#Or implying the age old conspiracy theory that jews control the media

[applesaucesupremacy]

sometimes people are wrongfully fired for supporting palestine and this should lead to appropriate outrage. but other times people are actually fired for genuinely antisemitic things. and your first response should be to research what was said instead of jumping straight to the outrage. just a thought.

[controversialhottakes]

I deleted my old tumblr about a year ago but then decided to make a new account with the intention of logging on every now and then to see what was going on in the fandoms I interested in. I wasn't going to interact with the posts or post anything myself but I can't keep my mouth shut anymore. I know that tumblr is a very far-left-chronically-online-teenagers kind of website (where "teenagers" does not necessarily refer to the actual age but rather to the black and white thinking and inability to understand that the real world is much more complex than that) and I'm not a fan of social media in general, plus I'm a very busy person, so I don't really like spending a lot of time on here but sometimes it can be fun.

Imagine my surprise when I created my new account sometime in December or January, only to find out that Noah Schnapp had apparently been cancelled, when only a year earlier he was being praised for being "so brave and queer" (I have my thoughts on all of this too but they're irrelevant right now). Knowing tumblr, I obviously rolled my eyes and moved on, wondering briefly what he might have done to warrant people cursing him left, right, and centre. Then I came across that photo and was like... I have no idea what's going on. Because I literally didn't. I learn about the news from newspaper headlines and only occasionally glance through New York Times, The Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, or some other reputable newspapers when I have the time and nothing better to do.

So I decided to do my research. Cambridge Dictionary told me that Zionism was "a political movement that had as its original aim the creation of a country for Jewish people, and that now supports the state of Israel" which sounded more than reasonable to me, I could 100% get behind that myself. This left me even more confused as to why everyone was freaking out. At that point, I knew that there was a war in the Middle East but I didn't pay much attention to it. But by that point I was so invested in finding out what started this witch-hunt that I decided to sacrifice some time I didn't really have and dig deep into the topic.

Since my knowledge of the history and politics of the Middle East was close to nill at that point, I just knew that it'd been very tense and very messy ever since I could remember, I had to do a lot of reading, and I quickly realised that the situation was extremely complicated. The whole region was a ticking time bomb and I couldn't think of any potential solution to the problem. In other words, I still don't think there was any chance of this not turning into an armed conflict sooner rather than later.

Armed with this new knowledge, I then returned to tumblr, thinking that people were upset that Noah was making a joke about the war, which is perfectly understandable. Instead I found out that the woke American left was now supporting terrorists. Which was an interesting development, to say the least. More terrifying was the realisation that they were getting all their information from Islamic sources, including the Hamas itself, because the West is apparently evil now (neo-orientalism, anyone? just me? okay...) and can't be trusted. Also, the Jews are responsible for that because they're controlling the governments and the media and basically everything else? Correct me if I got that wrong, I'm not very good at conspiracy theories, they confuse me, but I think that's what a lot of people are implying?

Let's take a moment to let it sink in: people believe everything a terrorist group tells them (see sources at the end if you have any doubts that that's what they are) as opposed to consulting different sources from various places where the press are reasonably free to tell the truth... Not only that, they are now "rooting for" Hamas (it's a war, not a football match, but fine) and, on the more extreme end, want to see Israel destroyed. In the same breath, with no sense of irony, they renounce genocide and praise the Nazis (which is what I actually wanted to talk about, but this has got too long, so more on those charming chaps, their modern counterparts, and how the far left has become the far right in my next post).

As for Noah, I find the post itself rather off-putting but not the fact that he might support Zionism (in its original form; people on this site seem to have redefined it and now I see it used as an insult, but I can't for the life of me figure out what you think it means, not to mention that none of you can actually agree on what it means, so I'm just going to stick to the original definition, thank you very much). But he's 19 and teenagers will always be teenagers, they rarely stop to think before doing or saying something. If he was 20 years older than he is, I'd think he should know better, but I've seen kids (and many adults) do much dumber, not to mention dangerous (as in could actually get them and/or other people killed), things in real life. I've done much dumber things myself. It's just that the most of us have the privilege of doing those dumb things in private, without millions of people analysing our every move.

Sources:

EU list of external terrorists (see 9 on p. 6); for more information, including criteria for listing, see this

An article from The Guardian from July 2017. Especially interesting:

The US classifies Hamas as a terrorist organisation, although in the UK it is not banned in its entirety. The Home Office’s list of proscribed groups only includes its military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, for their “aims to end Israeli occupation in Palestine and establish an Islamic State”.

US list of FTOs (Hamas designated as a FTO on October 8, 1997)

[bountyofbeads]

Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he’s praising Jews.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2019/08/21/trump-keeps-pushing-anti-semitic-stereotypes-he-thinks-hes-praising-jews/

Trump keeps pushing anti-Semitic stereotypes. But he thinks he’s praising Jews.

By Yair Rosenberg | Published August 21 at 5:16 PM ET | Washington Post | Posted August 25, 2019 4:20 PM ET |

When it comes to Jews, President Trump presents a puzzle.

His daughter Ivanka converted to Judaism to marry his Jewish son-in-law. He has Jewish grandchildren. He loudly proclaims his support for Israel and has long employed Jews in prominent positions in his businesses.

But Trump also seems to say a lot of anti-Semitic things. This week, for example, the president declared that Jews who vote for the Democratic Party are “disloyal” to Israel, invoking an age-old anti-Semitic slur against the vast majority of American Jews. Trump has regularly implied that American Jews are more loyal to Israel than to the United States and that they are essentially foreign guests in this country: At the White House Hanukkah party in December, he told the assembled American Jews that Israel was “your country.” At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gathering in April, he referred to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as “your prime minister.”

That penchant for anti-Semitic utterances goes back to well before his presidency. He has repeatedly suggested that Jews are greedy or money-grubbing and use their wealth to control politics. In a 1991 book, the former president of the Trump Plaza Hotel & Casino wrote that Trump had told him: “Black guys counting my money! I hate it. The only kind of people I want counting my money are short guys that wear yarmulkes every day.” During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump praised RJC members as great “negotiators” and openly declared that Jewish donors wanted a candidate they could buy: “You’re not going to support me because I don’t want your money,” he said. “That’s okay, you want to control your own politician.” Yet because he was speaking to rooms full of friends, he probably didn’t mean these words disparagingly.

So is Trump a philo-Semite or an anti-Semite? The answer is both. The principle that explains his seemingly contradictory outlook toward Jews is simple: Trump believes all the anti-Semitic stereotypes about Jews. But he sees those traits as admirable.

To Trump, the belief that Jews are foreign interlopers who use their wealth to serve their own clannish interests is not a negative — as it is for traditional anti-Semites — but rather a positive. He wants Jews to be his attorneys and manage his money, so that he, too, can be rich. He wants them in his political corner, so that he, too, can be powerful. He wants to buy politicians, just like he thinks they do. As a man who has always stood solely for his own naked self-interest, Trump does not see the anti-Semitic conception of the self-interested Jew as a complaint, but rather a compliment. He prioritizes his needs ahead of the national interest, and so he sees the idea that Jews might do the same with themselves or with Israel as entirely natural. He is the human embodiment of the Onion article “Affable anti-Semite Thinks The Jews Are Doing Super Job With The Media.”

This understanding also helps explain the most confusing aspect of Trump’s most recent anti-Semitic outburst. The president claimed that Democratic Jews are “disloyal” to Israel. But this is an inversion of the traditional dual loyalty trope, which charges that Jews are more loyal to their fellow Jews or Israel than to their home countries. Trump, by contrast, was arguing that Democratic Jews were insufficiently devoted to other Jews or to Israel — that they were not strong enough dual loyalists. In other words, he criticized American Jews for not conforming to the anti-Semitic stereotype.

This form of positive anti-Semitism is not as uncommon as you might think. As a reporter who has covered anti-Semitism for years, I’ve seen it abroad in countries with few Jews, where admiring stereotypes proliferate without much familiarity with actual Jews. The Talmud Hotel in Taiwan — which boasts rooms named after wealthy people and has a “Talmud-Business Success Bible” by every bedside — is a classic example. There’s even an old ironic Jewish adage about this phenomenon: “A philo-Semite is an anti-Semite who likes Jews.”

But while this form of “positive” anti-Semitism is better than the negative kind, it is still deeply dangerous — even when it’s not being wielded as a political cudgel against Jews in the way Trump has been doing this week. At best, expression of such stereotypes by the most powerful man in the world affirms and reinforces the beliefs of bigots who see those anti-Semitic ideas as reasons to hate Jews. At worst, given the right impetus, the coin of philo-Semitic anti-Semitism can easily be flipped, and all those formerly positive stereotypes can be weaponized against Jews.

Something like this recently occurred in South Korea. A country where translated Talmudic extracts have long been bestsellers and boarding schools with no Jews offer a “Jewish education” to pupils, South Korea is known for its philo-Semitism. The country’s ambassador to Israel once told a television program that “each Korean family has at least one copy of the Talmud,” because “Korean mothers want to know how so many Jewish people became geniuses.” As one Korean student explained to a Jewish reporter, “Despite all the time and money we spend on education, only one Korean has ever won a Nobel award. That irks many Koreans. It makes us want to learn Jews’ secrets.”

And yet, in 2015, anti-Jewish bigotry swept the country. An international controversy over a merger within Samsung, the largest South Korean business conglomerate, quickly devolved into an anti-Semitic free-for-all against one of the parties involved, Jewish investor Paul Singer. South Korea’s powerful Lee family, the controlling shareholders within Samsung, backed an internal merger between Samsung C&T and another Samsung affiliate. Singer, who owned 7 percent of C&T, opposed the move, arguing that it was a corrupt ploy to enrich the Lee family at the expense of other shareholders. (Years later, he was proved correct.)

The dispute quickly turned ugly. Anti-Semitic cartoons depicting Singer as a hooknosed vulture exploiting innocents appeared on the official Samsung C&T website. An article by an ex-diplomat in the South Korean weekly Sisa Journal declared, “It is the Jews who hold the financial power of the world,” adding, “These words, which were merely conspiracy theories or thoughts of other countries, are becoming a real danger to the nation’s economy.” (For good measure, the piece included a picture of George Soros.) “Jewish money has long been known to be ruthless and merciless,” another columnist wrote. Tabloids repeatedly invoked Singer’s Jewish identity and insinuated that he could not be trusted.

Onlookers were flabbergasted to see this transpire in such an ostensibly philo-Semitic country. But they should not have been. All that had happened was that Samsung and its allies had taken the latent Jewish stereotypes in South Korea — that Jews are wealthy, cunning and powerful — and activated them for an overtly anti-Semitic campaign. The philo-Semitic coin had been flipped.

Now it’s clear that the United States has a president who is openly toying with that same coin, carelessly tossing it on national television. We can only hope it doesn’t land on the wrong side.