The Meat Libel

"But you see, those (the owners of "mom and pop stores") are the people who have been overcharging us, selling us stale bread and bad meat and wilted vegetables. And they sold out and moved to Florida... First it was the Jews,then it was Koreans, and now its Arabs....."
Andrew Young, as quoted in the Los Angeles Sentinel

The speaker was forced to resign as head of Working Families for Wal-Mart, after the mega-store chain received numerous protests about this remark.

Andrew Young, a former member of Congress and Mayor of Atlanta, is best remembered as Jimmy Carter's ambassador to the United Nations. He was forced out of that office when it was revealed that he had opened a dialogue with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) without authorization to do so. Jewish pressure was widely blamed for his ouster, which may have affected his attitudes toward our people ever since. Since Florida is not brimming with retired Koreans or Arabs, I suspect that Jews were the primary target of his remark.

I doubt that Young has facts to back-up his charges about spoiled food, although he may have had bad experiences with purchases made in Atlanta. Our family has been buying meat from "Mom and Pop" Eisenbach for nearly 35 years, and we have been quite happy with the freshness and quality overall. As a boy I shopped for Hostess Twinkies at Feldstein's Store (1), exactly the type of Jewish-owned small business that Young was talking about, and I was always satisfied with the products.

Perhaps Young was just qualifying for the Mel Gibson Anti-Semite of the Week Award. (Lifetime Achievement Award has already been reserved for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran.)

Anti-Semites have been proven hard to please:
Haman complained that we don't follow the King's laws (2),
many Christians are still sore about the Crucifixion
(after 2,000 years, for "Guess Whose" sake!)
Hitler claimed we were an inferior race,
the Communists blamed us for being capitalists and cosmopolitans,
Klansmen accused us of being Communists,
Arabs claim we stole Palestine,
Gibson blames us for starting every war in history,
and now Andrew Young says we sold his people spoiled food.

As Rosanne Rosannadanna (3) would say,
"It just goes to show you----its always something!"

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(1) Located at 2126 N 16th Street, Milwaukee. After the businss closed (no thanks to Wal-Mart), the building was torn down.

(2) Esther 3:8

(3) Character on the Weekend Update Segment of Saturday Night Live.