Is this anti-semitism?

north korea does somehow seem more stable what w/ not sharing a border w/ syria or having a militant pseudo-government / syria civil war belligerent controlling parts of the country, or suicide bombings in the capital within the last 2 years, but tbh i'm a little jealous both of yr courage, world travel + ability to even go to beirut.

It is true that I have probably never been safer than when I was in NK. But the fact is that I'm more likely to be injured/killed in a car accident ANYWHERE than by a Beirut bombing. I think people my parents' age just hear the word "Beirut" and it is 1983 all over again.

I was going to try to work in an Israel visit but the logistics of doing both are just too cumbersome for a two-week trip :(

Will do Jordan+Israel at some point in the next couple of years I guess.

German court rules that firebombing a synagogue is not anti-Semitic

well i guess the germans would know

was it a jewish synagogue

As opposed to what? Wtf?

just trying to establish the facts maam

...

this shit continuing: http://www.jta.org/2017/01/18/news-opinion/united-states/18-jewish-institutions-across-us-targeted-in-second-wave-of-bomb-threats

Ugh, so terrible. At the Jewish institution I work at in SF we got a walkthrough of bomb threat evac procedures after we found out the Marin JCC had received a threat today.

ppl are stupid http://forward.com/news/breaking-news/360328/australian-mayor-declines-synagogue-invitation-citing-israel-s-occupation/

Gross

Wow, was about to ask how someone with such bad critical thinking skills could be elected mayor but... well... tomorrow is happening.

another wave of bomb threats against jewish community centers?

what do you guys think about the holocaust statement? a lot of ppl think that they omitted specifically referencing jews to... i guess signal to white supremacists? i'm willing to buy that but what i'm wondering about is to what end are they signaling WS's? are they hoping to rev them up into counter-protests, or use them for some purpose down the line? like once the election is over and trump won he doesn't need their votes. (and then even if he did, surely all the anti-immigrant stuff is pleasing enough to them that he doesn't need to throw antisemitism in there too.) in general i've found his dalliances w/ antisemitism to seem to mostly be thoughtless and not intentional (or at least w/ plausible deniability that his other bigotry doesn't have). i guess i'm just confused in general about politics atm.

like a. don't include jews in holocaust statement, b. white supremacists get excited he is signaling to them, c. white supremacists call jewish community centers with bomb threats, d. ???, e. profit

more like mentioning jews sounds too much like namby pamby "identity politics"

better just to say it was "sad" than admit that racism exists and that power relationships built on racism exist

I think they don't want to be on the record articulating that discriminating against minority groups is a bad thing

Re the Holocaust statement in particular. No way to know whether original omission was oversight because these clowns don't work on anything for more than 15 mins, or deliberate jew-trolling. The doubling down after the fact, though ("we were just trying to show how much we care about ROMANI!") definitely intended as "look at the jews trying to tell us what we can and can't say, well those days are over." I don't think it's mainly aimed at movement white supremacists as the much larger group who doesn't draw a clear distinction between jews / "the media" / "elites" / "political correctness"

Could be they are just really really really stupid and don't know wtf they are doing.

i'm reluctant to believe in nefarious conspiracy, or some kind of expert message calibration to thrill the nazis out there. i think it's better to focus on a habit of mind. trump and his people are historically and politically illiterate. the statement was terrible in a bunch of other ways beyond its non-specificity about the event it commemorated. trump's mind cannot look at victimization honestly. stating simple facts like who did what to whom and why is not something his character can allow.

i mean the first sentence is "It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust." heroes... of the holocaust? someone wrote that?

the last paragraph (of 3) is "In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that" blah blah i mean, what the fuck is this?

it's all vague storybook generalities that lead to self-aggrandizement. some stuff happened, i'm the hero here

And of course the movement white supremacists are over the moon about it, since their Holocaust denial has long since moved on from "there's no such thing as Auschwitz" to "the Nazis killed lots of people, war is terrible, look how the Poles and Russians suffered, somehow the sneaky Jews in the media managed to make it all about them like they always do, trying to drum up sympathy from gullible whites"

Hard to believe that Tom, this shameful speech has Bannon written all over it. He's dangerous, not stupid.

the point is, i'm pretty sure there's nobody in the white house whose attitude is "the jews are a cancer and need to be exterminated," but most of the history of anti-semitism is just not like that (one reason the jews of europe were taken by surprise) and yet is still pretty fucking terrible

goole otm

Yeah. And also what symsymsym said. Trump is far down the line that admitting the persecution of non-Christisn minorities exists would be a "gotcha" moment for the press

yup goole otm

I'm sorry pretty certain Steve Bannon has read a history of Germany in the 1930s, he's been meaning to check out the other volumes, but this is just such a page-turner.

becoming sadly regular today but worth mentioning that our local JCC in wynnewood (where a few friends send their kids) got their v own bomb threat today

My gf teaches at a JCC and is increasingly freaked out about this. Feel like the FBI's investigative route toward solving this string of crimes is pretty straightforward (seeing as how they keep targeting the same organization over and over) so I'm not sure they're doing a fucking thing about it.

i don't have much to say about it. a graveyard in philly got hit this week too. these are pretty cowardly acts - terrorizing children and the dead.

i guess i just feel pretty numb about the whole thing.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/226013/sarsour-odeh-anti-trump-movement

http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/if-my-son-and-his-friends-are-going-deface-jewish--5690

Do Jews have to make common cause with people who want to kill them?

A lot more of my relatives would have been murdered if we hadn't made common cause with Stalin so my answer is yes

last few paragraphs are p odious. Women, black people, latinos etc. have had to make common cause w racists/misogynists etc. in the Democratic Party since forever. There's always gonna be people on the left I think are insane or misguided or too strident or (possibly even) legit dangerous, but I'm not gonna lose too much sleep over it. Fringes of political movements are always like that.

xp Or let me put it another way -- it's not actually up to us who we make common cause with. People who are fighting Trumpism are fighting Trumpism. They are on the same side as us whether we want them or not. This is not Iran, we're not going to hold off Trump only to be ruled by the BDS/Sharia Law party.

otm

on an even less pleasant note i took a brief survey of some of our country's most illustrious antisemitic forums and they all agree to a man w/ the POTUS that the grave desecrations are probably a false flag attack. i wonder if any of the pos jews i know who are still defending this human garbage will agree with this conclusion.

I'm sure our man Jared does

i took a brief survey of some of our country's most illustrious antisemitic forums

I have to say, you have an admirably strong stomach, Mordy.

On a much less important level: would it be insensitive for me to call my dog's 13th birthday a 'bark mitzvah'? I wouldn't make him learn Hebrew or anything, just a name.

lol you have my jewproval for that

xp

has he been circumcised tho

I've given him lots of dog bris-cuits.

sounds like a great kohenine companion

I can't find a link but somewhere there is an instagram for :Kugel the Jewish Goldendoodle," who has some sweet Purim costumes.

fwiw there seems to some question of whether antisemitic incidents are actually increasing or whether there's just more attention being paid to them cf oppenheimer in wapost + frantzman. neither of whom i should make clear are remotely apologists for antisemitism or afaik for trump. i certainly don't think the current events and administration have been helpful and finding out that there is a correlation between increased hate crimes against jews and the trump admin would fit w/ my own biases + understandings. i was happy that trump unambiguously denounced antisemitism in his speech last night tho i do wonder about the ultimate value of that - he's stoking bigotry and anti-muslim bigots and anti-immigrant bigots are also anti-semites. you can't cleave one bigotry from another. there's a quote that i can't remember either the source of or its direct wording but it's something like "hate doesn't always begin w/ the jews but it always eventually gets there." (obviously the hatred that trump is stirring up is horrific enough even if he could somehow "protect" the jews from the wrath of the mob - but just speaking to the presumably measurable question of whether antisemitism is increasing in the US or not.)

I did see something on Twitter pointing out that his words ("Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week's shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a Nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms") weren't actually saying "Anti-semitism is bad", and that this was some form of Nazi-whistle - though I think they're probably reaching.