Firebird Anti-Semitic debate heats Up

I got into a very interesting debate about whether the Firebird series was anti-Semitic. Evangelical fans say it isn't, while others aren't so sure. Check out the debate and tell me what you think. Frankly, the whole tone of anti-Semitic literature within evangelicalism, I find tremendously dissapointing. Novels like Obsessed, with vampiric Nazis sucking the blood of Jews, or Left Behind, where Jews are merely pawns in Satan's end game, disappoint me with their inability to deal with the needs of post-Holocaust Christianity to dialogue.

"Kathy Tyers and the Eternal Mutant Super Jew"

If you want to read a pathological evangelical novel, I suggest you pick up Kathy Tyers's Firebird series, a truly scary piece of writing. In this "trilogy" of novels, a spacefaring race of allegorical Jews breaks up into two groups -Messianic, soon-to-be-Christian Jews (the Sentinels) and the Shuhr, evil secular Jews who abort "babies", conduct genetic engineering experiments and are generally very nasty telepaths (the whole Jew as telepath theme that we've talked about earlier). What is sad is that Tyers's seems to be unconscious of her racism and indeed in other works proudly proclaims herself to be an opponent of eugenics-based thinking. Yet, why is it always the non-Christian Jews that end up getting killed off in Christian novels? I realize premillenial dispensationalists may not be able to help this, but it's depressing none the less.

Keyword: politics, Tyers, politics and Tyers

Telepaths in science fiction: The Eternal Mutant Super Jews of Sci-Fi

Telepathy and those gosh durn Jews just seem to go together like Abbot and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Kirk and Spock. Please don't misunderstand me, I'm not being anti-Semitic here. Rather, I am pointing out the peculiar tendency of sci-fi writers to link Jews with telepathy, sometimes to poke fun at anti-Semitism, at other times for more poisonous reasons. The first example of this I would highlight is Norman Spinrad's excellent novel, the Iron Dream. In this novel, the linkage is intentional. Spinrad's novel is actually a novel within a novel, written in the voice of Adolf Hitler, who has become a science fiction writer. Hitler's science fiction novel (Lords of the Swastika) is a tale of a rise of a sci-fi dictator to power, who then battles hordes of mutants, who Hitler uses as stand-ins for Slavs, and in the case of the lead mind-controlling mutants, Jews. Spinrad's novel is a hilarious send-up of Nazi kitsch in science fiction, highlighting the disturbing similarities between fascism and science fiction novels like Starship Troopers. Of course, given that context, the portrayal is quite justified.
However, two other portrayals that come to mind are much more disturbing. Both portrayals cast Jews and Nazis as coming from the same cloth. The first is Babylon 5's use of telepaths. Though rogue telepaths are sympathetic characters, the Psi Corps, the leading telepath organization, is an SS-like group, devoted to persecuting "mundanes". This fulfills the secular\Christian fantasy that the Holocaust was really the Jews' fault, and not our own. Later on, however, the rogue telepaths look for a homeland (a.k.a. the Vorlon homeworld a.k.a Israel), but to get this homeland must engage in terrorism against the "legitimate government". Telepaths have sex differently (like the stereotype of Jews), think differently (ditto), and inspire all kinds of anti-telepath conspiracy theories (again ditto). This kind of plotline obviously has problematic elements that I don't think JMS ever adequately addressed.
Perhaps the most disturbing novel series along this line is the Firebird trilogy, written by evangelical author Kathy Tyers. Here, the human telepaths in the series are undoubtedly meant to represent Jews. Tyers basically admits as much in her forward. In the series, bad, secular Nazi-Jew humans (the Shuhr) attack the forces of light, represented most prominently by the Sentinels, who are good, Messianic Christian Jews. In turn, of course, the Christian Jews annihilate the secular Jews, which is seen AS TOTALLY JUSTIFIED by the author.
I guess sci-fi blood libels die hard, and I don't blame solely writers like Tyers for contributing to them. Too many of my secular friends turn legitimate anti-Zionism into an excuse to racially bait Jews. You'd think we'd have learned by now. I guess not.