Hate groups’ racist, irrational message shows how far we have to go

It’s so easy to revile them, to regard them with anger, with contempt, yet anyone who links his or her self-worth to anti-Semitism or overt racism is, most of all, flat-out pathetic.

Think about it. How do you hate someone you’ve never met?

Here’s how illogical that is.

Just before Christmas 1993, M.L. Carr took his wife and two young daughters shopping at the Natick Mall. He was a few steps ahead of them in the parking lot when a speeding car swerved in their direction and he heard someone holler, “Get off the street, you black (expletive)!” That’s all he had to hear. “I wasn’t thinking,” he recalled later. “I left Sylvia and the girls in the cold, jumped into my car and took off after them, pulling up beside them at a stoplight. When they saw me they got all excited: ‘Hey, look, it’s M.L.! How’s it going, M.L.?’

“I told them, ‘I should kick your rear ends, then follow you home to tell your parents why I did it.’

When one of them said, ‘But, M.L., we didn’t know she was your wife,’ I screamed, ‘It doesn’t matter whose wife it was!’ ”

Those lost souls in Nazi regalia who brought bloodshed to Virginia last weekend were no less indiscriminate and unknowing in the hatred they spewed at strangers.

Meanwhile, here in Boston, for the second time in two months the Holocaust Memorial was vandalized.

What’s the message the perpetrators hoped to convey?

Think about it, which they obviously didn’t.

Though their histories are different, anti-Semitism is no less irrational than racism, especially when it’s harbored by anyone claiming to be a Christian.

To be a Christian who’s anti-Semitic is to not know where you came from. Sit in on a Passover Seder and you’ll find yourself taking a tour of your own faith because, spiritually speaking, those were your forebears in bondage under Pharaoh, too.

And that baby in the manger? He was Jewish, from “the house and lineage of David,” remember?

Mary and Joseph were Jewish.

So were the apostles. Indeed, Peter, James, John and the rest of them could have started their own chapter of B’nai B’rith.

So, what exactly is it that these haters actually hate?

The guessing here is they don’t truly know.

If they carry any message at all, it’s this:

We’ve come a long way, but we still have a long, long way to go.