But first, an apology. David Weintraub pointed out in a comment on a previous post last night that I rarely capitalize "Jew" correctly. He was correct, and in fact I also often fail to capitalize "christian", and other pronouns such as "Liberal", "Conservative", "Progressive", "Democrat", and "Republican".
This is not just sloppy. In some cases, it is offensive to the group being identified, because it can be seen as a lack of respect.
I apologize to all groups for which I've failed to capitalize, including but not limited to the many Jewish readers of this site, many of whom oppose my opinions and have reason to suspect my motives. Please accept my word that I did not mean any disrespect, although my actions were disrespectful, and accept my promise that I will make every effort to properly capitalize in the future, at least in my own blog posts.
I had pointed out previously that people who were Jewish might be more likely to launch anti-Jewish attacks because they would know how powerful they could be. But re-reading a lot of RaisingKaine posts, and noting the context in which claims of "Being Jewish" were made both there and at NotLarrySabato, I realised that being Jewish is a great cover for launching such attacks, because if your opponent calls you on your attacks, you can say "Why would I do that, I'm Jewish".
It's part of politics I dislike, but if you want to call your opponent a racist, you send out a person of color. If you want to call him anti-women, you trot out women. If you want to attack his religion, you use people of that religion.
This does not prove that attacks are being made -- but that is not in dispute. It is factually clear that the attacks are being made (at least in some of the cases -- as I said in Ben's case, I don't think he purposely meant it, but I was dissappointed he refused to acknowledge and correct what I thought was inadvertant jew-baiting with his comment about Miller and church).
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