The scandal-free Parsis as the anti-Jews and anti-Chinese

Why are some middleman minorities bitterly despised and others fondly admired? I took a crack at this problem in an earlier post comparing the fates of the Parsis (a commercial and professional elite group of Persians in India) vs. the Ashkenazi Jews and the Chinese. In short, the more charitable the elite minority group is toward its host population, both in spirit and in deed, the more they are valued as a national treasure.

The danger that a host faces in bringing in guests is that they could take advantage of his hospitality. By proving themselves to be altruistic rather than parasitic, the Parsis not only have alleviated those fears, but have given their Indian hosts good reason to indefinitely extend their welcome to their Parsi guests. Indeed they are taking whatever measures they can to keep the Parsis from disappearing due to falling birth rates: "The Indian government is to fund new fertility clinics to help save its dwindling Parsi population which is now under threat of extinction," reads the sub-headline of a recent article.

Can you imagine the government of any Eastern European country investing taxpayer dollars into boosting the fertility of its Ashkenazi Jewish population? Or Southeast Asian governments doing so for their Chinese populations? The Parsis, however, are the targets of an anti-pogrom -- a concerted, collective attempt to send their numbers soaring.

This comparison just goes to show that there's nothing inevitable about an elite-status minority of foreign origin becoming the objects of envy, hate, and violence.

Still, couldn't the Parsis have some major faults, some big cost they impose on their hosts, but that is felt to be outweighed by the even larger benefit they provide to their hosts? If they did, it would show up as some kind of scandal. So I searched google for Parsi scandals -- and found nothing. Neither in India nor in America (where many reside), and neither in the present nor in the past. There has to be something, but it is apparently so rare in frequency and so minor in severity that it does not show up in google searches. Leave a comment if you discover any.

Jeez, even the Anglosphere has its share of scandals, whether in business, politics, religion, or entertainment. And you figure that if such bad behavior had truly taken place among the Parsis, the Indians would've noticed and blown it into a national scandal. The country is riven by all sorts of ethnic faction lines, so people are quick to notice when one of the many Other groups steps out of line -- it only proves how irredeemably wicked they are, how unlike Us they are. If no one has spoken up yet, that must be because the Parsis are close to model citizens.

About the only scandal involving them I can think of is the news that Freddie Mercury, the lead singer of Queen, had contracted HIV and soon died from AIDS. Even this was not a scandal of parasitizing his host country, but more of a shocking revelation about what he'd done off-stage.

In contrast, the history of Ashkenazi scandal is too unwieldy to tightly summarize. (The parallel case histories of the Chinese are omitted to save space.) It seems to have gotten worse after Jewish emancipation in Europe in the 19th C., just as blacks became more disdainful and disruptive of mainstream America after they'd won the desegregation and Civil Rights movements of the 1940s through the early '60s. They felt their hosts getting softer, and so felt more emboldened to press their own demands.

The 19th C. timing also reflects the rise of industrialization, which allows Jews to exercise disproportionate influence -- there were suddenly so many industries that reached up to a national or international scale. And that is the quantity that must be measured -- not the number of scandalous figures per capita among Jews, but this probability multiplied by the damage caused by the scandal.

As a brief reminder of this history, in the Victorian era there was Karl Marx, co-founder and arch-propagandist of Communism, to be followed by scores of early-adopter Jews in Communist movements throughout Europe, culminating in Leon Trotsky. In just about any financial scandal, you can expect to find a good number of Jews, right up through Michael Milken, Bernie Madoff, Lloyd Blankfein, et al., of the present day.

Just about all of the atomic spies for the Soviets in the Ozzie and Harriet years were Ashkenazi Jews, including the infamous Rosenbergs. Even worse, the spies were born and raised in America, not recent emigres who might be expected to have low attachment to the country. So much for gratitude toward the hosts of your birth country, eh? The same sorry charade played out decades later once Jews saw Israel as the up-and-coming state to spy for in order to score ideological points, not those has-been Communists. Jonathan Pollard is just the tip of the iceberg.

In addition to individual opportunism and organized subversion, Ashkenazi Jews are also notorious for sex scandals striking their religious communities. They're fortunate not to be a very religious people, or there would be even more. There are repeated such scandals in New York City's Hasidic community, including the recent conviction of Rabbi Nechemya Weberman for molesting a girl he was counseling, starting when she was 12. Nor are such scandals confined to America (link):

Another major Jewish organization in Australia is embroiled in a child sex abuse scandal, adding to the trauma triggered by recent revelations of similar cases involving students at schools in Melbourne run by Chabad-Lubavitch and Adass Israel.

Although not as scandalous as child sex abuse, Ashkenazi Jews have also played a disproportionate role in the American porn industry, both as producers and performers.

Jews may be joined by gentiles in all of these scandals, though not nearly to the same degree. This makes the scandalous activities of Jews harder to ignore and to rationalize away once discovered. The contrast with the Parsis makes this harder still -- why don't the Parsi priests use their influence and trusted positions to molest 12 year-olds? And why don't the Parsi professionals spy on behalf of their co-ethnics back in Iran? And why don't Parsi merchants and captains of industry try to leave others holding the bag after a financial screw-up, or stoop to peddling smut for a living? It's almost as though they held sexual relations sacred, citizenship sacred, even their career sacred, drawing a line that you just don't cross.

In our increasingly profane, trivial, and selfish world, it can be no wonder that their hosts are pulling out all the stops to rescue the Parsi community from demographic decline.