Bobby Fischer, perhaps the greatest player the game of chess has ever known, thinks I want to destroy his life. Not me personally, you understand. Jews. An international Jewish conspiracy. Now, I might be tempted to believe that millions of people have taken it upon themselves to ruin one man, save for one fact: I'm Jewish, and nobody told me about the plan to make Bobby Fischer's existence a living hell.
I must have missed that memo.
Except, when I get together with my Jewish friends, they never say things like, "Hey, wanna hear how we tracked Bobby Fischer to Japan?" or "Gee, I'd love to go to that movie with you, but I intended to spend the afternoon raining deadly laser beams down on Bobby Fischer in order to further the process of frying his brain." To be honest, I can't remember ever having a conversation about Fischer with any of my friends, Jewish or otherwise. If there had been a Jewish conspiracy, I would have thought that somebody would have let it slip.
Bobby Fischer's theory is an example of what I like to think of as "the Jewish conspiracies that Jews don't seem to be in on." They come in all shapes and sizes - from the purely personal to the international - but they all have one thing in common: no Jew has ever heard of them.
Take the Passover conspiracy. (Please!) The unleavened bread (known in Hebrew as matzoh), it is said, is made from the blood of slaughtered Christian babies. I mean, really! Anybody who has ever eaten matzoh knows this cannot be true - it's the most tasteless foodstuff known to humanity. The blood of slaughtered Christian babies could only improve the flavour.
I have read the ingredients of matzoh, and can say that I have never seen "the blood of slaughtered Christian babies" wedged in between "wheat flour" and "water." I mean, it's not like it's a long list of ingredients, people! There isn't really a lot of room to hide unpopular ingredients in there.
Humph. Makes you wonder what other misinformation is contained in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. You'd think Arab television could come up with something more contemporary.
Not that we have to go back to 19th Century Russia to find a good Jewish conspiracy theory. One of the more recent is that Jews knew that the attack on the World Trade Centre was coming, and that 3,000 of us called in sick and didn't show up for work on that fateful day.
Stories like this really make me angry. I've been traveling a lot, lately, and it is not outside the realm of possibility that I could have been in New York the day of the attack. Why wasn't I warned by another member of this supposed Jewish conspiracy? Forget memos - there's got to be a Jewish Conspiracy Update newsletter. Would it be too much to ask for somebody to tell me how to subscribe? (I tried looking for such information on the Internet, but, alas, none of the Jewish conspiracy sites are actually run by Jews. Given this, I find it hard to trust their information.)
Then, there's the old "Jews control the media" conspiracy. I have to tell you, I've been trying to sell my comedy for close to 20 years, and have had virtually no success. Poor sort of conspiracy that doesn't really benefit its members. Could there be a secret handshake that my parents neglected to teach me when I was growing up?
Of course, controlling the media is no fun if you can't use it to subvert the values of good, god-fearing Christian folks. Hey! I can do subversion! If this theory was true, I should have been living high off the hog in Hollywood ages ago.
No, these and other Jewish conspiracy theories (Jews control the banks? Really? How come none of them have invited me in to collect my share of the free money lately?) are completely inconsistent with my experience as a Jew. I would be tempted to write them off as the paranoid rantings of a small number of disturbed individuals, except...except that millions, maybe tens of millions of people throughout the world believe them.
And tens of millions of people can't be wrong. Right?