Earlier this month, members of the Westboro Baptist Church showed up on campus to protest services for Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, for reasons that make no sense to anyone with a brain and a heart. Church members, based in Topeka, Kan. espouse an (ostensibly) Christian theology of hate directed at gay people, Sweden and apparently Jews as well.

When I learned of WBC’s imminent arrival, I felt compelled to act. How could I let my Northwestern neighbors get attacked in my own backyard and not do something about it? I knew that any response had to be peaceful, respectful, loving, everything WBC abhorred, even if it was a simple public prayer.

I went up to WBC’s protest along with a dozen NU students, and while I was glad at the time that I’d offered a show of solidarity with our Jewish neighbors, in retrospect I’m not sure it was the best idea (although I will admit I enjoyed singing “Hey Jude” to drown out WBC’s version, “Hey Jews”).

The group slings poisonous barbs, yes, but none of them sting. Their rhetoric is so ridiculous it’s actually mildly entertaining. No one takes them seriously; even the KKK has denounced their activities. Responding at all, even peacefully, suggests these people merit our attention, when they surely don’t. From their perspective, any response validates their worldview.

We may feel compelled out of sheer disgust to take action against hateful groups like WBC, but a professor of mine suggested that this impulse is driven by something less altruistic: the need for self-affirmation. Reacting with self-righteous outrage makes us feel morally superior by putting us in sharp contrast with the hate-filled people we denounce.

Seen this way, attending a WBC counter-protest becomes a method of publicly demonstrating my own perceived “goodness” (the quotation marks indicating that this quality in no way actually exists). Not only did I provide these people with the attention they want, I may have done it for the wrong reasons.

I’d like to think I’m not that self-serving, but I can’t rule it out. And I can’t eliminate the possibility that a widespread desire for self-affirmation underscored the media circus around Terry Jones, the pastor of an obscure, minuscule congregation in Florida whose plans to burn the Quran on September 11 essentially held the attention of the mainstream media hostage. Like WBC, Jones’ congregation represents a radical fringe which got the national attention it dearly wanted and did not deserve. But maybe harping on the man makes us think we’re not Islamophobic.

We should not fixate on uninfluential fanatics. We’ve got much bigger problems to worry about, like the U.S. Census Bureau’s recent report that one in seven Americans now lives in poverty and that 51 million people in this country have no health insurance.

You may think I’ve essentially contradicted my own argument by devoting this space to the very individuals I’ve admonished you to ignore. But if you promptly do disregard them after reading this column, I’ll feel less hypocritical. Talk about needing self-affirmation.

Next time WBC shows up, I’ll say a prayer at home and skip the protest.

Hana Suckstorff is a Weinberg senior. She can be reached at [email protected]