Is this anti-semitism?

http://forward.com/articles/204493/jewish-student-at-temple-university-punched-at-pro/
http://forward.com/articles/204487/australian-jewish-school-evacuated-by-bomb-scare/

fuck this shit already

If they don't want to be targeted for being Jewish, maybe they should just stop being Jewish.

temple U! this is my fucking backyard.

I have Jewish family in Philly AND Australia.

that Philly thing doesn't read like a straight-up hate crime to me, a pro-palestinian group confronted by a dude from a right-wing pro-israeli group and the fists/insults flew...? not exactly shocking.

idk how reliable this is. the kid who got punched is a friend of a friend:
http://www.truthrevolt.org/news/temple-univ-jewish-student-punched-face-and-called-kike-anti-semitic-attack

def an objective account there lol

tbc nobody should be resorting to fists/insults. kids are stupid.

He is a member of the Jewish fraternity Alpha Epsilon Pi and a fellow with CAMERA, a right-wing pro-Israel media watchdog.

those guys are the fucking worst, i'm willing to bet that guy provoked his assailant.

of course, it takes two etc.

if he really wanted to provoke a response he should have just kidnapped one of them and set them on fire amirite

hey a link to ben shapiro's website, that's great

ugh Breitbart

http://www.jta.org/2014/08/22/news-opinion/world/vandals-target-jewish-school-in-denmark

Given that the guy was a "CAMERA on Campus fellow" I have to wonder if he was provoking them at least a bit on purpose.

Here's the *thing-I-just-can't-process-of-the-day*

http://972mag.com/nstt_feeditem/israelis-on-facebook-wish-death-for-holocaust-survivors-against-protective-edge/

Is this some kind of Sephardic-ashkenazic thing? Like do Jews from Arab countries more loudly profess their hate for Arabs and do they also have some kind of weird complex about not being of the group who went through the holocaust?

ime, as a stereotype, sephardic jews hate arabs more than ashkenazi jews do

where does that come from? bad relations with their neighbors prior to emigrating? Just a less politically correct/humanistic culture in general?

idk, any explanation i gave would be speculation + it's likely overdetermined but i'm sure it has a lot to do w/ being forced to live as second class citizens in arab countries before immigration + the ultimate expulsion of sephardic jews from middle east countries

http://www.npr.org/blogs/thetwo-way/2014/08/27/343666058/fashion-retailer-zara-pulls-kids-shirt-resembling-concentration-camp-uniform

http://media.npr.org/assets/img/2014/08/27/83b5a826-d7c5-45d4-86d3-24b300cf0665-460x276_custom-8d1b0c0aaf953bfe8116f9fbf1d61285bacaaefb-s40-c85.png

Update 1pm IDT: Zara parent company Inditex told +972 the shirt was inspired by Classical Western films and that it is no longer available. The Israeli chapter of the company apologized more profusely, adding that it was decided to remove the offensive product from the shelves – and “exterminate” it.

idk that looks like a Sherriff's badge to me

why it's on a striped shirt that is clearly not classically western in design is not clear

http://jpupdates.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/Jewish-Children-with-Yellow-Star.jpg

http://web.educastur.princast.es/cp/fresneda/colegio/biblioteca/investigamos/TEREZIN/JEWISH%20CHILDREN%20LIBERATED.jpg

fuck

The company has a whole history of troubling shirt designs I see in that npr link

i don't like everything here but i think he makes some clever points:
http://dsadevil.blogspot.co.il/2014/08/respectability-politics-and-causes-of.html

http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2014/07/07/civility-in-contemporary-debates-about-antisemitism-david-hirsh/

that post about Respectability Politics is good.

also - http://engageonline.wordpress.com/2014/03/21/robert-fine-debates-the-boycotters-in-leeds

my problem with the BDS thing is it really doesn't counter AIPAC in any meaningful way. if Americans want to divest from Israel, then we need to get our gov't to stop funneling money/weapons to Israel (something I totally support) and that means undermining AIPAC. which is about as easy as undermining the NRA (another key goal of mine)

i think robert fine makes some serious ideological challenges to BDS in that piece - not just practical/pragmatic ones

i think AIPAC's influence might already been shrinking a bit?

my problem w/ BDS has always been that it seems more like grandstanding than an effective form of protest. which is kind of offensive from two angles.

and as a jew i admit i'm kind of guarded and wary about some of the more heated rhetoric employed by proponents of BDS; that respectability-politics blog above (which I liked a lot) gets at some of the reasons why.

huh there seem to be a bunch of articles from March about AIPAC's waning influence in light of Iran brouhaha but I kinda wonder if that reversed itself with the recent Gaza incursion. I didn't see any members of Congress bucking the AIPAC party line.

xp

the Fine thing (I haven't read it all yet btw) seems to be exclusively about academic institutions...? Academic boycotts seem inherently stupid and wrong imo.

he makes some points about discrimination based on nationality but yeah i think his point is most damning re academic boycott

yeah there's been a ton of discussion about this -- i agree that academic boycotts seem counterproductive and kind of dangerous to scholarly culture.

and, again, completely ineffectual

it just seems so dumb. it isn't the universities that are building illegal settlements and dropping bombs.

and yeah its actual effects on intellectual discourse are inherently negative

also i think his point about alienating allies is really stark, esp re academics + other cultural resistances who may form/join a leftist coalition.

and as a jew i admit i'm kind of guarded and wary about some of the more heated rhetoric employed by proponents of BDS; that respectability-politics blog above (which I liked a lot) gets at some of the reasons why.

― I dunno. (amateurist), Wednesday, September 10, 2014 4:22 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Me too. Theoretically I don't really oppose BDS, but I find myself in a lot of conversations (online) anyway that I don't like being in with some of its supporters. Once I feel like I'm being pinned into the "are you the right kind of Jew?" corner I don't really let my guard down easily.

And also that post Mordy posted is on point about certain things -- the whole idea that all accusations of anti-Semitism are nothing more than a cynical smear campaign really bothers me. The Steven Salaita affair is one place where I find myself unable to really support the left line, because (1) I actually did find his tweets hateful, and (2) I think a university is entitled to be concerned about the way an academic publicly holds himself out, esp before fully hiring him (let alone giving tenure). I don't really buy that "civility" is just being used to silence all critics of Israel.

i have really mixed feelings about the salaita affair. my sense is that he is being singled out a little bit, since professors elsewhere have said really awful things on social media in other contexts and haven't been fired (or in this case a job offer rescinded at the last minute). i think UI handled it poorly, and their public comment on the matter has been incredibly tin-earned at best and genuinely scary at worst. but salaita seems like an idiot firebrand. so my sort of above-it-all opinion is "a pox on both their houses." but as an academic i still don't know exactly what to think.

another thought i had, which reminds me a little of the whole ward churchill affair, is why they would hire this guy in the first place given his history of asinine public comments. (churchill is obviously a whole nother kettle of fish but my sense of that whole affair was that the original sin was the university hiring him in the first place.)

it just seems so dumb. it isn't the universities that are building illegal settlements and dropping bombs.

― Οὖτις, Wednesday, September 10, 2014 8:35 PM

sorry but this ignores how many universities are closely tied to the state, not only economically but politically, not to mention in literal military applications - not only in Israel of course (the US DoD finances many departments and projects at America's best universities). further, the whole point of a boycott is to put pressure on a particular group - in this case for academics at universities in Israel to in turn pressure their government and use whatever influence they may have have towards a particular cause. how is this "dumb"?

the boycott is specifically against institutions tied to the Israeli state as opposed to academics who are Israeli, so Fine's efforts to conflate the two and portray this as discrimination against people based on their nationality are quite unfair.

Yeeeeah I dont really think israeli academics have much clout w the govt. Certainly not as much as American $$$ do. It seems like a weak lever to attempt to use from outside to affect policy. With tons of negative side effects.

Well, the boycott is dumb, but it's true that it's not a boycott against jews or Israelis. My Danish friend is doing a ph.d. in Israel - he married an Israeli girl and moved with her - and he'll be hit as well.

http://972mag.com/israeli-universities-becoming-hasbara-mills/38929/

"Two Israeli universities, Haifa University and Tel Aviv University, now offer programs in Hasbara. The Haifa course is meant for Israeli students, the Tel Aviv one for foreign students. Both are supported by Israeli ministries: the Haifa one by the Ministry of Propaganda and Diaspora (Ministry of Hasbara, in Hebrew) and the Tel Aviv program by the Foreign Ministry."

yep, definitely no complicity of institutions of higher learning in Israel with the state's domestic and foreign policy here!

more examples here: http://www.haaretz.com/mobile/.premium-1.612657?v=EEF7C70EBF2B3A98C8CCC99971173CA2

I didn't say there was no complicity, just that its negligible in the scope of things. And it's like two steps removed from actually impacting Israeli policy - the idea being that a) boycott the universities (OK no problem there), b) universities then respond by accepting the demands of the boycotters (highly unlikely, when has this ever happened? the boycott would just make them more isolationist and defensive, not cooperative) and then c) Israeli government acquiesces to the (coerced) demands of its academic institutions (also highly unlikely given that its the gov't that has leverage over the universities, not the other way around). The whole thing seems poorly conceived.