#as if being jewish means i have to be a racist islamophobic zionist | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

eddieydewr · 1 year ago

Note

standwithus is not “non-partisan” they’re literally classified as right wing even amongst zionist sociologists. the creator of the organization believes that any criticism of the israeli government should be condemned and that to be pro israel you must dogmatically support the actions of the government. they teach people that palestinian refugees exist not because of forceful displacement, but because of a war arab people started themselves (this is also what noah’s new bff moti believes). and when does standwithus ever mention palestinians on their page unless to call to put “palestinian terrorists” in bold red font or tell people to boycott BDS? john hagee is a key partner of SWU, and he’s a homophobic, racist, islamophobic antisemite who said hitler was a gift from god. (here’s an article from the jewish anti zionist org jewish for peace https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2018/10/ccpfisraelilobby/).

you are absolutely right that there are thousands of years of jewish culture. which makes reducing judaism down to the state of israel a stupid conflation. there’s no denying that jewish people have a connection to the land. there is absolutely zero issue with jewish people having historically lived in, visited, or worshipped in the region for much of history before the occupation. the issue comes with an establishment of a european led settler ethnostate and the displacement and incremental genocide/ethnic cleansing of the population that was living there. israel is a white supremacist apartheid state and this is both reflected in the genocide of palestinians and the national oppression that non-ashkenazi jewish people face in israel (https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/zionism/). not only does tourism fund this project, it propagandizes it.

birthright is an indoctrination trip and fundamentally problematic. noah wasn’t on birthright based on what i know, but he was on another free sponsored trip where many of the same issues with birthright remain true (https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2017/10/returnthebirthright-faq/ ).

palestinians aren’t the only people who are being murdered everyday, but why are we minimizing or normalizing the fact that they’re living under actual apartheid because of the israeli state? would it be okay or normal for somebody to have gone to apartheid south africa and called johannesburg their “happy place”? get real. celebrities regularly get all expense paid trips to israel and sell an image of israel that’s a whitewashed paradise. in a world where israel already gets billions of dollars in international support to fund their army that brutalizes palestinian existence and suppresses palestinian resistance, this isn’t an innocuous thing.

i’m just confused bc there are conflicting views about SWU. the zionist organization of america, for example, thinks SWU is too liberal and pro-palestine, more or less lol. i can provide a link if you want a source. also, there’s the whole thing with whether anti-zionism is antisemitism, and i’m not qualified nor an expert to answer that. i’ve been reading up on some stuff but it seems like there’s no clear answer.

this moti guy does seem firm in his convictions. but we don’t know if noah is actually close friends with him or agrees with his views. i doubt it but if he does, then that is something he’ll have to contend with. he is young, he’ll learn. anyway, i honestly think moti and the woman (rachel kay?) were the group leaders, more or less, and the boys noah were with seem to attend UPenn too.

i agree it is insensitve and ignorant to refer to israel as one’s happy place. we don’t know noah, so we don’t know what he means by it. he could be happy that he’s finally out of the closet and getting to hang out with people like him while connecting with his heritage and culture. i don’t think he meant any malice. btw, i did not mean to normalise or minimise what is happening in palestine, nor would i want to, so i apologise for that. i understand what you’re saying but there were people who enjoyed themselves in south africa during the apartheid. musicians for example, they performed gigs there. i can provide a source for that too.

again, we don’t know noah. and we can disagree on this but i don’t think he’s malicious. he likes travelling and exploring - which he often documents on insta and tiktok. and he has the opportunity rn since ST production is on hiatus due to the strike. he must be bored stiff and i don’t think he’s due back at college yet.

anon, thank you for your insights and nuance. i really do appreciate it. and thanks for the links too, i’ll have a look.

#noah schnapp #also that hagee guy is a proper weirdo lmao idk if noah knew about him. but then again - something he’ll have to contend with

2 notes · View notes

nevermindirah · 4 years ago

Text

Ok it's Jewish Booker o'clock, I can no longer stop myself, let's do this!

Why Jewish Booker? Dude was born in Marseilles in 1770, which happens to be a FASCINATING time and place in Jewish history, and it adds ridiculous layers to his character (without excusing a damn thing). Alternately just because I think he’s neat :)

Jewish Booker headcanons that make me happy:

not to be all "real Jews do X" but Jews fuck with candles hard. Book of Nile thrives on old/modern analog/digital giggles. Booker lighting Shabbat candles, lighting yarzeit (memorial) candles for his wife and sons (sob), lighting a menorah, lighting candles just because he's feeling emotional even though it's not chag (a holiday) or a yarzeit and Nile thinks he's trying to be sexy but he's really just in his feelings. just like. so many candles.

maybe Booker was the person who punched Richard Spencer at Trump's inauguration, just bringing back that time somebody punched a famous neonazi in the street and said neonazi has all but stopped appearing in public after a few rounds of public punching

were the Old Guard in Charlottesville in 2017? how many times has Booker the Blond Jew infiltrated North American white nationalist / Klan type activities and then stolen their weapons and/or killed them? likewise there's plenty of horrifying white nationalist shit happening across Europe this century, how many Pim Fortuyn types has he been involved in taking down? (I Am Of Course Not Endorsing Violence TM ;) ;) )

SINGING. Mattias Schoenaerts sings in Away From the Madding Crowd but it's church shit, sigh, anyway he has a nice voice. a lot of Jewish prayer is sung/chanted (depending on when/where you are and the gender rules of the community you're in) and there’s been a lot of innovation to Jewish singing in Booker’s lifetime, and I just want Nile to overhear him singing to himself on Friday afternoons

Nile Freeman was four years old when The Prince of Egypt came out, she grew up on that shit, she would want to introduce her new family to that shit. Please join me in picturing Booker, Nicky, Joe, and Andy all shouting "that's not how it happened!!" throughout this beautiful nightmare of a movie with lovely animation and songs but where white people voice most of the Egyptian and Jewish characters, because Booker Nicky and Joe's religious texts all frame the Exodus story a little differently and Andy was probably there when it happened (except for how it didn't actually happen it's an important story but it's just a story pls just let me giggle about Andy being super old)

Read below the cut for sad Jewish Booker headcanons, French Jewish history (mostly sad), context on antisemitism (enraging/sad), and all the way to the very end for a himbo joke.

Jewish Booker headcanons, I made myself sad edition:

he is a forger. who was alive. in 1939. visas. VISAS. V I S A S. how many of us did he save? how many more could he have saved if he didn't sleep that night? how heavily does that weigh?

how do we think he BECAME a forger? most likely he was doing what he needed to do to support his family, which gets extra poignant if he was also trying to help his people, forging documents as well as money even during his mortal life

Booker raised Catholic by crypto-Jews adds ANOTHER layer to the forgery thing, no shit he'd get good at falsifying paperwork and coming up with plausible cover stories

do we know how Booker made it back home after his first death in 1812? his route between the Russian Empire and Provence in 1812 would've been a patchwork of laws about Jews, in case starvation and frostbite weren't enough for him to have to deal with, he's blond and could maybe get away with pretending not to be Jewish if he had to, alternately maybe synagogues and yeshivot took him in on his way home

the structural and sometimes-interpersonal dynamics of antisemitism cause many individual Jews to experience feelings of teetering on the fence between a valued member of a not-exclusively-Jewish community and a scapegoat/outcast/problem. HOLY SHIT BOOKER. "what do you know of all these years alone" is the most Jewish loneliness-in-a-crowd shit I've ever heard. fear that we're not wanted, or only wanted so long as we're useful — that's something that basically all people struggle with under capitalism, but it's especially poignant for many Jews because of the particular way antisemitism operates. (NOTE this can tip from a legit Jewish Booker reading to woobification of the sad white man who couldn't possibly be held responsible for his own actions because he's so sad, which, NOPE. it's very understandable for him to feel left out and misunderstood and not as wanted, as the youngest and not part of an immortal couple and maybe Jewish, but NONE OF THIS excuses his betrayal.)

Crusaders murdered a lot of Jews on their way to the ~holy land~. how many of Booker's people did Nicky kill on his way to kill Joe's people? has Booker ever actually talked to either of them about it?

I read this really beautiful fic about Joe needing to circumcise himself after getting run over by a cart (ouch) — this is a hell of a thing for Joe and Booker to have in common

just generally Jewish Booker adds more layers to him and Joe so clearly being such close friends, ugh that look Joe gives him when they're leaving the bar at the end of the movie, and I very much do not mean this in a gross Arab-Israeli-conflict way because Joe is Amazigh not Arab and Booker is Jewish not Israeli (and also a lot of Jews are Arabs) (but most importantly there's no ~eternal conflict~ between Muslims and Jews) (more about OP Is Not A Zionist below)

like, the UK and France (and to a certain extent Italy) carved up the former Ottoman Empire after WWI; among other things, the UK took Palestine, and they could've worked on eradicating European antisemitism so Jews wouldn't have to leave but instead they used their control of Palestine to encourage Zionist emigration of Jews out of Europe, and France took what is now Iraq, which has some pretty direct implications for US military involvement in that country in Nile's lifetime; France colonized Tunisia in the late 19th century and still held it during the Vichy era which means Tunisian Jews were subject to Nazi anti-Jewish laws which is just layers upon layers of colonial racist Islamophobic and antisemitic nightmares for Joe and Booker to live through

to be crystal clear before anybody gets ooh Muslim-Jewish conflict up in here, antisemitism is an invention of European Christians that they imported to the places they colonized, the European colonial powers encouraged Zionism because it was easier for them to encourage Jews to leave Europe and set us up as middle agents between the colonial powers and the ~scary brown people~, the Ottoman Empire and other Muslim governments historically have had a second-class citizenship category for non-Muslims that rankles my American first amendment freedom of religion sensibility but was very much not targeting Jews specifically, and these two men who've lived for a long-ass time through many varieties of geopolitical awfulness (and alongside a certain unwashed Crusader who has since learned his lesson) would have Things To Say about how our current mainstream discourses frame these things

getting off my soapbox and back to this action movie I'm trying to talk about, the ANGST of Booker's exile, which is simultaneously a very valid decision for Andy Joe and Nicky to make, an extremely long time for Nile who is only 26 years old to be separated from the one person on the planet in a position to really understand the crisis she's going through, and holy shit expelling a Jew from your group when he's already been expelled from mortality and his family and being expelled from places and continually having to start over somewhere new is THE curse of surviving through antisemitism, OUCH MY FEELINGS

Some French Jewish history:

France, like basically all of Europe, periodically expelled its Jews, but Provence (where Marseilles is) wasn't legally part of France during the expulsions up through 1398 so Provence had a continuous active Jewish community; about 3,000 Iberian Jewish refugees ended up in Provence after the expulsions from Spain and Portugal in the 1490s

the 1498 expulsion of French Jews DID apply to Provence but many "converted" to Christianity and reestablished a Jewish community when enforcement of the expulsion chilled out (which was in the government's interest because they were really into taxing Jews at higher rates, so much so that they taxed "new Christians" at higher rates once they realized expelling Jews meant they wouldn't be around to overtax, ffs) — by the mid-18th century Provence had notable communities of Jews and crypto-Jews (forced converts and their descendants who still kept some Jewish practices in secret)

Booker would've been 21 when revolutionary France granted equal legal rights to Jews in 1791 — his mortal life and first century of immortality happens to line up almost perfectly with the timeline of legal emancipation of Jews across Europe

the American and French Revolutions happened pretty much concurrently and took different approaches to religious freedom that make Book of Nile with Jewish Booker and canon Christian Nile extra interesting — French emancipation, at least from my American sensibility, is about secularism and religion not "interfering" (hence French Islamophobic shittiness about banning hijabs), whereas American religious freedom is more of "the government can't stop me from trying to evangelize / religiously harass people at my school/workplace/etc" — to be clear I think both countries' approaches to religious "freedom" are hegemonic as shit and have devastating flaws, but they're different models that emerged at the same time in Booker's youth and Christianity is clearly a source of emotional support for Nile and there's so much to explore here

Napoleon tried to ~liberate~ the Jews of places he conquered for his dumbass French Empire, but liberation from ghettos came with strings attached (like banning us from some of the only jobs we'd been legally allowed to have for centuries, and liberating us for the stated purpose of getting us to assimilate and stop being Jews) and many places that were briefly part of the French Empire reinstated their antisemitic laws after Napoleon was gone, can you imagine being a French Jew forced to fight and die in Russian winter for that jackass and then have to trudge back through a dozen countries whose antisemitism was all riled up by French interference?

Some facts about antisemitism:

antisemitism operates differently than many other oppressions, it doesn't economically oppress the target group in the same way as antiblackness or misogyny or ableism etc — the purpose of antisemitism is to create a scapegoat to blame when European peasants are mad at the king / the church / the people actually in charge, and structural antisemitism encourages a system where some Jews become visibly successful so that those individuals and our whole community are easier to make into scapegoats

one of the historical roots of antisemitism is stuff in the Christian Bible about moneylending as sinful — Jews in medieval Europe were often barred from owning land and Christians barred from moneylending, so some Jews found work in finance and some of us became very visibly successful for working with money — a few individual Jews running a particular bank or finding success as jewelry dealers turns into "Jews control global financial systems" scapegoating — a more recent example of this is the participation of nonblack Jews in white flight and the role of Jewish landlords doing the visible dirty work of non-Jewish institutions in American antiblack housing discrimination, Nile grew up on the South Side of Chicago and would have seen some shit along these lines and might repeat hurtful ideas out of a lack of knowledge, here's Ta Nahesi Coates on some of these dynamics

Booker canonically being a forger (specifically of coins in the comics?) needs a little extra care to avoid antisemitic tropes about Jews and money, I will happily answer good-faith asks about this if you want to check on something for a fic/etc

antisemitism in the United States where I live in October 2020 isn't institutional in the sense of targeting Jews for police violence or anything like that. it IS systemic, however, for example in all the antisemitic conspiracy theories the Trump administration and several other Republicans peddle (ie QAnon), and in how the Trump administration points to support for Israel as if that means support for Jews (it doesn't, it's evangelical Christians who push the US government to support the Israeli government because they think Jews need to be in the ~holy land~ for Jesus to come back that's literally why the United States funds Israel at the level it does). antisemitism also gets weaponized to encourage white Jews (those of us of European descent, who in the United States are definitely white because the foundation of US racism is slavery and antiblackness as well as anti-indigenous genocide, maybe European Jews aren't included in whiteness everywhere but we definitely are where I live) to side with white supremacy instead of building solidarity with other marginalized people (ie a lot of mainstream Jewish groups shit on the Movement for Black Lives because of its solidarity with Palestinians)

the Nation of Islam has a major presence in Chicago and its leader Louis Farrakhan who lives in Chicago has long spread a variety of antisemitic as well as homophobic bullshit but there are genuine good reasons many Black people find meaning/support in the Nation of Islam and Nile would've grown up with that mess in the air around her, this is a good take from a Black Jew about the nuance of all that

the way the Old Guard comics draw Yusuf al Kaysani is HOLY SHIT ANTISEMITISM BATMAN I hate it please summarize the comics for me because I DO NOT WANT to look at that unnecessarily caricatured nose why the fuck did they do that human noses are beautiful there is absolutely no need to draw Joe like a Nazi would

Jews for Racial and Economic Justice is a local NYC group that recently developed a fantastic resource for understanding and fighting antisemitism (pdf) 11/10 strongly recommend

Zionism disclaimer: A lot of Jews feel strongly that we need a Jewish-majority country in order to be safe from antisemitism. I strongly disagree with this idea on its merits (Jews disagree about who is a Jew and making Jewish status a government/immigration matter means some of us are going to get left out; also non-Jews aren't fundamentally dangerous and separatism isn't going to end antisemitism) but I have a lot of empathy for the very valid fear that leads a lot of my people to Zionism. Whether I want a Jewish-majority country or not, what Israel has done and continues to do to Palestinians is a deal breaker. Emotions run very high on this subject — I spend a lot of my not-Tumblr life talking to other Jews about Zionism and I'd rather not have this Jewish Booker headcanons post become yet another place where fellow Jews yell at me in bad faith. Block me if you need to, you're not going to change my mind. Call me self-hating if you want, I know I love us.

Racism in fandom disclaimer: I feel weird about increasing the volume of meta about Booker in this fandom. Nile Freeman is the main character and deserves lots of attention and adoration from the fandom — and she deserves emotional support from as many friends and orgasms from as many partners as she wants. I think Jewish Booker makes her friendship and potential romantic relationship with him even more interesting, hence this post. Ship what you ship, but be aware of the racist impact of focusing your fandom activity on, for example, shipping two white men while ignoring awesome characters of color especially the canon man of color one of those white dudes has already been with for a millennium. Please and thanks don't use my post for shenanigans like sidelining Joe so you can ship Booker with Nicky.

Oh and a non-disclaimer fun fact, Matthias Schoenaerts was born in Antwerp which apparently has one of the largest Jewish communities still remaining in Europe?? ~Jewish Booker headcanons intensify~

In conclusion: Jewish Booker! Just because it's fun! It exponentially increases the angst of his mortal lifetime and it puts his first century of immortality smack in the middle of the most intense changes to Jewish life since the fall of the Second Temple (aforementioned emancipation, also founding of Reform Judaism, the Haskalah, Zionism, and then of course the Holocaust). It makes his relationships with Nile, Joe, and Nicky more interesting and potentially angstier and with more intense commonalities and tenderness about their differences. It's very common for Jews to not believe in God (this confuses the shit out of a lot of Christians) and this would probably have further endeared him to Andy.

One more thing: Booker as golem. (A golem is basically an earthenware robot of Jewish folklore.) He's tall and blond and the most Steve Rogers-looking of all of them and from the Himbeaux region of France. THE trope of Book of Nile is he will do WHATEVER Nile wants or needs him to do. I was today years old when I learned that Modern Hebrew speakers use golem figuratively to mean "mindless lunk" and I'm choosing to squint and read that as "hot kind and dumb as rocks" because it amuses me.

#sebastien le livre #tog meta #jewish booker #book of nile #i couldn't stop myself #antisemitism #genocide cw #antiblackness #european imperialism #us imperialism #antizionism #hi i'm an antizionist jew no i don't really wanna talk about it #except i just did #jewish things #jewish history #tog #mine

109 notes · View notes

mikhalsarah · 4 years ago

Link

RIP Open Orthodoxy, eaten alive by parasitic “Wokeness”...

There are already three streams of Judaism where women can be rabbis (Conservative/Masorti, Reform, and Reconstructionist), I should know, I belong to one of them. I’ve never entirely understood the Orthodox commitment to sidelining women in this day and age, but the simple fact is, people who are unhappy with Orthodox halakhah in this area have other places to pray, and the stubborn refusal to pray in any of “those places”, yet fighting tooth and nail to make their own shuls become just like them, smack of a weird sort of snobbish attachment to the word “orthodoxy”....even though the rest of Orthodox is but a hair’s breadth from considering them a treif liberal “fake” Judaism like the rest of us already.

As difficult, but possible, as the issue of female rabbis would be to bring about, (seeing as it is a rabbinic prohibition based largely on cultural attitudes no longer in play in western society), the issue of getting the Orthodox to accept gay couples is another matter. Again, not an insurmountable issue, Centrist Orthodox Rabbi Schmuley Boteach has written quite openly about the need to find a place in Orthodox shuls for gay and lesbian Jews. However Orthodox culture is never going to let them hold hands during service or kiddush, for the simple reason that public displays of sexual/romantic affection, even between heterosexual married couples, are frowned upon everywhere from the sanctuary to the grocery store, due to the strong feeling that sexuality should be put aside, or sublimated, when encountering certain kinds of holiness (engaging in prayer etc). Of course, that does not mean that in Judaism sex is the opposite of holiness in some way, or else it would be forbidden to have sex on Shabbat. Since marital sex is a mitzvah (commandment, meritorious act) on Shabbat, better to understand it as a different kind of holiness, one that is not compatible with some other mitzvot (like prayer) or with public life in general. Sexuality itself is a sort of holiness surrounded by taboos and necessitating the utmost privacy in Judaism, so this is ironically probably the hill Orthodoxy would die on, not figuring out how to tolerate the gays.

I heartily agree that it’s time to stop being racist to the Palestinians. Strange though that a “Woke” rabbi still can’t bring himself to call them what they call themselves, and in typical Israeli/Zionist fashion emphasizes their Arab otheness, rather than their indigenousness...thus making it seem rather like a favour being granted to them out of the goodness of his Woke heart, rather than an acknowledgement of their intrinsic belongingness. (This kind of stuff is typical for Woke social justice, which consistently cares far more about virtue-signalling and screaming at “white people”, or whomever else is deemed an Oppressor in the situation, than listening and paying attention to those who are actually oppressed.)

I spent decades of my life as a vegetarian, years of that as a vegan. Even though for medical reasons I had to adopt a diet which relies on meat for sufficient protein, I still try to limit my meat consumption. I am very pleased that so many people are seeing the value of vegetarian and vegan diets, and that even regular omnivore folk are adopting “meatless Mondays” and so forth. I’d be even better pleased with governments helping to encourage it by working to make it less expensive if/where possible. I’d nod my head approvingly if rabbis suggested meat-eating be reserved for Shabbat, if one didn’t feel able to give it up entirely. However, even when I didn’t practice (Judaism) and was secular it would never have occurred to me to ban it wholesale. I’m just not Puritan enough for banning things, I prefer the Quakerly ways of “convincement”. The Woke, on the other hand, are full-bore Puritan, convert-the-heathen-masses.

This is perhaps the strangest part of entire essay. This newly minted “rabbi” is publicly expressing the desire to not just overhaul a big chunk of halakhah in order to make Judaism less restrictive and bring it further into line with the mores of the gentile world... a process that has been going on forever, whether excessively quickly (Reform) or excruciatingly slowly (Haredi)... but is calling to make Judaism more restrictive in other ways, by banning things permitted by halakhah which happens never or so infrequently that I can’t recall an instance offhand. And he’s willing to use secular governments to achieve it by force.

I recall hearing conservatives decades ago saying “Inside the heart of every liberal is a fascist screaming to get out” and laughing derisively at how they could think that. I laugh no more, though I contend that it is a particular species of illiberal liberal, known as the progressive activist, that is to blame rather than liberals in general. Still...there it is, and the regular liberals are generally no help opposing their own extremists because deep down they harbour that intrinsic liberal guilt that they are never doing enough or being enough to be truly authentic and useful. For authenticity and “real change” they look ever to the fringes, on the assumption that the more wildly opposed to society in general an ideology is, the better it is, if only they weren’t too cowardly and comfortable to join up and suffer like the “real” activists.

I have to add here, how nice it is despite not having set foot in any shul in over a year, to still have something of the religious Jewish mindset, which makes impressive demands on your time, money, and moral fastidiousness, but at the same time reminds you constantly that you’ll never be perfect and will never accomplish everything you want or that God asks of you and God already accepts that as a given. “It is not yours to complete the task (of repairing the world), but neither are you free to desist from it.” -Pirkei Avot 2:21. Despite the reputation Judaism has for being guilt-inducing, at least we are free from the overwhelming and psychologically destructive levels of guilt induced by secular liberalism, which now has decided, via Wokeness, that merely existing in a society that is imperfect is a damnable offense, even if it is, on balance, one of the least imperfect societies around. This is how Jews like me know that Wokeness is not just a new religion, it’s an offshoot of Christianity, where just being born damns you to a state of perpetual sin.

This authenticity-of-the-extremists mindset blinds them to the fact that while the fringes are the birthplace of some excellent critiques and paradigm-changing ideas that have been of great benefit, those benefits most often only come when those ideas are tempered by counter-critiques and more pragmatic people who can tolerate the loss of ideological purity required to make them work in practice. Also invisible to the liberal mind are those historical moments when progressives have backed ideas that were...well, the term “clusterfucks” springs to mind.

Progressives less than a century ago were enamoured with ideas ranging from Eugenics to Italian Fascism (less so with Naziism, but even that had its adherents until the war and the atrocities of the camps coming home to roost). They backed Communism to such a degree that it took Kronstadt to shake most of them loose, and they still idolize Che Guevara, the gay-hating, probably racist, illiberal who put people to death without trial and “really liked killing” (his words) and can’t hear a word against Communist China (”That’s racist to the Chinese!”) or Islamic extremists (”That’s Islamophobic!), despite the fact that Communist China is “re-indoctrinating” the Muslim Uighers and using them as slave labour (in part for the profits and in part because keeping the men and women separated prevents them breeding more Muslim Uighers), and despite the fact that the Islamists throw gay men off roofs in public executions. When you do get a left-liberal to admit something on the Left has gone wrong at all, they immediately shift to rationalizing it as somehow really being the fault of conservatives all along...even in a case like Eugenics where religious and other conservatives were fighting it tooth and nail.

(NB: This is not an endorsement of conservatives, who have their own sets of problems but who, when they finally do change their mind on an issue, don’t try to rationalize their former wrongheadedness by claiming it was really the fault of left-liberals that they ever believed such things in the first place)

And that brings us back to Zionism and the Woke. The Woke cannot for the life of them admit that it was secular, and often quite far left, Jews that birthed Zionism directly out of the leftist “liberation” traditions of the day (albeit with a healthy side of pro-Western colonialism-admiring fervour for being “an outpost of the West” shining the light of rationality on the barbaric, backward, religiosity of the Middle East). They don’t want to see it. It disturbs their comfortably simple narrative, which prefers to maintain that it was the “whiteness” of the original Zionist Jews and their early followers that was the problem, not their politics.

But Zionism is merely the predictable result of what happens when you take an oppressed people and tell them that their oppression entitles them to do whatever they need to in order to end their oppression and that violence is not violence when perpetrated by the oppressed. That the world owes them, and their descendants, something in perpetuity for having oppressed them, some sort of special treatment, and that it must never withdraw that special dispensation because that itself would be oppressing them again. The fact that what the Jews would feel like they needed to do was ethnically-cleanse their former homeland of people who had once shared it with them (both Jews and Palestinians can be traced to a shared ancestry in the region going back about 50,000 years) and necessitating a whole new liberation movement to free them was an unintended consequence of th\e liberation movement, but a consequence nonetheless.

The Woke cannot admit that Zionism is, in large part, a direct consequence of the leftist liberation project, and Woke Jews (who are almost invariably “white”) can’t admit that the rest of the Woke movement hates them. They truly deserve each other.

Ah, well, at least this “woke” rabbi isn’t trying to qualify for the cognitive dissonance finals by being Woke and a Zionist at the same time like the current rabbi of my (rapidly sinking) former synagogue. We’ve had rabbis that horrified the congregation by being too right-wing (mostly on halakhic issues rather than politics), and we’ve had rabbis that horrified (the older portion of) the congregation by being too left-wing and running off to march in Selma. Thanks to this rabbi haranguing the congregation daily about LGBTQ issues to the point that even the LGBTQ Jews got tired of hearing him (our sexuality is NOT our whole fucking existence...no pun intended) and marching around the Sanctuary with the Israeli flag on Shabbat (an honour reserved for the Torah even by the most fervently Zionist among us, none of whom are yours truly) we now have the dubious distinction of being a congregation horrified by a rabbi being both too left-wing and too right-wing simultaneously.

Apropos of nothing, there is now a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn of my former synagogue and the membership at the Orthodox synagogue has grown with astonishing rapidity. We can extrapolate from this that in 4 years time, should the U.S. Republicans run any candidate remotely sane, they will sweep the election.

#judaism #woke #wokeism #zionism #sjw nonsense #sjws ruin everything #open orthodoxy #militant vegans #woke is a religion #puritan #vs #quaker

2 notes · View notes

schraubd · 7 years ago

Text

The Problem With Canaries

A group of pro-Israel, anti-BDS students at a variety of college campuses issued a statement harshly criticizing the Canary Mission for hindering their efforts on campus and unjustly maligning fellow students. They wrote:

Canary Mission is an anonymous site that blacklists individuals and professors across the country for their support of the BDS movement, presumed anti-Semitic remarks and hateful rhetoric against Israel and the United States.

As a group of conscientious students on the front lines fighting BDS on our campuses, we are compelled to speak out against this website because it uses intimidation tactics, is antithetical to our democratic and Jewish values, is counterproductive to our efforts and is morally reprehensible.

This blacklist aggregates public information about students across the country under the guise of combating anti-Semitism. It highlights their LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pictures, old tweets, quotes in newspapers and YouTube videos. The site chronicles each student’s involvement with pro-Palestinian causes and names other students and organizations with whom the given student may be affiliated.

We view much of the rhetoric employed to villainize these individuals as hateful and, in some cases, Islamophobic and racist. In addition, Canary Mission’s wide scope wrongfully equates supporting a BDS resolution with some of the most virulent expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel rhetoric and activity.

The ADL initially supported the students, referring to Canary as "Islamophobic & racist". Critics quickly contested what, exactly, Canary did that was "Islamophobic & racist", and a day later the ADL backed off, apologizing for "overly broad" language. I want to talk through why I think objections to Canary as Islamophobic are potentially justified. But I want to do so in what I think is a more nuanced and specified way, because there really are interesting questions here regarding the ethics of counter-antisemitism (or counter-racism, or counter-Islamophobic) discourse that I think are being elided in the usual rush to back our friends and lambaste our enemies. Let's stipulate for sake of argument that Canary doesn't use specifically Islamophobic rhetoric (in the form of racial slurs, conspiratorial claims about creeping Sharia, and the like), and that in general the factual claims they make about the targeted persons (that they did say X or join group Y) are factually accurate. I'm open to the possibility that they do use such rhetoric or that their claims aren't factual (in which case the argument that they're Islamophobic becomes trivially easy). But I make the stipulation because the case I'm going to make doesn't depend on any such behavior by Canary. Instead, let's focus on what we might think of as Canary's strongest possible foundation: factual revelations of things the profiled individual has definitely said, or groups they have definitely joined, absent any additional commentary. Again, I'm not saying that this is, in fact, all or even most of what Canary does -- I'm saying that this sort of thing would presumably represents the formulation of Canary's mission that would be most resistant to a claim of Islamophobia. So. First, I do not generally think it is a smear or otherwise wrongful to simply republish a terrible thing somebody has said (with appropriate caveats about not taking things out-of-context, omitting apologies, etc.). For example, the other day Seth Mandel accused me of a "smear" and a "lie" towards him in the context of my column on sexist responses to Natalie Portman not attending to the Genesis Prize. The irony of Mandel's complaint was that he was actually never mentioned in the column at all; he only appears in the context of two of his tweets being republished, verbatim, with no additional commentary or interpretation directed towards him whatsoever. If you can be "smeared" simply by quoting your own words back to you, then I suggest that the problem lies inward. Moreover, I'd suggest that there actually is something important about revealing the prevalence of antisemitism that exists amidst certain social movements (on campus or not) -- if only because Jews are so frequently gaslit on this subject. Just this week, the Interfaith Center at Stony Brook University had to release a statement (cosigned by a wide range of campus Jewish, Christian, and Muslim groups) in solidarity with campus Hillel after a campus SJP member demanded that Hillel be expelled from campus and replaced with "a proper Jewish organization" (proper, the student confirmed, meaning anti-Zionist). This blog had already covered the Vassar College SJP chapter distributing literal (1940s-era) Nazi propaganda about Jews. These things happen, and there's something off-putting about claiming that it's a form of cheating or a smear to document it. Too many people think that naming and shaming antisemitism is by definition a witch-hunt. That cannot be right, and we should be very suspicious of political arguments which act as if it is right, or act as if the very act of accusing someone of antisemitism (or, for that matter, racism, or sexism, or Islamophobia) is dirty pool or foul play. So what accounts for my unease? Well, for one it might be the sense that college students, in particular, often say dumb things they regret, and there shouldn't be an entire website dedicated to spotlighting them and inviting people to berate them for it. How much one sympathizes with that point would seemingly correspond to how much one dislikes "call-out culture"; if you're not a huge fan of it (especially when it comes to young people not otherwise in the public eye) then Canary would seem to be one manifestation of a generally malign social trend. Another basis for objection might be the distinctively chad gadya character of many of Canary's entries. If one reads the site, very frequently a profiled individual is listed because he joined a group which hosts a speaker who supports an organization who bit the cat that ate the goat ... and so on. There's a very distinctive "guilt-by-association" character to what Canary does that I think is obviously objectionable, regardless of how you label it. And note how it resonates with the way blacklists are being deployed against Jews and Jewish groups right now (e.g., the announcement by several NYU student groups that they were boycotting a bevy of Jewish organizations -- including the ADL). Such calls very frequently proceed by similar logic: the group supports a program which hosts a speaker who said a thing ... so on and so forth. Such logic could be used to ensnare essentially anyone who affiliates with anything -- which means in practice it must be deployed selectively to delegitimize certain groups and causes under the guise of neutral idealism. If that stunt makes us uncomfortable when it's deployed against Jewish groups, it should make us uncomfortable when it's deployed against Muslim groups. And here is where I think the Islamophobia charge has legs. I don't want to say "imagine if this were done to Jews", because it is done to Jews (albeit perhaps not in quite as organized a form). But there absolutely are cases of blacklisting Jewish students simply because they've joined pro-Israel groups, without any claims that the student has said or done anything remotely racist or Islamophobic. And such behavior I think is rightfully thought of as deeply chilling, and striking too deep in terms of the way it polices to the letter Jewish political and communal participation. Many Canary entries seem to be based entirely on groups the individual has joined (everything from Students for Justice in Palestine to the Muslim Students Association -- the latter of which, it is worth noting, joined the letter in solidarity with Hillel at Stony Brook), rather than any specifically antisemitic things that the individual has said or done. That seems to be as dangerous as equivalent blacklist efforts targeting Jews who are part of Hillel, or Students Supporting Israel, or J Street (yes, J Street). Indeed, I could go further. Let's take the case of the students who have, themselves, said antisemitic things -- they're on the record. Surely there could be nothing Islamophobic about including them in a database? Yet even here, I'm conflicted -- and again, the mirror-case involving Jews perhaps reveals why. Imagine there was a website which cataloged people -- mostly, though not exclusively, Jews -- who were members of Zionist or Zionist-affiliated groups for the purpose of declaring to the world that they were racist and should not be worked with. Wouldn't we view that as being antisemitic in character? Suppose that it limited itself solely to those persons who had engaged in Islamophobic remarks -- with the goal of showing the degree to which Islamophobia and racism were prevalent in Zionist discourse, in a way that gave the impression that such views ran rampant amongst (Zionist) Jewish college students. Could that be viewed as antisemitic? My instinct is yes. It is an instinct that is, admittedly, at war with my above acknowledgment that documenting the real and non-negligible existence of antisemitism that exists in pro-Palestinian movements is not a form of cheating (and I'd likewise agree that documenting the real and non-negligible existence of Islamophobia that exists in Zionist movements is likewise not wrongful). But in both cases it is a delicate thing, lest the impression be given that Jews Are The Problem or Muslims Are The Problem. It isn't wrong to demand that groups be attentive to that possibility and work proactively against it, and it isn't wrong to be suspicious of them when they seem indifferent to it. What was it that Maajid Nawaz said? “Who compiles lists of individuals these days?" Of course, the answer is "many people and many groups," and maybe that's not per se wrong (or even avoidable). But certainly it is something that requires considerable care and concern, and Canary -- given its propensity for guilt-by-association, given its wide sweep, and given the range of individuals it includes under its ambit -- doesn't strike me as expressing said care and concern. Is that Islamophobic? Depends on how you define it, but I would suggest that there is a prima facie case of a sort of moral negligence directed at Muslim students. In other circumstances, that same sort of moral negligence impacts Jews. Either way, it's a wrong, and it's entirely fair to label it as such. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2r7Rd2y

#academia #anti-semitism #Islamophobia

13 notes · View notes

decolonizejewish · 7 years ago

Text

a selective decolonial history of Jews in France

basically France has been playing Jews against Muslims and Muslims against Jews for years, since way before Israel was created, during colonial times.

for example in colonial Algeria, the native population of Algeria (both Jewish and Muslim) was initially under the "indigenous" status which meant they were second-class citizen in the colonial legal regime. and then in 1870 the Jews of Algeria were granted full national rights as French citizens by default, which suddenly gave them privilege over Muslim Algerians who were still under the "indigenous" status.

this divide and conquer strategy made the Jews of Algeria suspect of being on the side of colonial power - which was partly true. many were in favor of Algerian independance and participated in the national liberation movement and resistance against colonialism, but in terms of privilege, they had indeed gained a superior social, legal and economic status. and many therefore sided with the French because that is what served their material interests.

before the "Décret Crémieux" (the 1870 law that made all Jews of Algeria French), there was also a long process of assimilation of North African Jews into French culture, which was a deliberate process mainly implemented through colonial Jewish schools created by the "Alliance Israelite Universelle". these schools had the explicit purpose of "civilizing" the Jews living in these "barbarian" and "savage" lands, to enlighten them with the modern French culture etc, so they were very quickly and forcibly assimilated with European clothes, French first names, and of course repression of the use of Arabic language. these schools did the job within one generation. Arabic / Judeo-Arabic speaking parents sent their kids to schools of the Alliance Israélite Universelle where they were taught in French and became assimilated and lost their cultures. my father was raised in a French colonial school in Tunisia and he never even learnt Arabic although his grandparents spoke Arabic at home, and his parents understood it perfectly.

after the decolonization, most of Jews of North Africa were forced to leave because they had been given this special status that made them suspects of double allegiance in the eyes of the rest of the population, they were considered traitors, they were not considered as fully Tunisian/Algerian/Moroccan anymore, so some didn’t feel like they had a place there anymore post-decolonization. some had been given subaltern jobs in the colonial administration, they had been hired to do France's dirty jobs, so now that the countries had gained independance the colonial administration was gone and they lost their jobs. France's Jewish population is i think majority descendents of post-colonial immigrants - although it's just my impression but i might be wrong.

it must be noted that Adolphe Crémieux (the parliament member who passed that decree in 1870) and the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the organization who began this forced assimilation of Jews from colonized lands, were white French Zionist Jews. and they held really fucked up racist and colonialist positions. they stole our North African, Maghrebi, Arab/Amazigh Jewish cultures to homogenize all Jewish cultures to look like, sound like, smell like, feel like and taste like French European Jewish culture. their writing really reflect the “white man’s burden” type of mentality, they felt like they had to “save” Arab/Amazigh Jews and educate them and civilize them. just like Israel has been doing too, inventing a monolithic Jewish culture that is so colonial and so European and so Islamophobic and anti-Arab, negating all diversity of Jewish cultures, and creating a new language (modern Hebrew), new names (Tal, Dor, Or, Ronit), just stripping Jews from their cultures of origin and pretending they all have the same “neutral” Israeli culture... anyway.

many had left, but many Jews had chosen remained in Tunisia, Algeria and Morocco after the independence. they belonged in their countries and were attached to them, they felt fully Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan. But after the creation of Israel, antisemitic hostility grew. in 1967, after the 6-days War, there were violent anti-Jew riots in Tunisia for example, the synagogue burned, the whole community left and came to France. unlike Moroccan Jews who massively went to Israel through shady zionist displacement programmes, most Algerian & Tunisian Jews had no interest in Israel and felt deeply Tunisian & Algerian. They didn’t go to Israel when they were forced to flee, but instead they went to France, to escape the rising antisemitism in their home countries, in which they had been existing as communities since before even the Arab Conquest.

There have been Jews in North Africa since before Islamization, since before the Romans. We are indigenous to North Africa, as most Jews of the Maghreb are Amazigh (also known as "Berber"). for example in Morocco most Jews are Chleh (an amazigh people of Morocco, of which some are Muslims and some are Jews and were all living in the same villages, speaking the same languages, before the creation of Israel and massive displacement).

now the Jewish communities of Tunisia & Algeria are almost extinct, and they all went to live in France were they assimilated after a while, but still many of them live in racially & socially segregated neighborhoods along with North African Muslims. but after decolonization and immigration, France did not stop its colonial practise of trying to create tension. so now the government and the media use Jews as ammunition against Muslims in the Islamophobic propaganda. and everybody knows France is pretty much a laboratory of islamophobia. so then because public officials use Jews against Muslims so much, its just stirs hatred and they play dangerously with fire, and Jews end up being considered allies of white power. basically capitalism and white supremacy use Jews as a human shield, a scapegoat to receive all the resentment and anger of poor people and people of color. you don't have money? it's because of the Jews. you are being exploited? it's the Jews. as a Muslim you are denied your rights in this country? look at the Jews, they are not treated as bad as you are, they do not get the same treatment because they are France’s “favorite child”. etc. which then designates Jews as an easy target for terrorism, for hatred, for anger, etc. ‘cause of course if a parent keeps designating one of his kids as the favorite, and conspicuously treating his two kids with double standards, of course the “good treatment” from the parent will ‘cause anger, jealousy and resentment from the sibling who feels neglected and treated unfairly. it is an intentional policy in the case of France and its two religious minorities, to cause oppressed people to misdirect anger and social unrest at the “favorite sibling” instead of lookin at the oppressor. and of course the government and the media also keep repeating that there is no antisemitism in France, except for the one imported by the immigration from North Africa, that antisemitism is inherent to Islam, that all North African Muslims are antisemitic, etc, that it is very dangerous to be Jewish in neighborhoods with lots of immigrants, etc, so that Jews will start being more islamophobic and distrustful of Muslims, etc. the whole thing becomes performative. they just repeat and repeat and repeat those lies until they become truths. it's just a horrible mess. the more state Islamophobia grows, the more popular antisemitism is growing too, and there are crazy people making a lot of money and feeding it... it's just a nightmare for all of us, Jews and Muslims of color being used against each other by white supremacy and being victims of its plotting against us all.

the main French Jewish organization, the CRIF, is even more problematic than AIPAC. extremely Zionist, extremely Islamophobic, right-wing, and dominated by rich white/Ashkenazi Jews. they get to be the voice of Jews in France although they do not really represent what most French Jews believe, but they have coopted Jewish identity here so much that the French Jews who DON'T agree with them have almost given up on feeling Jewish, they/we feel almost ashamed to be Jewish, it is very hard to still want to identify as Jewish when that is what Jewish has come to mean in France in public discourse and in the media : Islamophobic, anti-Arab, Ashkenazi, White Supremacist, assimilationist, capitalist right-wing conservative, etc. All the Jews that have a voice as intellectuals in the mainstream media, Bernard Henry Levy, Elizabeth Levy, Eric Zemmour, Alain Finkielkraut, Gilles William Goldnadel, are extremely Zionist, racist, nationalist, and/or bordering on extreme right wing. the only ones i can think of who claim a visible Arab/North African Jewish identity/culture are all comedians/buffoons/clowns - Gad Elmaleh, Cyril Hanouna, and Michel Boujenah, so not political or intellectual or cultural commentors, they are not taken seriously.

this is an unfinished draft for an article that i might someday write

307 notes · View notes

projectqueer · 7 years ago

Text

STATEMENT OF SOLIDARITY WITH Dyke March Chicago

by Stephanie Skora, Trans Liberation Collective founder Before I say anything else, it is most important to note that the Israeli State began bombing Gaza again last night. Gaza has been limited to only two hours of electricity a day for the past several days, no doubt in a preemptive move to silence news about the bombing. Instead of circling up around Palestinian communities and helping support them during yet another brutal attack on their land and families, many people were calling them antisemites and perpetuating Zionist violence against Palestinians by allowing unfounded and unsupported accusations of antisemitism to gain traction. This is a source of no small amount of disappointment and anger on my part. We, as Jews who claim to be in solidarity with Palestine, must do better.

Let me make myself VERY clear: I am a proud Jewish woman. I am a genderqueer trans woman, a lesbian, and an anti-Zionist. I am nobody’s token, and I find antisemitism in all forms abhorrent. I am in explicit solidarity with the Chicago Dyke March Collective, and support all of their actions, and decisions during the March and at the park afterwards in regards to their removal of three Zionists from the space. I participated in the conversations with, and removal of, those Zionists, and would do the same again if asked. The people in question were kicked out because they were Zionists, were aggressive, and made Palestinian attendees feel unsafe. That is, and will always be, a valid reason to remove someone from a space.

In the interest of centering Palestinian voices in recounting the actual events of that day, I will refer everyone who asks to the forthcoming statement from the Dyke March organizers. The Chicago Dyke March Collective organizers can speak for themselves, and I would encourage everyone to listen to their words, rather than making assumptions based on sources that lack credibility. I will, however, make a statement about the backlash from, and aftermath of, the removal of those Zionists. Many of you have asked my perspective on the events of that day, so please consider this my official statement on the matter.

Dyke March is, very specifically, a space organized by queer and trans people of color, FOR queer and trans people of color, so that they have somewhere safe to go and celebrate themselves during Pride Month. Yes, everyone is welcome at Dyke March as long as they follow the rules of the space and don’t cause any problems, but Dyke March is not designed to be a space for everyone and their assorted feelings about oppressed people.

This year, Dyke March was very, VERY visibly anti-Zionist, and pro-Palestinian. This means a variety of wonderful and necessary things, but it also means that, for attendees, that there are prerequisites to our attendance there. By attending, we are recognizing that we are entering a space that was specifically designed to center and uplift queer and trans Palestinian voices… if that is not something that you can comply with, the solution is simple: don’t go to Dyke March. If, like Ellie Otra, Palestinians make you feel uncomfortable and you “just want to be Jewish in public” but feel the need to assert your presence and privilege even after you’ve been told that Palestinians feel uncomfortable, then don’t come to Dyke March, and go do it somewhere else. If, like Laurel Grauer, you are a known liar, Zionist, racist, and Islamophobe, then don’t come to Dyke March, and go march with A Wider Bridge and/or the Israeli Consulate in Chicago Pride, who I’m sure would be more than happy to have your despicable-ass self in their contingent.

Just to make myself clear: if you are a Zionist, if Palestinians make you feel uncomfortable, or if you work for a horrible, violent, pinkwashing organization, go fuck yourself, and go fuck yourself somewhere other than Dyke March. Just because a space allows you to attend does not mean that the space is FOR you, and to assume that you have a right to come and make people feel unsafe in their own spaces just because you want to be visible in public is the HEIGHT of privilege, White fragility, Jewish feelings, and general fuckery.

It is also important to say something about the role of Jews in explicitly anti-Zionist spaces. Namely, it is never the place of Jews to tell Palestinians how, where, why, and at what they are allowed to feel uncomfortable, unsafe, or traumatized, and in which contexts. Palestinians always have the right to determine the terms of their own safety in their own spaces. Always. It is neither the place, nor the right, of Jews to get all up in our feelings about the reactions of Palestinians to symbols that have been heavily appropriated by the Israeli State and Zionist settlers for the express purpose of eliciting reactions of fear and trauma. Whatever your feelings about the Star of David as a symbol, the reality of the situation is that the violent use of that symbol by the Israeli State has made it inextricably associated with that state, and the violence that it commits. That is OUR problem as Jews, and our feelings about that symbol are to be hashed out amongst ourselves, in Jewish spaces, and not taken out in the form of baseless and violent accusations against Palestinians.

It is absolutely true that the Israeli State has appropriated Jewishness for its own purposes, and perverted the culture and history of a beautiful, proud, and strong people to serve the theocratic, ethno-nationalist interests of a genocidal nation-state. It is absolutely true that Zionism is a form of racism and White Supremacy, mediated through a Jewish context. It is absolutely true that Zionism is an unacceptable political ideology that has no right to be heard, or considered as valid, in any space, but particularly those that center Palestinians. It is absolutely true that Zionism is an ideology that maintains its supremacy through the re-traumatizing of each successive generation of Jews, in attempt to force us into allegiance with the Israeli State. It is absolutely true that Zionism reinforces its power by forcing Jews to exhibit White fragility in response to criticism of Jews, because in the context of Zionism, Jews assume a position of power and privilege that we have not historically occupied.

So, what is the role of Jewish people in anti-Zionist spaces, especially ones organized by Palestinians? I would argue that our role is twofold: 1) To support the labor, organizing, and work of Palestinians as they continue their struggle for liberation from the Israeli State and Zionist ideology, including by educating other Jews about Palestine and Zionism. 2) To link the struggles against antisemitism and anti-Zionism, and to help ensure that one struggle is not weaponized to silence the other.

Why does this look so limited? Because we, as Jews, enter into these spaces (or at least SHOULD be entering into these spaces) as accomplices to the liberatory struggle of the Palestinian people. Zionism is a system of power and control places Jews in a position of privilege vis a vis Palestinians.

This means that when Jews enter an anti-Zionist space, we accept that we are entering it under certain conditions. As beneficiaries of the system of power and control that those spaces were set up to combat and dismantle, we may be held to a higher political standard. We may be required to affirm certain political positions in order to remain in the space. We may be asked certain questions about our politics because of our positions of privilege. And all of those things might feel bad, might hurt our feelings, and might seem really unfair to us… but it is our job to remember, and to remind each other, that our discomfort and hurt feelings at being held to a higher standard is nothing, NOTHING, compared to the genocide, violence, and ethnic cleansing that we are in those spaces to help put to an end. That is our role as accomplices, and privileged people in that space. Other privileged groups of people are treated the same way in social justice spaces, and that is the norm in our corner of society. It is also important to note that if you are arguing that a space that excludes Zionists automatically also excludes Jews in general, then it is YOU who is conflating Zionism and Judaism, not Dyke March.

I would also like to add this, specifically addressing the Jewish people that will see this statement, and in particular those of us who call ourselves anti-Zionist, or Palestine solidarity activists. It is incumbent upon us, in particular, to not participate in this mishegas, and to not heap violence upon Palestinians. It is incumbent upon us to not let our possible previous Zionist brainwashing and existing Jewish fragility and feelings to allow us to grab on the first specious accusations of antisemitism levied against Palestinians by a source that completely lacks credibility. A Wider Bridge, is a known racist, Islamophobic, homophobic, and transphobic organization coming down against Dyke March, which is run entirely by queer and trans people of color, some of whom are Palestinians. Laurel Grauer, a known liar, racist, and Islamophobe, works for A Wider Bridge, and is not credible in any meaningful way on this issue.

It is our job to listen to Palestinians. To not pass judgement on them without hearing their voices. To believe them when they refute or reject accusations made against them. To lift up their voices when they speak their own truths, and give their account of events. It is our job to not give further traction to unfounded or under-supported accusations of antisemitism made against Palestinians, especially when we KNOW that accusations antisemitism have been historically weaponized against Palestinians, and used to silence their voices on vital matters, including affirming their own humanity and safety.

If you, personally, cannot do these things, then I ask you to consider why you cannot believe Palestinians, why you are giving credibility to accusations of antisemitism without knowing all the details, and why you have a right to be considered a Palestine solidarity activist.

That’s all I have to say on the matter for now. I am in explicit solidarity with Chicago Dyke March, and all the organizers in the Chicago Dyke March Collective.

#chicago dyke march #lgbtq #palestine #israel #zionism #xenophobia #racism #colonialism #imperialism #bigotry #oppression #lgbtq issues #lgbtq visibility #chicago #illinois #human rights #activism

76 notes · View notes

sparrowsapling · 7 years ago

Text

Please Listen

There was an article making the rounds recently titled, if I remember correctly, "I don't know how to explain that you should care about other people." It was a good article, but that's not what I want to talk about now. I remembered the article title today in the midst of many other frustrating thoughts, and what I came out with was this:

I don't know how to explain that you should care about Jews.

We are not some distant hypothetical, some Hollywood stereotype, some far-removed historical figures. We're not just a religion that celebrates Chanukah instead of Christmas, or basically all just white Europeans. We're a diverse, distinct people in a world that simultaneously wants us to shut up about it and will never let us forget that we're different.

We are not your rhetorical device. "You wouldn't get away with saying that about Jews." But people do, make no mistake; maybe you just don't pay attention when it's about Jews. "The ____ holocaust," you say while wondering why Jews talk so much about their own Holocaust. "It's like being a Jew in 1930s Germany," you say, not thinking for a moment about what it's like to be a Jew now.

We are not your ultimate villain, the whitest of white people, the bankers, the conspiring media, the puppetmasters behind every evil of the world. We are rich and poor people, successful and unsuccessful people, people in positions of power and people who are struggling. We do good things and bad things, just like everybody else, and the bad things are not representative of every Jew or part of some vast conspiracy.

We are not pretenders, trying to claim victimhood. We are people who have stubbornly survived through centuries, millennia of oppression and have the memories of it in our stories and our own DNA. We are people who remember when our parents, grandparents, great-grandparents and on back for generations saw the winds turn and found themselves no longer welcome in the places they called home, and often in danger. We understand the subtleties bigotry can take, the way anti-Semitism is so woven into the fabric of society that it's often easy not to see it if you have the privilege not to.

There are many just causes in the world, and there are many Jews who fight for them, but who will fight for us? When you talk of Nazis, white supremacists, the alt-right, will you remember that Jews are a target too? When people rail against bankers and the media, against globalists and corporatists, or descend into more overt conspiracy theories, will you remember how those concepts have been and still are weaponized against Jews? Will you speak out against them?

And when Jews say that we are scared, will you listen? Or will you shrug off our fears because the problems we face are more subtle than those of people of color or Muslims or other minorities? Will you ignore that Jews account for a vastly disproportionate percentage of hate crimes because those crimes aren't violent, or if they were, nobody died, or if they did, it was in another country and it wouldn't happen here?

When Jews say that something is anti-Semitic, will you hear us? Or will you listen to the people who say that it's an overreaction or an excuse to silence criticism, forgetting for a moment that privilege can mean not seeing oppression or prejudice right in front of your face? Will you insist that it's only anti-Zionist without stopping to consider why so many Jews outside of Israel experience "anti-Zionism," or why you think it's unequivocally correct to hate Israel, or whether you even know what Zionism is?

And what about when Jews dare to speak positively about Israel? Many Jews live there, or have relatives there, or have visited there, or simply believe that the country has a right to exist, which is all that Zionism means. That doesn't mean we think the Israeli government or its citizens have never done anything wrong, or that we don't think Palestinians have rights too. But the situation is complicated, and if you can't believe that, perhaps you should consider why you're so willing to accept that once again, it's all the Jews' fault, and that once again, we need to pick up roots and go. If you think that Israel is uniquely evil in the world, or uniquely worthy of constant criticism, perhaps you should consider why people spend so much time and energy hating the one tiny little Jewish country in the world. If nothing else, consider why Jews who are doing nothing but being Jewish are so often expected to answer for Israel before they can be a part of spaces on the left, let alone bring up anti-Semitism.

I would hope that non-Jews who claim to care about social justice will listen and care and speak up for us, but my experience and that of many other Jews is that they often won't. There will be millions of "Je suis Charlie" tweets and barely a word about the attack on a Jewish supermarket, to say nothing of the attacks on Israeli Jews that are sometimes even celebrated, no matter who the victims are. There will be, appropriately, anger at politicians who make racist or sexist or Islamophobic comments but ignoring or even justifying of anti-Semitic remarks.

The same people who insist that it's not for white people to say when something is racist or straight people to say when something is homophobic and so on will suddenly argue with Jews about whether something is really anti-Semitic. People who normally say that intent doesn't matter if you hurt someone suddenly insist a person isn't anti-Semitic unless they really meant to be. Besides, they're just telling the truth about how Jews are rich and powerful, plus Zionism is such a great evil that Jews deserve everything they get

Right-wing anti-Semitism is a frightening thing, but left-wing anti-Semitism is frightening in a different way. It's people who say that we should care about and fight for all oppressed groups forgetting us, or outright saying, "No, we don't need to fight for you." It's telling Jews that we're not allowed to speak out, and not allowed to be ourselves. It's telling us that all the standards which apply to other people don't apply to us, sometimes in words and sometimes in actions. It's telling us that because Israel exists, Jews around the world are not worthy of protection. It's showing us that when the Nazis come for us again—because to them, we're not a part of the white world they want—our supposed allies will just look away.

This may seem melodramatic, but you have to understand: Jews have been expelled from one country after another, over and over throughout our history. Jews have faced discrimination and fear and violence, and fled only to experience the same thing somewhere else. If we're worried, it's because history has taught us that it's not paranoid; it's realistic. We've learned the hard way that when it comes down to it, most non-Jews won't fight for us.

I keep hoping I'm wrong about that. I keep talking about my Jewishness so that people who don't know other Jews will see that we're people, different in some ways and the same in many. I keep pointing out anti-Semitism and keep trying to educate people who seem to have good intentions but don't understand how anti-Semitism works, how it hides itself away. I keep telling people I'm scared and hoping they'll listen and care.

But the silence is so often deafening and I don't know what else to do, let alone how to convince the larger world to care about Jewish struggles and Jewish fears, and to talk about them. I don't know how to make people so aware of other types of privilege understand how privileged they are not to see anti-Semitism, and to leave their unconscious biases about Jews unnoticed and unquestioned. I don't know how to explain that Jews deserve to be taken seriously and to exist and to feel safe. I don't know how to get non-Jews to care, and sometimes I wonder if there's any way I can.

#antisemitism #anti-semitism #check your privilege #allyship #punch nazis

13 notes · View notes

deodatasslawson · 4 years ago

Note

TIEDR is ThisIsEverydayRacism.

The connection between the first screenshot and the other two screenshots is that thisiseverydayracism has reblogged multiple times from a TERF called black-diaspora, who now goes by yasss-black-diaspora, who has a history of homophobia/lesbophobia as well as anti-Arab racism and Islamophobia (much of which is rooted in anti-Arab racism). She also is a Christianity apologist/Christian supremacist and claims Christianity is superior and more progressive and "feminist" than other religions, especially Islam and Judaism. And she is also a major apologist for Joe Biden despite his history of anti-black racism and his sexual assault allegations and is very anti-Bernie Sanders because she thinks Bernie is a "communist" (ThisIsEverydayRacism/TIEDR is extremely hateful, and I really do mean EXTREMELY HATEFUL and anti-semitic towards Bernie Sanders (who is basically a social democrat and center-left) and any Jewish person who happens to have left-leaning politics and/or has sympathy for the plight of the Palestinian people, critical of the state of Israel and/or anti-Zionist, with TIEDR going so far as to calling them "kapos" just for being left-leaning Jews) so I would not be surprised if she's also an anti-Semite on top of being a racist, Islamophobic, homophobic/lesbophobic, and transphobic reactionary neoliberal TERF.

And contrary to popular belief, TIEDR/ThisIsEverydayRacism is actually pretty anti-Trump and is a staunch Biden supporter, much like black-diaspora/yasss-black-diaspora is.

So basically, what I am saying is ThisIsEverydayRacism/TIEDR claims to be anti-TERF yet will directly reblog from TERFs and give them a platform, much of which is due to ThisIsEverydayRacism's Islamophobia and anti-Semitism and racist reactionary neoliberal beliefs.

yeah, thisiseverdayracism is trying to cover all kinds of bigotry in a woke hat, especially the islamaphobia

It’s really really freaking crazy actually

Especially considering I keep seeing their posts and have reblogged then myself

I need to be more selective with Reblog just as much as everyone else

That being said no one is entirely perfect

But fuck them more importantly

#biden supporters are fuckin racist terf apologists at least 90% of the time #the ones who are the neverbernie types are the ones that i am talking about #sorry if this is hard to read btw #im on mobile #suzy talks #thisiseverydayracism #tiedr

8 notes · View notes

annaspavlova · 7 years ago

Note

Yeah, how dare she love her people, that are hated all over the world by people like you, and want to defend her country. I bet you hate the soldiers that were fighting against Nazism too. How nice to be you, comfortable and safe, not surrounded by millions of Arab enemies that want you and all you love - dead.

israel is a man-made, zionist state that has continued to take over palestinian land for decades. if you had an ounce of common sense, it would mean knowing that all land that belongs to israel on a map as of 2017 is not true israeli land as israel does not own any land that they have not stolen from palestine. their entire country and its borders are the result of violently stealing from a palestine that had been brutally attacked for years in order for israel to acquire more and more land and to preserve it as israeli land as much as possible. if you look at maps over the years, it literally shows how much land israel has violently stolen from palestine, which used to own all the land currently occupied by israel. israel has invaded, stolen, murdered, bombed, etc. in order to create and maintain the borders of their "country." as for israel being surrounded by arab enemies, there was a fucking choice made that israel, an official jewish state, would be created on what is now INVADED and STOLEN arab land in the first place. it is literally impossible, unless you're the most fucking idiotic person on this planet, for there to be a logical belief that a country created the way israel has been created and expanded without having a single thought that maybe stealing and, again, expanding israeli land over decades without having a fraction of a thought that it might possibly anger arab countries, their citizens and their governments. their anger and hatred of israel IS justified, especially considering arab receive very little vocal support from the western world. arabs are consistently labelled horrible things (ex. terrorists) so often that the islamophobia has prevented them from being treated and welcomed worldwide; they face constant fear of violence simply from being arab or a member of islam. are all arabs members of islam? no, yet that doesn't matter as all arabs are considered islamic extremists hoping to destroy the west by a staggering number of people worldwide anyway. israel also receives so much support from the united states and other countries around the world that of fucking course arabs are going to be angry. a state that was created by the invasion of palestinian land would obviously disturb such a significant number of arabs, so to say they have a reason to hate israel, anyone who knows anything about how the state was created yet defends it and all of its negative impacts on palestine and the rest of the middle east sounds pretty reasonable in my eyes. israel does not deserve to be viewed as a real country, nor does it deserve the support from people like you who honestly believe that israel is pure and wonderful and has done no wrong. you're either racist and islamophobic as fuck, are actually israeli and blindly defend your horrific country, are such a huge fan of gal that you refuse to believe the atrocities her country has committed or have been fed the wrong information for so long that you don't know the truth about israel whatsoever. whatever it is, i suggest doing some research for yourself on how israel was created, the violence they acted with and continue to act with and take a look at a map that shows the progression of israel invading palestinian land. as for gal loving her country and wanting to fight for her people, a choice was made on her own to serve in the idf, which is well known as a horrible, violent military group. as an israeli citizen, gal gadot would know and be taught the history of israel and how it's fared as a country just as i have been taught the same things about the country i live in. the thing you might have not thought about is that curriculums here are often tainted to make my country look better, stronger, more powerful and more globally prominant than it really is or ever has been. our curriculum teaches us that we magically ended world war 2 by participating in d-day and our textbooks continued to label the russians, who were a huge part of ending the war and defeating nazi germany, as evil people that should never be trusted. it's skewed and extremely inaccurate and gal gadot would have been taught the same types of things about her country, especially considering their country has been much more unnecessarily harmful worldwide than the country i live in has been. israel has much more to hide about its past than many other countries, so why not hide the truth about the heinous parts of their country's past and present in order to secure the patriotism in their citizens. this is way too common of a practice in the teaching of a country's history; the government of any country would never risk teaching the entire truth to its citizens in fear of risking losing the patriotism and respect most people have for their countries. yet if i, as a 15 year old kid, began questioning and later researching the things i'd been taught in school myself, gal should be able to to the exact same thing as a grown adult. if she can't be intelligent enough as a fully grown adult to research her country's past for herself with all the horrible information about israel that the country faces consistently and hears often, she's not proving herself to be worthy of any sort of hype or respect and certainly should not be thought of as intelligent or thoughtful either. my point summed up: she isn't a good person and unless she finds a way to believably, truly regret and apologize for her service that contrubited to many deaths, i will never respect her and you're fucking crazy if you do. cool, she may have just created the mosts amazing movie to ever exist acccording to some, but out of respect for the people she helped murder, i will definitely not be contributing to the money the movie has already made. it's fared just fine without peoples' money who refuse to watch in theatres because of gal. are you honestly accusing me of being a nazi apologist because i refuse to support a movie that includes a woman who was willing to help her country murder innocent human beings? you're some kind of next level fucked up for accusing someone of that. even as a person 300% against anti-semitism and in support of the protection of all jewish people worldwide, i do not feel bad for hating israel and wishing for it to be abolished, as israel has gone on to murder a significant number of people as well. as many as nazi germany? far from it. more than necessary with zero reason for the past how many decades now? yeah, they have, and it's dispicable. as a group of people who were so severely targeted during world war 2 and deserve lives filled with peace, love and support from the very beginning, you've got to have some real fucking guts if you're israeli to believe murdering people who are different than you despite your own people being murdered not long ago in the mid-1900's and taking their land (sound familiar? it's what nazi germany did! and as a country germany still has a lot to do to even begin getting into repairing what their country did less than 100 years ago, one thing of which is current german generations whining that it is unfair for people to remember the country's actions under hitler and still feel negativity toward germany for what they did) for your own prosperity is so fucking wrong. is israel a jewish state, and do i support jewish people and put down any kind if anti-semitism i come across? fucking obviously. do i support jewish people and judaism across the entire globe? obviously as well. i, as someone who is not a part of any religion by my own choice, happen to have a HUGE interest in learning about jewish peoples' experiences during and since world war 2 and judaism in general (as well as having a tremendous amount of respect for jewish people who are still unafraid to show and speak about their religious/cultural beliefs to the world despite anti-semitism still being rampant worldwide) as i believe judaism is the most interesting of the major world religions, still do not have any type of support for israel as a country nor for gal gadot as a person who negatively contributed to horrible actions carried out by the idf. and it's not as if i don't have support for jewish people in israel because i do, as long as they don't claim palestinians do not deserve to exist and israel should own all of their land, as long as they don't believe it is okay to be a part of the idf and contribute to mass murder (yes, i understand that for the average working-middle class person it's extremely difficult to be properly excused and not face harsh punishments, although bar rafaeli was excused due to her career, even though she admitted she would have liked to have served and as a result have very low respect for her as well, so considering rafaeli was excused, gal's fame and area of work very likely would have been a good enough reason to be excused as well), but just because i support jewish people who can tell right from wrong with regards to the idf's actions, even if they live in israel, it still does not change the fact that that i believe israel as a nation is one of the most destructive and abominable countries on this planet and i will not ever be convinced otherwise.

2 notes · View notes

nothingman · 8 years ago

Link

Click here for reuse options!

A new social media project gives much-needed historical perspective to Trump's executive order.

Hundreds of Jewish refugees were turned away by the U.S. government on the eve of World War II. Dozens were killed in the Holocaust's concentration camps. St. Louis Manifest, a bold new Twitter project that takes its name from the vessel bearing that precious human cargo, pays homage to its victims as the U.S. and other European countries ban Muslims fleeing catastrophic wars fueled by the West.

In May 1939, the MS St. Louis traveled from Hamburg, Germany to Havana, Cuba. Nearly all of the ship's 937 passengers were Jews, most of whom were German citizens, trying to escape the Nazi regime.

Cuba, which was a virtual U.S. colony at the time, refused to accept most of the refugees. Right-wing newspapers and politicians stoked fear and paranoia about the asylum-seekers, claiming they were communist infiltrators.

When Cuba turned them away, the ship's passengers subsequently contacted U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, requesting asylum. He declined to respond. The State Department and the White House decided to reject them, acting on strict immigration quotas and pervasive xenophobic sentiment. The refugees were forced to return to war-torn Europe, where hundreds died.

My name is Lutz Grünthal. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz http://pic.twitter.com/DyS8NXrk2P

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

St. Louis Manifest puts a human face to the refugees who were turned away, using photos and stories documented by The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.

The project was launched on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, which commemorates the day in 1945 when Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camp, was liberated by the Soviet Union's Red Army.

My name is Horst Rotholz. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Auschwitz http://pic.twitter.com/2qoCtYrnFN

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 27, 2017

Russel Neiss, a St. Louis-based Jewish educator, technologist, and activist, co-created with Charlie Schwartz, a rabbi in Cambridge Massachusetts. AlterNet interviewed Neiss via email.

"It was made on a whim last night over the course of about two hours," Neiss said, referring to Thursday, January 26. "Its primary purpose is to honor the memory of a small sliver of the 10,000,000 victims of the Nazis on International Holocaust Remembrance Day."

My name is Selma Simon. The US turned me away at the border in 1939. I was murdered in Sobibor http://pic.twitter.com/znXwe8zqCU

— St. Louis Manifest (@Stl_Manifest) January 28, 2017

Far-right political movements and anti-refugee xenophobia are on the rise across the West amidst the worst refugee crisis since World War II.

On Thursday's day of rememberance, President Donald Trump signed an explicitly racist executive order barring all entrants from seven Muslim-majority countries from entering the U.S., including those with green cards and visas. (Five of the blacklisted countries are currently being bombed by the U.S., and the U.S. has destabilized the other two.)

Neiss drew parallels between the plight of Jewish refugees who were turned away 80 years ago and the plight of Muslim refugees fleeing Western-backed wars today.

"'We Remember' and 'Never Again' ought to be more than empty platitudes," he stressed.

Neiss condemned the Zionist Organization of America in particular for its anti-refugee stance. Leading pro-Israel groups have jumped on the Trump bandwagon and either expressed support for, or remained silent on, his extreme anti-Muslim, anti-refugee policies. The Zionist Organization of America even hosted Steve Bannon, a far-right racist who has been accused of anti-Semitism, to speak at its gala.

Neiss also criticized the Jewish Federations of North America, the American Jewish Committee, and the Jewish Council on Public Affairs, "for their silence on the issue."

"If the goal of these organizations actually mean 'Never Again,' and 'We Remember,' they ought to do something to prove it," he said.

"The Anti Defamation League has been the only mainstream Jewish group to have taken a pro-refugee stand on this issue and they ought to be commended," Neiss added.

The racist, anti-Muslim sentiment that plagues the U.S. and Europe today echoes the anti-Semitism of the early 20th century. In fact, many of today's Islamophobic myths employ the exact same language as the anti-Semitic stereotypes of yesteryear.

In World War II, the Nazis and their fascist allies killed more than six million Jews in one of the worst genocides in human history. They also murdered millions of communists, socialists, anarchists, labor organizers, feminists, Romanis, people of African descent, homosexuals, and the disabled.

Nazi Germany was only defeated through the enormous sacrifices of the Soviet Union. At least 26 million Soviets lost their lives in the fight against Nazism, more than half of whom were civilians. In contrast, just around 400,000 Americans and 400,000 Britons died in the war.

Some 20 million Chinese, more than three-quarters of whom were civilians, also died in the fight against the Japanese empire, which was allied with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Click here for reuse options!