Is this anti-semitism?

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.

you might be surprised to learn that racial mythology was very important to Nazi social + political ideology

Hitler loved Wagner iirc

Yeah, currently reading "Hitler's Willing Executioners," which really delves deeply into the details of the German racial mythology and how their entire cultural worldview was based around a certain conception of "The Jew" which had no basis in reality. It wasn't just cynical manipulation by the Nazis. They really, genuinely believed it themselves.

Plus there was no "favoring the dominant religion" in Nazi Germany. Hitler had no more use for Catholics and Lutherans than he did anything else that was not of the Party.

Trying to take the Star of David out of a Holocaust memorial is point-missing on a "how are you even breathing unassisted?" scale.

Shorter: It really did run on simple-minded hatred. Hitler would and did gladly divert needed resources to killing Jews over supporting combat activities - winning the war and making Europe Judenrein were one and the same.

Okay, was less aware of that, assumed that in the early days there was some PR/manipulation at work

Keep in mind that, when Hitler dictated his final testament before his suicide in the bunker, the last, most important thing he felt he needed to tell the German people -- who were undoubtedly going to lose at that point -- was, "It was all the Jews' fault."

A stunningly original thought on which to leave on

"A big Jew did it and ran away"

I suppose what I want to avoid is the 'safety' of thinking that people who commit genocides are all passionately devoted to abstractions, and think of themselves as performing a duty beyond or above personal gain; sure, many of them are, but you don't avoid the possibility of collusion just by distancing yourself from fanaticism.

yeah hitler's anti-semitism wasn't just honest, it was practically his only idea. everything else (lebensraum etc.) was either pretty standard interwar german conservatism or clever (and not-so-clever) opportunism. the jew-hatred doesn't fall into the second category; he formulated it early and stuck to it forever; it was the animating principle of his life. but as for the possibility of collusion, sure: the one thing everyone remembers from arendt is that you didn't need to be passionately devoted to hitler's ideas to become a supporter, even an architect, of genocide. there's no safety in reason. but i think the seed does have to be there.

of course it was convenient for the german people post-ww1 to have an easy explanation for both the war and the defeat, and very convenient to someone trying to rally them behind him. but he rallied himself with that idea as much as anyone else, i think.

turns out that what everyone remembers from arendt is wrong, too:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/misreading-hannah-arendts-eichmann-in-jerusalem/?_r=0

eichmann was a passionate believer in the cause