In honor of Isaac Asimov's burthday.

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"The extract was about prejudice and persecution; specifically about Asimov's discomfort at the fact that some of his fellow Jews, who were so animated at any manifestation of antisemitism anywhere in the world, could be completely blind to the persecution of non-Jews, even if it was going on right under their noses.

It reminded me of a comment the Israeli two-state activist Uri Avnery once made about his own experience of teaching the Holocaust to children in Israeli schools. Avnery was often invited to speak to Israeli children about what it was like for him to be a Jewish child growing up in Germany during the decline of the Weimar Republic and the rise of the Third Reich.

After recounting his experiences, Avnery would always ask the children what they thought was the lesson of the Holocaust. About one in four would answer that the lesson of the Holocaust was that nothing like that should ever happen to anyone again. But the other three-quarters of the class would answer that the lesson of the Holocaust was that nothing like that should ever happen to Jews again.

I thought of that as I read these comments of Asimov; it struck me that if Isaac Asimov had been one of Uri Avnery's schoolkids, he would definitely have been one of the one in four."