Is this anti-semitism?

it's a long book and there's a lot more. you probably have to have a strong constitution to make it all the way through.

you really find that offensive, rather than silly/pathetic?

i think the notes from underground protagonist is simultaneously pathetic + horrific and i guess i feel similar about the protagonist for prague cemetery? being silly/pathetic does not mean that it's not upsetting - after all isn't all anti-semitism pretty silly? the idea that ~12 million jews (%0.02 of world pop iirc?) are controlling governments, banks, hollywood... still destructive ideology.

you never hear about the young'uns of Zion

whippersnappers of zion

the welders

tweens of zion

A guy on a sales call just reassured me that he's not trying to jew me.

did you say "too late, I'm already Jewish"?

thought this might be a bump for the slow-learner english football pundit who described an error in a match last night as potentially being 'a holocaust'

the exact same thing has happened before i think, which suggests rather like 'rape' to mean 'physically dominate opponent', 'holocaust' to mean 'disastrous mistake' is part of football's private idiolect

John Galliano's new look

ajl nagl

such a bawbag

thats how he always dresses and wears his hair

You'd think the Post would know how to spell 'schmuck'.

Like when they called Ed Koch a "mench"

maybe they misspelled "menk"?

well this is fascinating and awful

http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/charles-krafft-is-a-white-nationalist-who-believes-the-holocaust-is-a-deliberately-exaggerated-myth/Content?oid=15995245

Owens was motivated to speak on Facebook after playing online chess with a close Jewish friend from Boston, who simply asked Owens why he had a friend like that. "I realized that I could not continue playing chess with Harvey unless I did something about Charlie—it became simple for me," Owens wrote to me in an e-mail. Owens made another, broader, important point, too: We should "not just blame Charlie for this but the entire arts community of Seattle which has proven to be soft-headed. As I said when I wrote about this, it would never happen in Brooklyn or Boston—people would just kick his ass down the block. But Seattle has a misguided kind of false tolerance going on here, so there is a lesson for all of us in this."

I am not so certain that this dude would get his ass kicked in Boston

fucking hell

good object lesson in being very suspicious of "ironic" bigotry in the first instance

like, the kara walker comparison doesn't work at all because krafft isn't jewish

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2013/feb/21/george-galloway-debate-israeli-oxford

urls i will not click #1 in a series

About the Eco book.

There's a feeling sometimes when someone is trying to write an antisemitic character, or an anti-black, or Islamophobic character, and that author isn't part of the group the character is supposed to hate, that the tropes and tics of that hatred are cliches, right?

For reference I also don't think American History X is very good, for the same reason.

I know I already mentioned this example, but such cliches can be used to great effect in capable hands. in lazier hands the results vary, of course.

http://www.jta.org/news/article/2013/02/24/3120356/house-subcommittee-convenes-anti-semitism-hearing

But, they say to me, the Jews have their own judges and laws. I respond that is your fault and you should not allow it. We must refuse everything to the Jews as a nation and accord everything to Jews as individuals. We must withdraw recognition from their judges; they should only have our judges. We must refuse legal protection to the maintenance of the so-called laws of their Judaic organization; they should not be allowed to form in the state either a political body or an order. They must be citizens individually. But, some will say to me, they do not want to be citizens. Well then! If they do not want to be citizens, they should say so, and then, we should banish them. It is repugnant to have in the state an association of non-citizens, and a nation within the nation. . . . In short, Sirs, the presumed status of every man resident in a country is to be a citizen.

For the longest time I thought Napoleon said this but it turns out it was Stanislas Marie Adelaide, comte de Clermont-Tonnerre.

Very much part of the unifying principle in French politics, an attitude which regularized administration and weights and measures but was pretty fatal to local cultures and languages. Bonaparte was generally pretty good to the Jews but very much in line with the philosophy above.

Cf. contemporary French tussling about Muslim women wearing hijab.

well if you're getting anticlerical you can't play faves

http://www.jewishjournal.com/cover_story/article/why_i_am_a_zionist

American and Israeli accounts of anti-Zionism have a tendency to portray modern Europe as slouching towards a Bethlehem of Jew-hatred, with far-left and far-right combining to bring about a return to the 1930s. I wouldn’t go that far. Anti-Zionism is certainly ubiquitous on the hard left, but in my experience is merely one component of a seamless, all-encompassing theory of the world that, if I may be cynical for a moment, revolves around three questions:

1. Which side is the United States on?

2. Which side has all the money/weaponry?

3. Which side, overall, has lighter skin?

Where all three questions generate the same answer, that answer is The Enemy. Where the answers are mixed or unclear, the result is abject confusion, as in the case of Syria. In the manner of a stopped clock, this formula will occasionally yield the correct position, as with South Africa (of which more later). More often, it’s a first-class ticket into the moral abyss. In the interests of balance, I should point out that a nontrivial percentage of right-wingers make use of the same three questions with the results inverted.

It is this dogmatic form of anti-imperialism, in my view, that most accounts for leftist hostility to the Jewish state. In Israel’s troubled early years, and in the long years of struggle before its foundation, Zionism was chiefly associated with the political left, to the extent that George Orwell could write in 1945 that “it was de rigueur among enlightened people to accept the Jewish case as proved and avoid examining the claims of the Arabs.” Only with Israel’s emergence as a regional superpower and staunch American ally did the worm turn; a sequence of events that also miraculously coincided with conservatives discovering their deep-seated affinity for the Jewish people.

as with South Africa (of which more later)

oh man i can't wait

basically he says that apartheid south africa being the last successful liberal fight accounts for its obsessive evocation re israel - past glories + all

i don't hold with people who call israeli policy 'apartheid' but you have to admit there's more similarities than that

this thread's been bugging me because i started reading an interesting book re: liberalism and multiculturalism the other week and i can't for the life of me remember what it was. but the intro was talking about the conflict between some liberal values and the values of religious or cultural communities within a state and saying that the book was an attempt to reconcile this conflict.

i think the apartheid connection is kinda spectacularly dumb tbh

Yeah, I think the apartheid comparison is only slightly more sophisticated than the nazi comparison.

http://www.cnn.com/2013/02/28/showbiz/joan-rivers-holocaust-joke/index.html?hpt=en_c2

I am filing this under "this isn't really happening, is it?"

yet another illustration of offensive jokes being even more offensive when they are pathetically unfunny

not funny but more anti-german than anti-semitic

it might be anti-semitic in that it doesn't consider the dead jews to be german

also it's a botched line, "looked hot" instead of just "hot"

I don't think the line was botched, and I don't think Rivers is anti-semitic. I think I'm just getting more conservative about humor as I get older. At least in so far as I consider the audience; i.e. everyone with a TV or an internet connection.

afaic joan rivers can tell whatever antisemitic jokes she wants. i totally accept her explanation that she's using humor for holocaust awareness. godspeed to her.

I am still boggling that someone complained that Joan Rivers was being anti-Semetic tbh; I'd react the same way if someone called Chris Rock a racist after his "black ppl vs n*****s" routine

yeah, she's a brooklyn jew ffs

the joke was INCREDIBLY crass tbh, but kind of incredible

can't really fuck with Joan Rivers

she knows exactly what she's doing with her material, for ex:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAD-ky3TYQk

https://twitter.com/SamiraIbrahim4/status/225613031277735937

idgi, is she claiming that someone hacked her twitter, and it wasn't her reveling in the bulgarian bombing?