I recently read the Book of Esther, the part where Haman takes an instant dislike to Mordekai and decides that the Jews are evil and should be destroyed. Haman starts a whispering campaign to turn all of the government against the Jews, eventually leading to a death sentence for the entire people. They are only saved by Divine intervention, with Esther risking her life to approach the king in defense of her people.
This is not the first “whispering campaign,” nor is it the last we see in history. The practice is renewed by the Germans in the 1920s and 1930s, when the Jews were blamed (by agitators in government and business) for all poverty, civil unrest, government failures, bad international agreements and treaties, and, if they’d thought about it, bed bugs and thunder storms. Instead of whispering, the effort was enhanced by newspapers, and after Hitler rose to power, by official government (i.e., fake) news. Hitler’s effort was so successful that the German people publicly persecuted their Jewish neighbors (with whom they had lived peacefully for centuries), and Jews were eventually limited by law and, eventually systematically exterminated.
Isolating “The Other” has been done throughout history: those barbaric American Indians, the hateful Irish (or Polish, or Greek, or Italian, or Russian) immigrants, the terrible Mormons, those ignorant slaves (whom we deprived of any opportunity to overcome their reputed ignorance), the Bhutanese residents of Nepal, the Royhingya Muslims in Myanmar, and now, in this enlightened 21st century, under the “leadership” of Donald J. Trump.
Whispering campaigns can be via whispers, commercial advertisements, government edict, conspiracy theories or, in our current age, via Twitter.
Whenever dictators, demagogues, or unenlightened rulers decide they need to beef up their base of supporters, or to create an issue that they can correct (in the minds of their herd of followers), they turn to the campaign of isolating a minority, spreading the word that the subgroup is terrible or ignorant or unwashed or blasphemers, or have terrible hair, or whatever. Then, when the publicity campaign has taken root, they start talking about getting rid of this minority by depriving them of rights through persecution, expulsion, or murder.
All these efforts are usually done either out of complete ignorance of the minority or out of genuine hatred, almost is always exaggerated and misplaced. These whispering campaigns allow the perpetrators to feel good about their accomplishments, which almost invariably include illegal or immoral actions against the minority-du-jour that has been singled out.
Persecution of “The Other” is not the way the Savior would have treated anyone; it is not the way we should treat fellow children of God; it is immoral. As followers of Jesus of Nazareth, we must take special care to recognize such isolation and persecution of The Other and be willing to defend them and call out the immoral persecution to which they are exposed.