Is this anti-semitism?

'become orthodox'

What happened to make Paro wake up one morning and suggest enslaving the entire Jewish people? (It could not have been irrational anti-Semitism because Christianity and Islam were not yet even thoughts in anyone’s mind).

i have to admit this gave me a chuckle

orthodoxymoron?

but he's comparing Obama to Romney/Paul/Gingrich/Santorum

I'm sorry, I just am still to this day amazed at how it seems that every group who has faced discrimination still has another go-to discriminated-against group that they blame all of their troubles on.

like ilxuk and the tories

"Waiting to hear from Alex in SF how he "defends it pretty handily.""

I meant he defended blurbing the book pretty handily. He didn't address any of Jeff Goldberg's specific "quotations" (not clear why he should.)

"I think it's pretty bad form for him to include fictional Jewish characters as evidence for the moral claims he's making against our co-religionists!"

Those are a whole bunch of separate quotes. They are not contextual to one another.

"Also, what's that organ trafficking charge?"

Didn't you hear the story about the dude who woke up in hotel bathtub with his kidney missing? THAT WAS ISRAELIS THAT DID IT!

Tbf, Dan, Jews have tried several times over the course of their rather lengthy history to assimilate and the results haven't been all that great. Either they succeeded and are no longer Jews or there was some kind of backlash. I can see how Kahanists would think there's only safety in Eretz Yisrael following God's rules closely.

I think he's referring to this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8608053.stm

Police smash Israeli organ-trafficking ring

inappropriate roffles

I meant he defended blurbing the book pretty handily.

Where did he defend it? His defense seems to have consisted of: "I wrote what I wrote."

"...and I stand by it." He wrote a blurb, not a treatise.

That's not a defense.

Really? I think it works quite well given the circumstance.

Why did you give a positive blurb to a book that contains anti-Semitic rhetoric?
I stand by my blurb.

Defended!

No, but seriously, are you just trolling or are you making some kind of really subtle point that I'm not picking up on?

Atzmon can't really win, though. He's a self-defined proud self-hating Jew. Okay, whatever but he also says shit like this,

"The Holocaust became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe, to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. It made vengeance and revenge into a Western value."

I will utterly defend his right to loathe Israel or religion or whatever but saying stupid shit like this should 'cause fewer ppl to listen not more. Vengeance and revenge have been part of humanity for eons and this thesis is basically a dim exegisis of Borges' 'Deutches Requiem'.

Oh wait he actually did defend it detail:

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/25/mearsheimer_responds_to_goldbergs_latest_smear

I hadn't seen that defense. It looks extensive tho. I'll have to read it in a little bit.

Vengeance and revenge have been part of humanity for eons and this thesis is basically a dim exegisis of Borges' 'Deutches Requiem'.

^^^

ugh i just spent a lot of my lunch hour looking into the whole josh block firing fiasco, and it's all very washington-y and sick

that basic gist of it, as far as i get it, is that block, former aipac spokesman and resident conservative (i think?) at the democratic-leaning truman center, didn't a little more than just accuse some people of being anti-semites. he had a whole big file of quotes from all of these dem-progressive writers painting them as anti-semites and was pushing them on a conservative listserv. not just nutso atzmon types but people who are, or work for, washington liberals in good standing. so basically the whole town turned on him.

glenn greenwald has several hundred words on it if you're interested

Mearsheimer's defense is pretty good

the guy who said hitler had some good ideas had some good ideas too. what?

Yeah he pretty much destroys Cohen and Goldberg's points.

Without going a bunch more into this bc I don't really want to spend significantly arguing about Mearsheimer - his defense is more serious than I gave him credit for, and in that particular piece he comes off as perhaps more nuanced than the impression the Commentary article gave. At the same time, some of his critiques are kinda disingenuous and I can never help but feel like his tone is a really clever guy who is good at "just asking questions" without ever addressing the subtexts of some of those questions. If he can't see how some of the assertions he makes (or that MANY of his commenters seem to think he's making) would be terribly upsetting to Jewish people, then he's particularly myopic. If he can, he's cruel.

Thats' why I said that that Talk of the Nation I heard with him and someone like Cohen was eventually unlistenable - they talked past each other and gave themsleves every permission for exageration and mischaracterization. I was largely sympathetic to him but then he'd say something so tone-deaf I'd wince.

I strongly recommend not reading the commentary to that piece btw.

i kind of get why hawks for israel would want to write pieces based on all the sick internet comment box garbage they run into. i mean, we all do the same on the corner and elsewhere. you wonder how prevalent the attitudes really are.

Although I did learn this from the comments which is actually kinda hilarious in a "rebellious kid badgering his teacher" sorta way:

"Goldberg says that Atzmon's book suggests that historians reopen the question of whether or not the Medieval Blood Libels had any basis in fact."

No, actually, that accusation appears to be completely baseless.

Goldberg clearly did not read the book, and THAT particular accusation was culled from a blog called "Harry's Place", where that blogger had himself culled this quote from the book:

"It seems I didn’t learn the necessary lesson because when we studied the middle age blood libels, I again wondered out loud how the teacher could know that these accusations of Jews making Matzo out of young Goyim’s blood were indeed empty or groundless. Once again I was sent home for a week. In my teens I spent most of my mornings at home rather than in the classroom."

That's pretty fucked up. :/

http://www.theonion.com/articles/the-israeli-conflict-is-far-too-nuanced-and-comple,11576/

Hollywood is cannuck now anyway, isn't it? Flappy-headed bastards.

like ilxuk and the tories

LOL guy in Ireland thinks Tories discriminated against

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/89404/sounding-off/

If what Rosenberg and the others on the left want is a debate—by which I understand them to mean a debate about the wisdom of a war with Iran, and about the proper role of the U.S.-Israel relationship—great. The left, I think, will win that debate on the merits, because it recognizes that if Israel is to survive as a Jewish democracy living in peace beside a free Palestine, an assertive United States has to pressure a recalcitrant Israel to come to its senses, especially about the insanity of attacking Iran.

But that debate will be shut down and sidetracked by using a term that Charles Lindbergh or Pat Buchanan would be comfortable using. I can’t co-sign that. The attempt to kosherize “Israel Firster” is an ugly rationalization. It shouldn’t matter that the American Jewish right proliferates the term “anti-Israel.” The easiest way to lose a winnable argument is to get baited into using their tactics. I don’t fetishize false civility; bullies ought to get it twice as bad as they give. People disagree, so they should argue. Shouting is healthier than shutting up.

Call me a squish or a sellout or a concern troll. Whatever. But if you can’t be forceful without recalling some of the ugliest tropes in American Jewish history, you’re doing it wrong.

i've always liked spencer ackerman, will read

that is one of the worst magazine graphics i've seen in a while tho

I like his tone

"New antisemitism is the concept that a new form of antisemitism has developed in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, emanating simultaneously from the far-left, radical Islam, and the far-right, and tending to manifest itself as opposition to Zionism and the State of Israel. The concept generally posits that much of what purports to be criticism of Israel by various individuals and world bodies, is, in fact, tantamount to demonization, and that, together with an alleged international resurgence of attacks on Jews and Jewish symbols, and an increased acceptance of antisemitic beliefs in public discourse, such demonization represents an evolution in the appearance of antisemitic beliefs."

that had been bugging me for some time, glad i learned about that concept today.

:(

rolling 'is this anti-semitic' thread

i'm as much of a WE ARE CREATED BY THE DISCOURSE, DO YOU SEE humanities twat as anyone but saying that "the concept" posits such-and-such is doing some interesting work here

I keep winding up watching youtube videos and reading youtube comments that I should probably just not be watching at all, but I'm noticing a kind of rhetoric that I'm starting to get very uncomfortable with although I once thought it was harmless -- "I'm not anti-semitic, I'm anti-zionist." I used to feel like, "yeah, that's fair, of course you can be against the idea of a jewish state without being anti-jewish," and I still feel that way, except that now I see that the line is often followed with fairly scary stuff about how it's the "zionists" who control the banks, the money supply, force the US to fight wars, drink blood, whatever. I haven't changed my mind about criticism of israel or anything, but I think that the attempt to draw up a categorical bad guy is always a dangerous way to go.

― pass the duchy pon the left hand side (musical duke) (Hurting 2), Monday, October 31, 2011 12:18 AM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/20/world/europe/gunman-kills-3-at-a-jewish-school-in-france.html?_r=1&hp

I have said this other places but 'zionist' is not a word that needs to exist in contemporary political dialogue and anyone who uses it isn't just making a neutral argument, they're using a word w/ a lot of weird associations in 2012. the best way to say "I'm against the idea of a jewish state" is by saying "I'm against the idea of a jewish state"

yeah this is fucked up. the killer successfully escaped too, hopefully they find him today. but what is there to say... 'hopefully he just picked a school at random to shoot at children and it just happened to be the jewish school'? there is ignorance and then there is being fucking deranged and evil.

--

france has become such an intolerant place in recent years and much of this election is being fought on anti-islam ideals of the right and I wonder if this has just spread over into general xenophobia, racism and hatred of anything different. Hopefully Sarkosy can fuck off and a more tolerant socialist government makes it (they are ahead in the polls iirc.) I don't think that would have anything to do with this, I just feel like venting.

There's a very strong suspicion that the killer is the same guy who killed some Foreign Legionnaires in Toulouse and Montauban recently.

Unlikely that the shooter is a Sarkozy supporter, that's for sure.