Is this anti-semitism?

thx, don't check that address that much, will check

http://www.sacred-texts.com/neu/eng/child/ch155.htm

Interesting, well that's a new one on me!

I think in some cultures "Jew" was something in between an archetype and a mythic creature, rather than a person you met on the street.

- but spinoza didn't believe in the holy trinity.

- spinoza was a jew.

- what's a jew?

- you never saw a jew before? here. i have some sketches.

- no kidding! do they all have these horns?

- no. this is the russian jew. the german jew has these stripes.

x-post

Yeah, it's odd because of the universal 'lose a ball in someone's garden' idea - that house on your street you run past as a kid. Only this time it's used as blood libel.

lol dfl

er dlh

I like how the protagonist in these stories often unfairly provokes/tortures/maligns the Jew, only to have the Jew try to redress grievances, overplay his hand, and meet his "deserved" doom.

― temporarily embarassed millionaire (Shakey Mo Collier), Monday, June 17, 2013 7:35 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark

isnt this kind of the merchant of venice

I think in some cultures "Jew" was something in between an archetype and a mythic creature, rather than a person you met on the street.

― i don't even have an internet (Hurting 2), Tuesday, June 18, 2013 11:07 AM (4 hours ago) Bookmark

such as the suburbs of toronto ime

That stuff about pinkwashing upthread is interesting.

Jayson Littman, a New York-based organizer of social events for gay Jewish men who has led gay-themed Birthright trips to Israel. Last spring, Littman sent a proposal titled “The Myth of Pinkwashing,” which, along the line of Jonathan Miller’s, explained that the Israeli government’s advertising its gay life is primarily about tourism dollars, not propaganda.

I've been looking for Littman's article mentioned here and can't find it. However, is there really that secure a boundary between a country doing something for 'tourism dollars' vs for 'propaganda'? I mean it's not like, for Israel or for any country, money from tourists only goes into special, benign parts of the economy, is it? Large (economically significant) groups of people coming to spend money in a country, contribute that money to whatever that country is currently doing, including e.g. paying for someone's hotel or museum to stay open but also e.g. paying for that country's war effort.

This is also, of course, v. relevant to Saudi Arabia and indeed the US and the UK and their tourist industries.

Yeah but starting from that premise anything does for tourism or exports would be ____washing. Is promoting christian holy sites "christwashing"? Is selling jaffa oranges abroad "fruitwashing"? I mean if you believe in complete boycott/divestiture, fine. But I don't get what is particularly sinister about Israel promoting openness to gay and lesbian culture.

But I don't get what is particularly sinister about Israel promoting openness to gay and lesbian culture.

I don't know if there actually is anything sinister about it. At last when you put it in those terms.

But if pressed to 'find something sinister about it' ... a nasty part of me envisions a certain kind of stupid, materialistic person - who could be straight or gay, male or female - who likes traveling and partying and having fun. And this demographic doesn't give a fuck about, like, some oppression or like some war or something over in (wherever it is) because (wherever it is) has these great beaches, and cool nightclubs where you can drink alcohol, and take drugs, and have sex with attractive people!

Which seems pretty sinister. If these people exist. Sometimes I think they do, sometimes I think I'm being weird and hung up (cough and/or a massive hypocrite).

But Israel being 'open to gay and lesbian people', obvs only a good thing. When you put it like that, in idealistic terms.

It's more the party party fun fun we don't give a fuck culture I find sinister, really, and the way Israel (or, as should be made clear, literally any other country you care to name) can tap into that as source for money and a good image as a party party sort of place. Such that when that country bombs a few schools or whatever, people in the US and the UK think 'Oh, they're the party party place, they must have a good reason for bombing those schools or whatever'.

And the way that that party party let's all party culture is now absorbing something called 'being gay', at least in the UK, or well, at least in cardamon's nasty little box he possibly shouldn't have climbed out of today.

You might find it interesting to know that I had a conversation with someone in Israel who actually works for the government sort of doing international PR as it were, and she had similar reservations but from the other side -- she didn't have any problem with gay rights, gay culture, etc., but she felt like it was kind of frivolous and inappropriate to be focusing on promoting gay party life.

i don't really know enough about the state of lgbtq politics in israel to comment specifically on israel's potential pinkwashing, and lol this is probably totally the wrong thread for this, but i feel like saying that pinkwashing per se isn't such a bad thing because at least it's promoting openness or tolerance or w/e is kind of problematic. for me, "pinkwashing" connotes gay-friendliness that is only superficial. say, for instance, you have a large corporation that, like many fortune 500 companies, has policies that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation or gender identity, that provides benefits to domestic partners, etc. maybe they advertise in the lgbt community or actively recruit in it. they present a gay-friendly image to the public; perhaps they even donate money to an organization like the HRC or GLAAD. but what if they have investments in or otherwise profit from private prisons and the prison-industrial complex? you could say that this is a case of pinkwashing where they use their good works in the gay community to cover up or distract from their bad (or at least controversial) works in a different area. i think it goes deeper than that, though: lgbtq people are disproportionately affected by and subject to the criminal justice system; they're more likely to experience police harassment, more likely to be imprisoned, and more likely to be abused and raped (by both authorities and other prisoners) while in prison. they're also more likely to have special medical needs that may not be met while they're imprisoned. so in this (hypothetical but not unlikely) case, pinkwashing is being used to hide policies that disproportionately negatively effect lgbtq people beneath a veneer of lgbtq-friendliness. imo that's not a net gain for lgbtq ppl
also what cardamon said

it seems like a major moral failure to condemn positive developments in one area bc of lack of them in another, and an epic strategic failure for Schulman to keep reminding ppl that Israel is a democratic country that protects gay rights.

it seems like a major moral failure to condemn positive developments in one area bc of lack of them in another

This. Unless there's a very, very clear causal link between the one and the other - cases where some good thing is only happening at the expense of some other, not only bad but worse thing. But such cases are rare, and I certainly don't think this is one of them.

oh UN-paws: http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/crc/docs/co/CRC-C-ISR-CO-2-4.pdf

Harmful practices
41. The Committee expresses concern about reported short and long-term complications arising from some traditional male circumcision practices.

42. The Committee recommends that the State party undertake a study on the short and long-term complications of male circumcision.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2348191/EXCLUSIVE-KGB-operation-seeded-Muslim-countries-anti-American-anti-Jewish-propaganda-1970s-laying-groundwork-Islamist-terrorism-U-S-Israeli-targets.html

daily mail

they're just reporting a scoop from here:
http://www.amazon.com/Disinformation-Undermining-Attacking-Promoting-Terrorism/dp/1936488604

it's not the scoop it's that the daily mail is reporting about propaganda against a minority.

ahahahah "a scoop". that book looks _real_ trustworthy there!

pacepa is an interesting dude

more importantly tho, the general information about how nkvd invented 'anti-zionism' as a substitute for anti-semitism is historical record afaik so this really just fill in blanks - it doesn't need to be particularly trustworthy to be worthy of note

don't need trustworthiness when someone is writing about the secret plot to ensure that all anti-israel sentiment is definitely anti-semitic

but really lol at the daily mail, perhaps the most racist national publication in the UK

i'm reviewing that nirenberg book (anti-judaism) for a local federation paper. it's really good - sections on ancient egypt, quranic islam and voltaire are all really strong.

i heard a funny joke at shabbat table this shabbat. two jews pass a church advertising $100 for conversions. one jew says to the other "hey, let's do it," and he goes in. a little bit later he comes out and his jewish friend is like, "nu? did they give you the money?" the new convert says, "you jews, it's all about money to you."

that's p anti semitic mordy

when u think about it like, i mean just look at what it's saying

well i posted it in the anti-semitism thread

but not in a sufficiently disapproving manner i feel

does the joke tell us whether or not his horns were gone when he came out btw

u might have to be jewish to fully understand the joke

.......

what makes you think im not jewish!

i'm with darraghmac. tsk tsk

i like this thread overall because i learned that adbusters was sincerely antisemitic, and not just trading in on lazy "arggh bankers!" tropes, and that gave me another good reason to dismiss them. more than that, i don't have to worry about my generation being the "dead end of civilization."

yeah that was the baby boomers

it's true. and millenial hipsters are going to show us the way out of the labyrinth (subject of the next david brooks column)

as long as they're not muslim, as they're mentally uncapable

http://www.timesofisrael.com/wiesenthal-center-slams-thai-university-for-hitler-mural/

So that article and general idea of Russia (?) constructing something called anti-Zionism as a cover for a no longer acceptable anti-Semitism ...

I sort of think some people on the ground might have had legit reasons for being anti-Zionism. Or are we to see Palestinians as a bit too stupid to understand the ideologies going on around them, the Russians need to weave a magic spell? Has to come from above, from the anti-Semitic powers that be, can't just be that Palestinians know what Zionism is and disagree with it on principle because it inherently means them losing their homes?

Or am I missing like millions of points here.

Is this anti-semitism?

I don't think you can claim that RUSSIA, esp. modern Russia as some monolithic state that needs to invent propagandist terms to deliver anti-semitic narratives. Like, they are pretty upfront about not liking Israel the State as it is currently managed, but if it's bigotry they are after, for instance, they use no euphemisms for the State's disapproval of homosexuals and also radical feminists such as Pussy Riot.

However, I think they do use the cover of anti-Zionism as a shield for their continued trade relations with Iran. Which doesn't really suggest that they hate Jews or something. I don't know that much about the history of Russia but the modern state seems far too realpolitik to give much of a shit about racial or ethnic groups except for those that can be exploited for gains in land control -- in which I mean mostly Balkanized states they wish to once again fold into their country.

Not to suggest that there is any truth to the story, but this was supposed to have happened between the Stalin and Andropov eras when realpolitik would have made it potentially useful.

The Soviet relationship with Israel, and with Jewish Russians, was always enormously complicated.

wouldn't say this is exactly anti-semitism but it is astonishingly clueless and insensitive:

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/23/an_atheist_groups_fight_against_a_holocaust_memorial/

Had there been a separation between religion and state honored and enforced in Germany, ensuring government could not favor the dominant religion and persecute and scapegoat minority religion and other ‘dissidents,’ there would not have been a Holocaust.

not the perfect thread for this, but tangentially related and an interesting read:
http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-arts-and-culture/books/126348/when-feminists-were-zionists

xp ugh, as both an atheist and a descendant of Jews who is not himself Jewish, that's about the most tone-deaf, straining-at-gnats bullshit I've ever heard.

I mean, they actually think the Nazis were killing people because of the Nazis being Christians, don't they?

That's one of the big misunderstandings about Nazism, right? The idea that it ran on a kind of simple-minded hatred solely, and the downplaying of the cynical manipulation of that simple hatred for political ends, which is surely the worst part of it.