Tonight is the first night of Passover.
As Michael Froomkin says, what better night to try to dislodge an antisemitic site from the first position in a Google search for “jew,” and replace it with the Wikipedia entry for the term. Or, if you don’t care for the Wikipedia, you could link to the Judaism 101 article “Who is a Jew.” (Google weights pages in search results in part based on the number and rank of sites linking to the page; by linking to the Wikipedia and Judaism 101 pages rather than the antisemitic site, I help to increase their page rank. This is a process known as “Googlebombing,” and it’s the first time I’ve seen it used to address an ethically problematic result in Google’s search results.)
There have number of incidents recently in my personal and professional lives that have reminded me that hatred and antisemitism are still alive and well and dwelling in our midst. What’s almost as bad as the antisemitism is the lack of outrage it seems to generate in those who observe it. It’s depressing, and demoralizing.
The Happy Tutor posed a classic question this week on his site: “Must those committed to tolerance tolerate the intolerant?” Then he responded in the affirmative, saying “Because the intolerant must learn to tolerate the tolerant, no less than the other way around, that we all might be forgiven and reintegrated with the Carnival of Self-Acknowledged Fools.”
I suspect it’s easier to tolerate the intolerant when what they’re intolerant of is others rather than you and those you love.
www.flickr.com
|
