-up to a weeklong business trip, I called the car service I've been using for years to pick me up at my home. The driver arrived promptly at 1:30 p.m., the arranged time.

The ride to the airport started out just fine. The driver began making small talk. I noticed he had a Jamaican flag on his dashboard, so I asked if he was Jamaican. He said he was, and he asked if I was American. He was playing reggae music, so I told him I liked the music and asked if he was Rastafarian. He said he was and explained that Rastafarian is a form of Christianity. He asked what my religion was. I told him I was Jewish.

(snip)

And then the rant began. Continuing to raise his voice, he told me that Mel Gibson knew what he was saying. He told me he used to favor the Jews until they, themselves, became the Hitler under whom they suffered. He told me that the Jews are indeed the root of all the world's problems today... He continued to rant for another 10 minutes. Between his shrieking voice and the Jamaican accent, I could barely understand the things he was saying -- about Oprah becoming rich and just like the white man because of the Jews, and that Saddam Hussein's hanging was posted on the Internet because of the Jews. He then turned to look at me in the backseat, while driving on the freeway. "You Jews are the cause of the black man's suffering today," he screamed at me as he took his hands off the wheel. "I suffer, because of you."

Until this point, I had been quiet. "Please sir," I said calmly understanding my predicament, "please keep your hands on the wheel." That was it.
"Just like a Jew -- always telling the world what to do," he responded. "Don't you worry about me. Worry about what you do in the world. You make my life miserable. I don't care if I die. Maybe I'm a terrorist, like my Palestinian and Arab brothers whose lives you have destroyed. Maybe I am just going to now crash this car and kill both of us." He was completely hysterical. The car was swerving out of control.

(snip)

Personally, I am now faced with a terrible moral dilemma. This man knows where I live. My wife stays in our house alone when I am away on frequent business trips. He is crazy, and I believe has great potential for violence. If I report him, are we in danger? If I don't, is someone else? How safe are we in the world today?

http://www.jewishjournal.com/home/preview.php?id=17082

he knows where you live anyway. he could hurt someone else. he hardly sounds like a true Rastafarian. he's fucking nuts. good luck.

riders have a right to a pleasant ride

Things like this are more commonplace than many are willing to admit or accept. Perhaps not to the extent of this driver, but the "Mel Gibson" rants are not uncommon. Anti-Semitism has never gone out of style and, sadly, I don't think it ever will.

...else posted this. I wrote this in response to the writer, and I see someone else is posting in that mode also. After putting energy into writing this, I want *someone* to read it! :)

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If you don't report him, he's stirred some irrational...

...guilt in you. First, you must take care of yourself and your family. That's everyone's prime directive in this life. And then you must take steps to protect the public -- especially others who might "confess" to being Jewish in his car.

I once lived in Ojai, and there was a young black man from a tropical isle living there. He regularly, and very loudly, proclaimed how racist the white society was, how hard life was for him. He once caught my daughter unawares, jammed his knee into her driver's side door, and would not let her leave, in spite of her many protests that she had to get home.

He had been there for some time. He made himself present in the library, in the shops, at various community gatherings, and I heard a number of women complain over time that he had behaved very much as he did with my daughter, but they would not report his behavior to the police because it would "look so racist." "Maybe I *am* racist," one of them said to me, in a perplexed tone!

They were so uncertain in their own minds that they *weren't* being racist if they took action (because he had implanted that idea in their pretty little heads), that they let this scenario go on for a couple of years.

When I reported this guy to the police, they pulled up a long arrest record, found he was using a false name, there were warrants out on him, and he was in the country illegally. He commented, in a voicemail message, that he knew where my daughter would be going to school, and he was going to pay her a visit.

He would have had to paddle across a big pond because he found himself in a tropical climate very shortly after that. But he made her wary, and me, the whole time she was in art school.

We all suffer to a degree from the feeling that too quickly deciding to take action against patently antisocial and dangerous behavior is being judgemental. Darn right it is. There is such a thing as *mature* judgement. (And as an aside, I think America is hamstrung by this same kind of irrational sympathy for George Bush, and that we as a nation are failing to intervene in a situation that is patently absurd. Having a terrible childhood is not a ticket to act out on the world stage with murderous rage! Why don't we get that?)

I'm not Jewish. My best friend is an Israeli and I've spent many hours in her home, with her Jewish friends. I came to life in a fundie "Christian" environment. I appreciate the Jews I've known because they value education, and most of them have a well-developed social conscience that I never experienced when I was growing up with my fundamentalist family in Texas. (Except that the U.S. Army got me out of there early and often, and I consider that a major piece of good fortune.)

My American Jewish friends are very, very concerned about the Palestinian situation. Many are as critical as anyone of Israel's policies in that regard. They face the same kind of conundrum we Americans face over Bush's activities in Iraq. But almost all of them are children of Holocaust survivors, and have lost loved ones since the founding of Israel.

We hear claims that Israel was built on stolen land. We don't hear claims of that sort here in America, unless we take Native American Studies classes at age 50, and find out about the American Holocaust, which they just kind of forgot to mention in high school! Of course, that was then and this is now!

While it may not be popular to show sympathy for Israel on this board, I feel that antisemitism (of the Jewish variety) is being fueled by a view of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that fails to take into account the long view of what has caused that problem, what sorrows have been endured by both sides.

The guy you ran into sounds like just a nutcase, someone who can't make informed or sane judgments. Nevertheless, the drumbeat that's out there about Israel's culpability in the Israeli/Palestinian problem feeds into irrational behavior of the type you ran into, in my view. Certain movies that gross in the millions add their fuel to the fire, also.

I'm very sorry this happened to you. There are millions of ill and unfortunate people in the world. We can't help them by taking on their illness. By reporting this incident, you *may* get some help for this man. Having feedback from the authorities about what has happened to him may give you *some* comfort, as it did when I, a white woman, had to report that young black man several years ago. He was very bright; he could quote whole books, almost. He was messed up in a major way. I was very sorry for that. I had to take action, anyway.

Sincerely,

Judy Barrett
Santa Fe, NM
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and it can be confusing since I posted the story as is, and it is written in the first person format...

Thank you for detailing your actions. Yes, this is a problem with us, liberals. We bend backwards to accommodate everyone, even, as it seems, at a price of personal harm.

This may be a stretch but.. have you noticed how more or less liberal newspapers - LA Times, Minneapolis strib and others - publish columns by right winters, but you don't see reciprocity in conservatives ones?

...is that liberals who don't stand up to clearly antisocial behavior are, in a sense, following the Christian admonition to "turn the other cheek." They need to add to that repertoire the story of Jesus angrily driving the money changers out of the temple.

We don't see reciprocity in right-wing "journalistic" sources because they operate from a stance that they already have the truth, they're right, and they're not going to entertain anything that might cut into their narrow worldview. Anything that might not cater to their established appetites is the work of Satan, anyway!