Hate or Fear, What's the difference?

Anti-Semitism - noun: a person who discriminates against or is prejudiced or hostile toward Jews.

I've always been a believer in saying things like they are, and not mincing words. The definition above is just a nice way to say hate. Because isn't that what anti-Semitic behavior is after all?

Just read an article today on how Anti-Semitic hate crimes have risen sharply in the last 5 months, and most especially since Israel had Operation Cast Lead, to defend itself. This past Shabbos we experienced anti-semitism first hand in our community.

Racist and anti-Semitic stickers were placed on our Shul, other synagogues in our area and cars Friday night/Saturday morning sometime. Luckily some of the men from our community removed them before any of the children saw the on our shul.

Interesting how this act happened only a few days before the U.N. Racism Conference. Which has been boycotted by United States, Australia, Germany, Canada, Israel, Italy, Sweden, Poland and the Netherlands. There may be others, but this is the list I found. Note that England and France did NOT boycott. And they wonder why those countries are havens for terrorists.

The conference is a follow-up to the contentious 2001 conference in the South African city of Durban which was dominated by clashes over the Middle East and the legacy of slavery. The U.S. and Israel walked out midway through that eight-day meeting over a draft resolution that singled out Israel for criticism and likened Zionism the movement to establish and maintain a Jewish state, to racism.

Today at the conference Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was allowed to give a speech. To which U.N. diplomats walked out. Surprise! Why did they allow this person to speak? Then he said somethings that were racist, anti-Israel and anti-U.S., so some of them walked out. Why did they not see this coming is beyond me.

Some European diplomats immediately walked out of the room when Ahmadinejad said Israel was created on the "pretext of Jewish suffering" from World War II.

Ahmadinejad has always contended that the Holocaust did not happen. It is not really some revelation that he would speak about it again, given a world forum.

Another excerpt of Ahmadinejad's speech:

In a rambling speech, Ahmadinejad on Monday pointed the finger at the United States, Europe and Israel and said they were destabilizing the entire world.

So not only does he hate Israel and the Jews, but now everyone else is on his list of people to hate. Except I guess for North Korea, who is helping him in his quest for nukes.

After all of this the glaring question is why? Why has this man been allowed to get where he is? Why do we tolerate him testing and building nuclear weapons? Why does our President even suggest the idea of having "talks" with him? Why is he given the platform at a multi-nation conference to say the very things we knew he would? Why?

In this time why do people still hate? What are they afraid of? Is there really a difference in the two? Given the condition of our world don't we as a people have more constructive things to do with our time than to waste it on something so non-productive.

You know what is even less productive than hating, is expecting a different result. We all know people who are that consumed with hate never get passed it. It consumes them like a fire burning a piece of paper. Nothing else matters to them, and nothing will stand in the way of accomplishing the goal of removing the object of their discontent. Nothing.