Circumcision: Fun and Games Until…UPDATED

Remember when you’d be with your friends, fooling around in some questionable manner, and then your mother would tell you to stop it, because “it’s all fun and games, until somebody gets hurt…”

And you and your friends would keep doing what you were told not to do, until, inevitably, someone would get hurt.

So, the last few days, a few of us bloggers have been irreverently hooting about San Franciscan’s foreskin fixation and it’s desire to outlaw circumcision.

And now…it’s getting uncomfortable:

If I were Jewish I would be getting uncomfortable.

Writes Bookworm:

Zombie has gotten hold of some of the campaign literature from those supporting the circumcision ban that made its way onto San Francisco’s November ballot. I am not kidding when I say that the material is indistinguishable from something the Nazis would have prepared . . .I read a headline today (and can’t, for the life of me, figure out where), stating that antisemitism is resurgent today in a way not seen since the eve of WWII. This kind of garbage makes that claim — a claim I don’t doubt is true — resonate with real force.

San Francisco in a very insulated, in its own way provincial little enclave where people are accustomed to thinking that everyone around them shares the same opinion. I am choosing to believe, for now, that this is merely the case of one person with vile views overconfidently overreaching within that community, and that he’ll be slapped down. If he’s not, then it might be time to get very worried, because, as someone mentioned in an email exchange:

San Francisco has always been a loony city, but it’s also been a leader. Back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, my educational process started decaying big time, as the SF schools abandoned traditional teaching in favor of all the “new” theories coming out of the educational Left. Although we stopped learning, those failed techniques became de riguer in public education and are a large part of what’s driving our failing schools. Where San Francisco leads, even if off a cliff, too many other cities, anxious to appear forward looking, follow.

UPDATE: Instalanch! thanks Glenn! and welcome, Insty readers; while you’re here, please nose around. We’re also talking about whether another insulated community — that would be Hollywood — has too strong a hand in shaping social and cultural directions

UPDATE II:
In a new post, Max Lindenman has additional thoughts

Now, I’ll admit, Tatler makes a pretty good prima facie case. All the tropes of Nazi propaganda appear to be in ordnung. Foreskin Man is one of those blond Ubermensch types that Jesse Owens ate for breakfast. (Indeed, had the comic come out 20 years earlier, its film adaptation would have given Dolf Lundgren the role of a lifetime.) Monster Mohel and his henchmenschen could have been extras in The Eternal Jew. They’ve got that whole Shylock-on-meth look: shaggy beards and peyot, hooked noses, maniacal gleams in their beady eyes.

And yet, for me, it doesn’t quite add up.

Anti-Semitism has been called the oldest hatred, and I have no doubt it’ll always be around — somewhere, in some form. But if it’s re-emerged and metastasized in a major American urban center, I have a hard time believing it would take the form suggested by the tropes in this comic.

And because he is tireless, and also willing to listen to what his commenters say, Max has yet another post on the subject, complete with punny title. Do remember that Max’s last name is Lindenman.

When I read that Hess and his friends call themselves “inactivists,” my heart broke a little. That’s clever, damn it. Urbanites who are clever enough to come up with a name like that and geeky enough to draw passable comics have no business disliking Jews. If anything, they should BE Jews. But now I realize I’m stuck in the New York of my childhood. It’s w hole ugly new ball game out there.

UPDATE III: Neo-neocon finds Old Nazi Cartoons and other anti-semitic drawings with which to compare Foreskin Man. Go look.