Is this anti-semitism?

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/21/george-galloway-debate-israeli-oxford

urls i will not click #1 in a series

About the Eco book.

There's a feeling sometimes when someone is trying to write an antisemitic character, or an anti-black, or Islamophobic character, and that author isn't part of the group the character is supposed to hate, that the tropes and tics of that hatred are cliches, right?

For reference I also don't think American History X is very good, for the same reason.

I know I already mentioned this example, but such cliches can be used to great effect in capable hands. in lazier hands the results vary, of course.

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2013/02/24/3120356/house-subcommittee-convenes-anti-semitism-hearing

But, they say to me, the Jews have their own judges and laws. I respond that is your fault and you should not allow it. We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw recognition from their judges; they should only have our judges. We must refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so-called laws of their Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens individually. But, some will say to me, they do not want to be citizens. Well then! If they do not want to be citizens, they should say so, and then, we should banish them. It is repugnant to have in the state an association of non-citizens, and a nation within the nation. . . . In short, Sirs, the presumed status of every man resident in a country is to be a citizen.

For the longest time I thought Napoleon said this but it turns out it was Stanislas Marie Adelaide, comte de Clermont-Tonnerre.

Very much part of the unifying principle in French politics, an attitude which regularized administration and weights and measures but was pretty fatal to local cultures and languages. Bonaparte was generally pretty good to the Jews but very much in line with the philosophy above.

Cf. contemporary French tussling about Muslim women wearing hijab.

well if you're getting anticlerical you can't play faves

http://www.jewishjournal.com/cover_story/article/why_i_am_a_zionist

American and Israeli accounts of anti-Zionism have a tendency to portray modern Europe as slouching towards a Bethlehem of Jew-hatred, with far-left and far-right combining to bring about a return to the 1930s. I wouldn’t go that far. Anti-Zionism is certainly ubiquitous on the hard left, but in my experience is merely one component of a seamless, all-encompassing theory of the world that, if I may be cynical for a moment, revolves around three questions:

1. Which side is the United States on?

2. Which side has all the money/weaponry?

3. Which side, overall, has lighter skin?

Where all three questions generate the same answer, that answer is The Enemy. Where the answers are mixed or unclear, the result is abject confusion, as in the case of Syria. In the manner of a stopped clock, this formula will occasionally yield the correct position, as with South Africa (of which more later). More often, it’s a first-class ticket into the moral abyss. In the interests of balance, I should point out that a nontrivial percentage of right-wingers make use of the same three questions with the results inverted.

It is this dogmatic form of anti-imperialism, in my view, that most accounts for leftist hostility to the Jewish state. In Israel’s troubled early years, and in the long years of struggle before its foundation, Zionism was chiefly associated with the political left, to the extent that George Orwell could write in 1945 that “it was de rigueur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs.” Only with Israel’s emergence as a regional superpower and staunch American ally did the worm turn; a sequence of events that also miraculously coincided with conservatives discovering their deep-seated affinity for the Jewish people.

as with South Africa (of which more later)

oh man i can't wait

basically he says that apartheid south africa being the last successful liberal fight accounts for its obsessive evocation re israel - past glories + all

i don't hold with people who call israeli policy 'apartheid' but you have to admit there's more similarities than that

this thread's been bugging me because i started reading an interesting book re: liberalism and multiculturalism the other week and i can't for the life of me remember what it was. but the intro was talking about the conflict between some liberal values and the values of religious or cultural communities within a state and saying that the book was an attempt to reconcile this conflict.

i think the apartheid connection is kinda spectacularly dumb tbh

Yeah, I think the apartheid comparison is only slightly more sophisticated than the nazi comparison.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/28/showbiz/joan-rivers-holocaust-joke/index.html?hpt=en_c2

I am filing this under "this isn't really happening, is it?"

yet another illustration of offensive jokes being even more offensive when they are pathetically unfunny

not funny but more anti-german than anti-semitic

it might be anti-semitic in that it doesn't consider the dead jews to be german

also it's a botched line, "looked hot" instead of just "hot"

I don't think the line was botched, and I don't think Rivers is anti-semitic. I think I'm just getting more conservative about humor as I get older. At least in so far as I consider the audience; i.e. everyone with a TV or an internet connection.

afaic joan rivers can tell whatever antisemitic jokes she wants. i totally accept her explanation that she's using humor for holocaust awareness. godspeed to her.

I am still boggling that someone complained that Joan Rivers was being anti-Semetic tbh; I'd react the same way if someone called Chris Rock a racist after his "black ppl vs n*****s" routine

yeah, she's a brooklyn jew ffs

the joke was INCREDIBLY crass tbh, but kind of incredible

can't really fuck with Joan Rivers

she knows exactly what she's doing with her material, for ex:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAD-ky3TYQk

https://twitter.com/SamiraIbrahim4/status/225613031277735937

idgi, is she claiming that someone hacked her twitter, and it wasn't her reveling in the bulgarian bombing?

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/03/the-long-data-of-european-jewish-expulsions/

fucking comments

lol obv it was her comment. btw, re that wired article, my friend wrote this very excellent response:

With all due respect, this is a bit overrated. The assumption that an expulsion=an expulsion is false-- you can't assume transitivity when dealing with qualitative, long duree' historical stuff like expulsions of Jews. How long were Jews expelled for? How long had they lived there for before? What were the legal conditions of both their residency and their expulsion? The legal issues of Italian city states who issued various conditional permissions for Jewish residency in the form of a contract (cf. Ariel Toaff) or of city states in the Holy Roman Empire who allowed limited Jewish residency for diplomatic or commercial purposes (cf. Jonathan Israel for a quick introduction to the phenomenon) are not interchangeable! Were the Jews meant to live in a place for a short period of time? Did they overstay their welcome? Had they been tacitly allowed by never really allowed? Were there warring Polish noble families who took various sides on the issue and Jews were expelled, readmitted, re-expelled due to these external factors (cf. Magda Teter, Gershon Hundert for examples? This is a Goldhagenian Whiggish dataset which assumes a unified phenomenon where there is none, reduces historical quality to quantity and then leads us to unfounded conclusions which obscure rather than reveal anything about jewish history. Bravo for expelling the Jews from our own expulsions.

Oh shit she got hacked again

رفضت الاعتذار للوبى الصهيونى فى امريكا عن تصريحات سابقة معادية للصهيونية تحت ضغوط من الحكومة الامريكية فتم سحب الجائزة #سميرة_ابراهيم

I refuse to apologize to the Zionist lobby in America under pressure from the U.S. government for previous statements hostile to Zionism

more on the krafft affaire:
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/11/we_let_charles_krafft_fool_us_partner/

i hadn't seen this story before but it's insane:
http://forward.com/articles/6615/white-nationalist-conference-ponders-whether-jews/

lolz all around there. even mentioning Nick Griffin. must be so awkward for white supremacists when they have to discriminate against a religion that is a choice.

that is crackerjack reporting

no prize in the box sadly

Mordy, I was out cycling when I found myself thinking about your statement that "the apartheid connection is spectacularly dumb". I found I wanted to ask you a very simple question.

Let's play a mind game. Let's set aside completely whether there is any inherent merit in the apartheid metaphor. Let's just imagine an alternative Mordy who does believe the apartheid metaphor is salient, and who acts on that belief.

What kind of things does this hypothetical Mordy do, that you don't do? Is he more liberal than you? More activist? Does he become isolated, do some even accuse him of anti-semitism? What are the real world outcomes of his belief?

Now let's go a step further and imagine that this hypothetical Mordy is not isolated and not seen as anti-semitic, because he now represents a majority of public opinion in the Jewish and Israeli world. Does Israel, does Palestine, does the region, and does the world become better or worse in this scenario?

I do not believe that a world where the majority of ppl believe Israel is an apartheid state (+ acts on that belief) leads to better outcomes for Israel or the Palestinians.

I don't believe in Grampsy

Okay, fair enough. But what kind of things does that Mordy do? And is he more liberal than you are, would you say?

I think I'm more liberal than theoretical Israel-is-apartheid believing Mordy - assuming both Mordys are equal in every other way. But the ppl who believe that Israel is apartheid tend to enjoy taking the most radically left wing position as an aesthetic choice and would likely be more leftist than me -> assuming you're defining leftist in some idiomatically appropriate to contemporary American politics way.

Interesting. The word "liberal" is a slippery one.

Might those people simply be taking the most radically left wing position as a political choice, rather than an "aesthetic" one?

Sure, why not.

What's the difference? I take the positions I take because they make sense to me logically and because they resonate with me politically/ethically. Some things are contradictions (my belief in God) and I try to parse out the difference. The idea that Israel is an apartheid society (and that convincing people of that fact might make the world a better place) doesn't make sense to me logically, politically, or ethically.

Gotcha. I see that other, hypothetical Mordy fading away before my very eyes! It's a pity, because I thought he was a kinda cool guy, politically and ethically, if not logically.

You're sweet if not passive-aggressive Grampsy. :) Why don't you play us off w/ an incredibly stylized Gramspy anecdote?

Why don't you play us off w/ an incredibly stylized Gramspy anecdote?

I will, if you like.

I was walking by the Dead Sea. I say "walking", in fact I was "there" via Google Streetview. It wasn't the car-mounted Streetview, but a more groovy one that (and you could see this by the shadows) was a guy on a kind of beach buggy with a camera on a pole. I'd dropped the little yellow man randomly on a map of Israel, from quite "high", not knowing where I'd land.

The place was a beach resort. It seemed very rich. There were elderly people with bellies spilling out of their beachwear, and groups of young, trim teenagers. The first thing I thought was "I'm amongst people like me", by which I mean very affluent, advanced people. It felt like an outpost of America, or perhaps a wealthy Mediterranean resort.

The landscape, though, was spectacularly alien. There was a strange white light coming off the Dead Sea, and the basaltic mountains behind the ziggurat-shaped resort hotels were utterly primeval. For some reason they made me think of the setting of weird sci-fi survivalist films featuring Charlton Heston.

Israel looked "nice" and "rich". There were showers on the beach, and some amazing looking modern architecture on the horizon. But I was very aware of an absence. It felt as if this was a rarefied, purified environment. Ethnically cleansed, even. It felt like some other places which are economically cleansed of the poor, like Monaco. I felt the same claustrophobia, a sense of privileged hedonism which was, in some way, brutal, despite the apparent ease of life there.

And I thought of the videos of Israeli artist Yael Bartana, who shows Israelis dirt-racing in off-road vehicles, or ascending in hot-air balloons. On the face of it, these are just people having fun. But "the face of it" isn't enough.

eh google streetview insights

Jobbik’s general antagonism toward Israel has blossomed in recent months into a fully fledged campaign. Gyongyosi has announced a national tour of lectures on the “Zionist threat to world peace.” In parallel, anti-Jewish and anti-Israel articles now take up more than 30 percent of the content on the party’s English-language website.

"Labour Party suspends Lord Ahmed from membership following allegations of anti-Jewish remarks" according to BBC...