Adbusters Blames the Jews

http://www.thornwalker.com/ditch/conc_toc.htm

"Drawing attention to the Jewishness of the neocons is a tricky game. Anyone who does so can count on automatically being smeared as an anti-Semite. But the point is not that Jews (who make up less than 2 percent of the American population) have a monolithic perspective. Indeed, American Jews overwhelmingly vote Democrat and many of them disagree strongly with Ariel Sharon’s policies and Bush’s aggression in Iraq. The point is simply that the neocons seem to have a special affinity for Israel that influences their political thinking and consequently American foreign policy in the Middle East."

But ending it with "and half of them are Jewish" just doesn't sit well with me.

It's obviously a shadowy, sinister conspiracy.

http://fcit.coedu.usf.edu/holocaust/arts/PROPAGAN/octopus.JPG

Wikipedia's entry is a really good introduction, actually.

(their magazine is not free, go figure)
(also is that a Paul Heyman octopus?!)

Is the entire purpose of that magazine to just make everyone feel stupid and ashamed?

You could read it for free at many hanging-around areas at Hampshire, unsurprisingly.

November 26, 1999 - Participate by participating!
(Press release from http://tao.ca/~lombrenoire)

For the past eight years, a few self-described "culture jammers" from
Adbusters Magazine have dubbed the last Friday in November "Buy Nothing
Day."

From their stylish home base in Vancouver's upscale suburb of Kitsilano, the
Adbusters' brain trust has encouraged conscientious citizens worldwide to
"relish [their] power as a consumer to change the economic environment." In
their words, Buy Nothing Day "proves how empowering it is to step out of the
consumption stream for even a day."

The geniuses at Adbusters have managed to create the perfect feel-good,
liberal, middle-class activist non-happening. A day when the more money
you make, the more influence you have (like every other day). A day which,
by definition, is insulting to the millions of people worldwide who are too poor
or marginalized to be considered "consumers."

It's supposed to be a 24-hour moratorium on spending, but ends up being a
moralistic false-debate about whether or not you should really buy that loaf
of bread today or ... wait for it ... tomorrow!

Well, this year, while the Adbusters cult enjoys yet another Buy Nothing Day,
accompanied by their fancy posters, stickers, TV and radio advertisements
and slick webpages, a few self-described anarcho-situationists from
Montreal's East End are inaugurating Steal Something Day.

Unlike Buy Nothing Day, when people are asked to "participate by not
participating," Steal Something Day demands that we "participate by
participating." Instead of downplaying or ignoring the capitalists, CEOs,
landlords, small business tyrants, bosses, PR hacks, yuppies, media
lapdogs, corporate bureaucrats, politicians and cops who are primarily
responsible for misery and exploitation in this world, Steal Something Day
demands that we steal from them, without discrimination.

The Adbusters' intellegentsia tell us that they're neither "left nor right," and
have proclaimed a non-ideological crusade against overconsumption. Steal
Something Day, on the other hand, identifies with the historic and
contemporary resistance against the causes of capitalist exploitation, not its
symptoms. If you think overconsumption is scary, wait until you hear about
capitalism and imperialism.

Unlike the misplaced Buy Nothing Day notion of consumer empowerment,
Steal Something Day promotes empowerment by urging us to collectively
identify the greedy bastards who are actually responsible for promoting
misery and boredom in this world. Instead of ignoring them, Steal
Something Day encourages us to make their lives as uncomfortable as
possible.

As we like to say in Montreal: diranger les riches dans leurs niches!

And remember, we're talking about stealing, not theft. Stealing is just. Theft
is exploitative. Stealing is when you take a yuppie's BMW for a joyride, and
crash into a parked Mercedes just for the hell of it. Theft is when you take
candy from a baby's mouth.

Stealing is the re-distribution of wealth from rich to poor Theft is making
profits at the expense of the disadvantaged and the natural environment.
Stealing is an unwritten a tax on the rich. Theft is taxing the poor to
subsidize the rich. Stealing is nothing more than a tax on the rich. There is
solidarity in stealing, but property is nothing but theft.

So, don't pay for that corporate newspaper, but steal all of them from the
box. Get some friends together and go on a "shoplifting "spree at the local
chain supermarket or upscale mall. With an even larger mob, get together
and steal from the local chain book or record store. Pilfer purses and wallets
from easily identified yuppies and business persons. Skip out on rent. Get a
credit card under a fake name and don't pay. Keep what you can use, and
give away everything else in the spirit of mutual aid that is the hallmark of
Steal Something Day.

Download our detourned poster http://tao.ca/~lombrenoire, make copies and
stick it up wherever you can. And don't forget, send your scamming and
stealing tips to us at lombrenoire@tao.ca.

See you next Steal Something Day which, unlike Buy Nothing, happens
every day of the year.

Disclaimer: all opinions are those of the authors and this press release is reproduced for information purposes only.

xpost I'm not sure if that was a typo or not, Tep, but either way it's totally OTM.

Nevermind, that's actually not much of a contest at all. But I never bought a copy of adbusters.

I played Star Frontiers, man, not Battletech. But that was junior high. I don't know which direction that shifts my coolness.

As I understand it, on every other issue it is trending left.

50% of young Jews saying Arabs shouldn't have the same rights as they do = "trending left", in your analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cFAKBt_kHo8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Af2G_AZUmLs

This is pretty well annotated, though it's from the Middle East Forum which isn't particularly impartial and almost all the sources are in Arabic so it's hard to follow-up (the author is a professor at University of Haifa): http://www.meforum.org/1874/fatahs-embrace-of-islamism -- but it seems to be primarily about Islamic roots of Fatah which is not really what I was referring to. It was my understanding that over the last few years the Fatah secular revolution doctrine has become increasingly unpopular, which is most expressed through their reconciliation attempts w/ Hamas, a tacit admission that Hamas holds the vast popular support and Fatah's secular ideology is pretty much defunct. That's really a secondary point, though, because more importantly Fatah would still augur a radical government that would imprison ideological opponents, journalists, even facebook commenters without any commitment to democracy: http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2013/04/19/slow_death_palestinian_democracy_fayyad_abbas - I assume it goes without saying that despite being nominally more secular than Hamas, Fatah still supports violence against civilians, as recently as this week.

xpost to hungry, so apparently that "nuke israel" video isn't a parody? wtf

mordy, israel holds a lot of responsibility (no, by no means ALL the responsibility) of strengthening Hamas as a political "counterweight" to the PLO during the first intifada. one could also argue that israel's continued pattern of making deals w/ the PA and breaking them (w/r/t settlements in particular) was a deliberate attempt to undermine their authority.

the settlements question is the one that sticks in my craw b/c I have a hard time seeing it as anything other than (a) appeasement of the haredi elements of Israeli society, testament to their power despite the ups and downs of their electoral representation; (b) deliberate altering of "facts on the ground" to make a West Bank-centered Palestinian state more and more untenable. there's frankly no reason for a country with the population density of Israel to be persistently intruding upon land that is almost universally agreed upon to be "contested" at the very least in order to build settlements for jews.

i'm more sympathetic to you than other folks here in your frustrations. I don't have a lot of illusions about what a one-state solution with a palestinian majority might look like, at least at the present time. anyway, nobody but nobody involved in the situation is really advocating that (which in a way is too bad, even if its unworkable it's a scenario that would be useful to have on the table).

and btw although you seem to be arguing that in most respects israel is becoming "more liberal," i think what we're really seeing is a lot of currents and counter-currents and contradictions and nothing has resolved yet. in other words i think you're being a bit... pollyanna-ish.

israel is subject to the same ironies as any liberal democracy. it's not likely to become a theological terror state in the immediate future, but the power of the far right (which I would say has more access to the mainstream than at nearly any point in Israel's history) means that certain fundamentally outrageous and anti-democratic policies can't be reversed for politicians' fear of their constituencies revolting and/or their coalitions crumbling.

http://ottomansandzionists.com/2013/05/02/freedom-houses-funhouse-definition-of-israeli-press-freedom/

In case you are wondering why Israel and its supporters constantly decry double standards and Israel being unfairly singled out for criticism, here is Exhibit A. Nobody claims that Israel is perfect, least of all me, but there’s no shortage of Israeli missteps to criticize without making new ones up. The idea that Israel’s press is not completely free is ridiculous, particularly to anyone who has spent even five minutes reading Israeli newspapers or watching Israel television, and if Freedom House wants to credibly assert differently, it’s going to have to come up with something better than a bunch of “yes, but” speculation.

I don't know why I'm still using this thread. Please ignore that I posted that here. I'm moving it over to the Middle East thread.

:-(

Fatbusters blames the Charleston Chews.

paging Treeship: I think this is relevant to the discussion in this thread about post-colonialism + marxism-
http://jacobinmag.com/2013/04/how-does-the-subaltern-speak/

thx for that

thanks mordy. i actually had that bookmarked but i forgot about it! i feel like i am probably mostly on your side on this question: i have been skeptical of the more simplistic end of postcolonialism ever since reading of grammatology... there is nothing progressive about theorizing the other as "absolutely Other," and romanticizing non-western, pre-industrial cultures is really just the other side of the colonialist coin. still though, i sometimes also find myself making relativist arguments and being reticent to judge the beliefs of people who seem to be very culturally different from me. this is a tough question

New Adbusters book has another defaced Jew on the cover. This time it's Zuckerberg. http://subscribe.adbusters.org/products/ab118

Eh, in isolation that doesn't bother me much. Maybe considering their past work I'd want to at least see what kind of language they use with respect to him.

Zuckerberg's a shbag

There's nothing about the cover that says "Jew" to me, although I also just don't get what it's supposed to be conveying.

first line of the profile: "Zuckerburg, a be-horned Yid, is literally Satan."

Zuckerberg and his soul-stealing Punimshmata

A famous jew once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a detested megabillionaire is just a detested megabillionaire.

obv if u subscribe to the idea that bigotries form a structural context in which all conversations occur, it is probably not incidental that the detested megabillionaire they focused on happens to be jewish, esp considering adbusters history. i remember a debate re goldman sachs about whether its bad press relative to other banks was due to particularly bad behavior, or bc of the name.

in either case i'm not worried i think zuckerburg can take care of himself

the detested megabillionaire they focused on happens to be jewish, and also has the useful plausible deniability of not publicly associating himself with jewishness in quite the same way others do, or being a common target of lurid antizionist types

i think he was in AEPI

A famous jew once said that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Sometimes a detested megabillionaire is just a detested megabillionaire.

― Aimless, Wednesday, 28 January 2015 19:18 (9 minutes ago)

there are probably lots of famous jews who said that, neither jews nor famous people are immune to the eternal appeal of crap sayings, though the one you are thinking of didn't

at the very least it's apocryphal

There aren't a lot of peer companies. Sergey Brin and Larry Page are also at least Jewish by birth. And Zuckerberg is kind of high-profile (no pun intended) publicly for whatever reason, I guess the movie plus the fun of his story.

xp, it probably was a semi-famous Jew who said that, but more likely the kind who played the Catskills

http://www.phmainstreet.com/mba/blog/jmason.jpg

"sometimes a cigar is just a cigar"

it probably was a semi-famous Jew who said that, but more likely the kind who played the Catskills

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Wednesday, 28 January 2015 19:36 (3 minutes ago)

ha yeah i think Fred R Shapiro, the editor of the Yale Book of Quotations, would have better spent his time searching newspaper comedy reviews of the 1930s than successfully showing it isn't anywhere in freud or the secondary literature

And Zuckerberg is kind of high-profile (no pun intended) publicly for whatever reason, I guess the movie plus the fun of his story.

― walid foster dulles (man alive), Wednesday, 28 January 2015 19:35 (11 minutes ago)

yeah his main asociation with jewishness in the public consciousness is probably that 'jews/asians' scene in the social network

the billlionaire most speculated about by antizionist paranoids and judaeophobes globally is surely george soros, the least jewish jewish billionaire of them all

soros for the right and adelson for the left?

someone tried to claim to me a few weeks ago that the koch bros were jewish. i was like "no way you're pinning those guys on us."

adelson in america but in europe, russia and beyond soros and his foundation is a source of confusion and vitriol across the spectrum

to the uk left he will always be hated because of his shorting of sterling in 92

how could anyone think the kochs, the least jewish non-jewish billionaires of them all, were jewish?

seriously! that's what i said.

leftist antisemites are a special kind of moron

Culture jamming is the primary means through which Adbusters challenges consumerism.[24] The magazine was described by Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter in their book The Rebel Sell as "the flagship publication of the culture jamming movement."[25]

In 1999 Adbusters won the award for National Magazine of the Year in Canada.[49]

who the fuck still reads this shit

http://images.soundspike.com/artists/phish_061012.jpg

culture jamming

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=culture+jamming+coca+cola&source=lnms&tbm=isch

surely george soros, the least jewish jewish billionaire of them all

wtf

Koch is sometimes a Jewish name.

i hear more about soros being an antisemite here in the USA

I thought Soros was believed to have escaped the holocaust through his sinister cunning though

sorry discussions of "who's more Jewish" get my hackles up

that was more a sarcastic reference to what goole is alluding to, the way he is demeaned for his father's activities and ideas, his atheism/rationalism/globalism etc, his expressions on israel and antisemitism, nothing to do with his own identification which is clearly as a jew

parallel forms of mischarachterization to that of the antizionist crowd

ah gotcha