Vice President Joe Biden was called out by the Anti-Defamation League on Tuesday after he employed a term historically used as a slur to describe Jews as greedy moneylenders.
Addressing the Legal Services Corporation at its 40th anniversary conference, Biden told his audience that his son Beau had informed him of the financial struggles US soldiers face while serving in Iraq, CNN reported.
“[P]eople would come to him and talk about what was happening to them at home in terms of foreclosures, in terms of bad loans that were being…I mean these Shylocks who took advantage of, um, these women and men while overseas,” the vice president said.
The Anti-Defamation League’s Abe Foxman issued a condemnation of the remarks later that day.
“When someone as friendly to the Jewish community and open and tolerant an individual as is Vice President Joe Biden, uses the term ‘Shylocked’ to describe unscrupulous moneylenders dealing with service men and women, we see once again how deeply embedded this stereotype about Jews is in society,” Foxman said in a statement.
The term is widely viewed as a slur, originally based on Shakespeare’s villain Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice,” as CNN noted. The character, a predatory and calculating Jewish lender, provided the basis for anti-Semetic stereotypes in the Western world.
This guy has put his foot in his mouth so many times it’s a wonder it doesn’t look like a shoebox.
Let’s see the media make a big deal the next time some Teabagger in Congress insults the Muslim community (like the Oklahoma state senator who recently said American Muslims need to be “cut out like a cancer”). Yeah, like that will ever occur. They are very selective in their reporting of anti-Semitic remarks. And yes, you fucking Teabagger morons who happen to be trolling this site, Arabs and others in the Middle East are also a Semitic people.
More media hysteria…Don’t speakers speak with the assurance that most listeners listen through an understanding of the speaker’s life gestalt? Isn’t it just possible, considering Biden’s life and works that the Vice President was merely highlighting unscrupulous moneylenders without the ancient ethnic/religious prejudice to those few aware of the Shakespeare reference?
TPM leaves out the most important part of the story:
"When someone as friendly to the Jewish community and open and tolerant an individual as is Vice President Joe Biden, uses the term 'Shylocked’ to describe unscrupulous moneylenders dealing with service men and women, we see once again how deeply embedded this stereotype about Jews is in society,”
Translation: Stand back while I reach to earn my paycheck.