The dilemma that resulted is many-faceted.  In a nutshell, though, it boils down to this.  The longtime residents were all Christians of northern-European or Scandinavian descent.  They are people who treasure community neatness, friendly greetings and a cup of conversation at the local cafe. Classic small town Americans to whom a neatly mowed lawn is sacred, and from whom neighbors could expect comfort and help when times are tough.

They are the people liberals tell you are narrow-minded, racist, bigots.  The evil folks in the red part of that famous election map.  The ones the media claims are Fascist Christian fundamentalists, militia members, unsophisticated rural redneck louts who drive pickups with gun racks.  But as this program (no doubt to the chagrin of PBS) proved, they are pure Norman Rockwell -- friendly, eager to welcome newcomers and tolerant to a fault.

Before the invasion, nobody in Postville locked their doors or took their keys from their cars.  Now, it seems, it is not safe for their children to walk alone to the park.  The Police chief, interviewed on camera, said that things had changed a great deal in town.  The producers avoided the reason why, merely pointing out that Hispanics liked to gather in groups and stare at people.  If you want to know more about that, talk to the police in the Washington county strip city that runs from Hillsboro to Forest Grove.  I will leave that item with this comment.  Jews do not assemble on street corners and stare at people.  They are responsible for perhaps the lowest contribution to crime statistics of any ethnic group in America with the possible exception of Eagle Scouts.

The trouble began when the big city Jews didn't mow their Postville lawns.  It built when they did not return friendly greetings on the street and turned down newcomer gifts of food and chat offered by longtime residents.  Jews are cultural isolationists that make pre-WWII Christian Americans look like globalists. While they may argue that they have good historical reason to be stand-offish with non-Jews, their initial treatment by the people of Postville was as warm and generous as a greeting could be.

(When wealthy Asians departed Hong Kong prior to the takeover by the ChiComs, lots of them moved to Vancouver, B.C.  They bought up every big home in sight, driving the local prices so high that few Canadians could afford to live in their own better neighborhoods.  The holier-than-thou Canuks, who in the Sixties told me America was a racist nation and their's was not, rioted in the streets. Hypocrisy, thy name is Canada.) 

I once lived in NW Portland.  Unlike the Christian residents of Postville who took a plate of cookies to the Jews who had just moved into the neighborhood, the Jews of NW Portland treated me as if I was invisible.  They were not hostile to my friendly approaches, just negatively formal.  Thus I came to the opinion that I was tolerated, not welcome, in their community, and hold that opinion to this day.  I respect their right to be exclusive, but in terms of this essay must report that tendency as follows: Jews do not bring newly-arrived Gentiles a plate of cookies or invite them to join in their kosher cafe conversations. Only Gentiles, like the folks in Postville, do that.  As Tevia sang in Fiddler on the Roof, the Jewish view is "Save us from the stranger's ways."

The root of the dislike for Jews as posited in this docu-ganda about America's heartland is the same as the common aversion to imported Hispanics.  It is not, as liberals would have you believe, simple white bigotry.  The heart of it has to do with the basic concept of America -- People from elsewhere forging a common future here.  I don't think you can make an efficient machine out of parts selected at random. You can begin with them, but before the machine will work, those parts have to be shaped into gears that mesh. 

Jews, at least, partially accede to that necessity, and teach their children English as well as Yiddish.  Hispanics, well, based on demands for bi-lingual education, that's another matter. 

The Jews who came to Postville blocked a major source of communication when they refused to join the locals at the cafe over a cup of coffee because the cups had contained non-kosher liquids.  (Unblessed chicken soup, for example.)  But, the Spanish?  Even if they decided to sit down and drink from the same cups, they could not have talked to longtime local residents.  When the local Catholic church started offering services in Spanish, the Anglos had had enough, and drove to the nearest town where the service was in English. 

Try to visualize the reaction of Mexicans visiting a cathedral in Guymas where ten generations of their ancestors had been christened, confirmed and received their funeral rituals, only to discover that the sermon had been changed to English.  In Mexico, there would be a riot.  In Postville, the Anglos just went elsewhere.

As an interesting aside, the producers, while they did mention that the Jews were sloppy with their lawns, didn't touch on the matter when discussing the Hispanics.  If the experience in Postville is similar to that in western Oregon, the Hispanic taste in home colors, general yard condition and garbage disposal also fails to meet local standards.  Only one shot of an Hispanic residence was shown, and that was of the back of a mobile home next to a well manicured residence lawn.  The narrative pointed out that the local whites (read:racists) had jacked up house prices artificially so the brown folks couldn't afford to live in the better parts of town. 

(I suspect that the truth is otherwise.  The Jews were not excluded from Christian neighborhoods in Postville.  Most likely, it was their purchases of homes -- like the Asian real estate rush in Vancouver, B.C.-- that drove up prices.  And, the positive effect opening up the packing plant had on the local economy was a major factor, too.  Witness the prices of homes in the tri-county, Portland area with the creation of the Silicon Forest.  Racism didn't make homes in northwestern Oregon more expensive.  The many good jobs provided by Intel and corporate friends did that.  Liberals are completely ignorant of the laws of supply and demand.)

With respect to the imported Hispanics, there had to be other scenes that could have been shot around Postville. Old sofas, clothes dryers, dead TV sets and bags of garbage full of Mexican food wrappers, dumped behind buildings and in rural ditches.  Those who drive the secondary roads of  Washington county these days are familiar with such sights. If you'd like to see some, head west from Portland, turn left at the Mountaindale exit, then right at the first road.  If the local farmers haven't picked up the latest deposits, you'll see piles of crap by the pioneer graveyard.  The secret to locating these dumps is to focus in on stretches of road not immediately adjacent to one of the farmhouses.  For the larger dumps, talk to a logger.  They find them all the time in the hills adjacent to Hispanic areas.  Some of them contain dead cars.

There was a time when the local press would do stories about these ad hoc dumps, but no more.  The only objectionable waste to our modern press is cigarette butts. Migrant litter and abandoned vehicles rolled into a canyon may only be criticized generically.  Identifying their source is considered racist.  All this explains why the Postville program so cautiously filmed the Hispanic presence, there. Such manipulation via omission reminded us of the only toxic waste dump in America that PBS won't film -- the one in Al Gore's back yard.

That sort of thing is the key to understanding why public broadcasting's version of journalism is also garbage.  The Postville docu-ganda (documentary propaganda) was created by people who either don't understand why this country has become the greatest nation on earth, or despise it for those reasons.  People who hate truth, individual freedom, rewards going to those who work hardest or are the brightest and so forth.  People who wept when the Berlin Wall went down.  People who use words like multi-cultural and diversity -- words that divide America into opposing groups instead of hundreds of millons of individuals who all share a common understanding that their future will be the result of their own efforts.

Multi-cultural and diversity. The liberals use them as though they were symbols of unification.  But, then, such redefinitions are common to liberals.  They call quotas that introduce institutional race favoritism "affirmative action."  They call taxpayer financed social welfare programs "investments."  They call budget increases which are less than they want "cuts."

The producers of Postville even had the gall to use the motto "e pluribus unum," in their presentation. ("Out of many, one.")   It perfectly describes the point I have been making.  It's about an America that using the world's greatest political documents, and the linguistic and cultural synthesis of the melting pot, merges disparate ideas and words into the fundamental linguistic river of English, and then runs those concepts through the magical force of capitalism -- to create the first great power in planetary history whose national product is the spreading of freedom, dignity and improved economic opportunities for all the common people of the world. 

The part public broadcasting left out when they quoted that motto was what it will become when they are through redesigning your country.

"e unum pluribus."

NOTE: After decades of ignorant suspicion, a  great many Jews are very belatedly realizing that all the mainstream media crap about white American Christians, particularly those from the heartland, being rightwing fascists is hogwash.  The program described above was a moronic attempt by the leftists of PBS to continue hanging the bigotry tag on the most, generous, decent people on Earth.  But, it's hard to hang the evil tag on folks who go out of their way to make strangers feel welcome.  This, and the present mainstream media bias in favor of Moslems is even causing some to wonder if  they have been right to side with the "separation of church and state" crowd for lo these many years.  Read this. Jews and Christians in America, A moment of truth

What I would add is that Jews in the entertainment industry should be ashamed of themselves.  Their treatment of Christians in films and television shows has for decades been right down the liberal party line.  When was the last time you saw a villain who wasn't a white, male (and often) Christian?  (In case the above link expires, here's a backup.)

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