Is this anti-semitism?

there's a gradient, like David Baddiel pointed out in his radio bit, but why there's a gradient or whether there ought to be is a different question?

i think the "please don't use this word even if you're trying to be positive" argument is pretty fair at this point

made me wonder about what percentage of a group has to take serious offence at a word before the law decides to step in tho - not that i'm denying that this is an offensive word that people should take offence at

Any combination of words intended to harass or intimidate on the basis of race would be covered, even if those words weren't inherently offensive outside of that context.

idk why or whether there ought to be, and everything depends on context, but i mean i couldnt argue that 'paddy' was in any way as unacceptable as the obvious ones. i wouldn't consider that yid is either, though it's hardly for me to define that one way or the other, and this is probably why this is a greyer area.

PFA boss Gordon Taylor has told him to toughen up. Taylor said: "It belittles racism to compare the two issues. It is just an opportunity for someone to have a go in same way as if you are bald or fat.

"Dave should be proud of his hair. It makes him stand out if he is having a good game and he could always dye it if he wants."

Simon Cheetham, who chairs Red and Proud, said: "I have no sympathy for Dave Kitson. I think he should get a grip on himself and stop whingeing. I have to say he comes across as slightly pathetic, a ginger whinger.

"Come on, everyone with red hair gets some stick. Okay, so I have never had 20,000 people shout at me, but we just get on with it.

"He should be proud of having a red head and moaning about abuse is not doing us redheads any favours."

just cos it was bumped today

You can't prosecute or censor words as hateful regardless of context, otherwise you'd be censoring rap albums and concerts, or anyone reclaiming anything. You can't say it's okay if group X says it but not group Y either; that might be a useful shorthand for identifying whether it's offensive or not, but it obviously doesn't work across-the-board. (Spurs; Paul Elliott)

Where Baddiel is most persuasive imo is that Spurs adopting the word inevitably leads to abuse which might or might not be anti-semitic, but tbh what's the point in even attempting that distinction? It's clearly abuse of abusive intent, using ethnic language, why bother parsing whether it's actual racism in intent, isn't that almost beside the point? (Suarez; not John Terry)

The basic problem is the fluidity of language - 'yids' means Jews but it also means Spurs fans, and the meanings aren't entirely separate things.

http://www.jewishmuseum.org.uk/football

Morty: if you're nice you might be able to get some literature/pamphlets from them. Could be pretty interesting.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/04/antisemitism-does-not-always-come-hitler-salute

A piece on the exhibition conrad linked to above

http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/172613#.UlS4LhZmQZY

Howard Jacobson: “The syllogism goes like this. Not all critics of Israel are anti-Semites. If I am a critic of Israel, therefore I am not an anti-Semite. In this way has anti-Zionism become an inviolable space. Question it and you are deemed to have cried anti-Semitism, and since to cry anti-Semitism is a foul, no position from which it is rational to question anti-Zionism remains allowable. By the infernal logic of this magic circle, the anti-Zionist is doubly indemnified, firstly against any criticism of his position whatsoever, since the status of such criticism has been reduced to that of 'tactic', and secondly against the original accusation of anti-Semitism, which anti-Zionism cancels out."

He added, "I don't myself argue that anti-Zionism is a method for circumventing Jew-hating while indulging it, but were that to have been the intention, it could not have been better planned.”

Sometimes I feel like this entire thread should just be compressed into a single "yes" post from mordy

yes

how'd that make it any different from any of the 'is this ?' threads tbf

lol well like apart from mordy saying 'yes' i guess

The syllogism goes like this. Not all critics of Israel are anti-Semites. If I am a critic of Israel, therefore I am not an anti-Semite.

uh no that's not a syllogism and it's not a valid deduction either.

wait, it might be close to a syllogism -- just remove the "if". it's still not valid.

he seems to be turning the statement

Not all critics of Israel are anti-Semites.

into

All critics of Israel are not anti-Semites.

which you can't do. I'm not sure what his point is.

It's bollocks basically

I think the point is that this kind of faulty syllogism is used to defend antisemitism masked as antizionism. The speaker's point exactly is that this kind of syllogism doesn't actually work, but it's still commonly used as an argumentative trick. I guess he should've called it a "false syllogism" or something like that, but the point is pretty clear to me.

It's poorly expressed but what he's getting it is plainly true: one extreme claims that all criticism of Israel is anti-semitic while the other claims that none of it is. Both are false but feed off each other.

OK.

Have we had this one yet:

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/11/ban-male-circumcision-antisemitic

One thing I've got out of this thread, by the way, is to see a lot of bullshit down in the comments of that CiF piece that I wouldn't have picked up on before. A lot of talk about Modern Europe and Barbarism That Has No Place, and The Bronze Age.

Almost a quarter of respondents in a major survey of Jews from nine European countries said they avoid visiting places and wearing symbols that identify them as Jews for fear of anti-Semitism.

Fear of wearing a kippah and other identifiably Jewish items was especially strong in Sweden, where 49 percent of 800 respondents said they refrained from such actions, in a survey conducted this year among more than 5,100 Jews by the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights.

In France, 40 percent of approximately 1,200 Jews said they avoided wearing such items in public, followed by Belgium with 36 percent, according to preliminary results from the survey, obtained by JTA.

In total, 22 percent of respondents said they avoided “Jewish events or sites” because of safety concerns.

In Hungary, 91 percent of more than 500 respondents said anti-Semitism has increased in the past five years. That figure was 88 percent in France; 87 percent in Belgium and 80 percent in Sweden. In Germany, Italy and Britain, some 60 percent of respondents identified a growth in anti-Semitism, compared to 39 percent in Latvia.

saw on some episode of Bizarre Foods (lol) the other day that Hungary has the largest per capita population of Jews in Europe, which I would not have expected given their own mini-Holocaust. Jewish quarter looked pretty awesome tho.

Has the third largest synagogue in the world!

i went to school w/ a kid whose grandfather, a poet, was one of the 1,685 jews that kastner negotiated to escape hungary

shakey you'll be happy to hear that regarding this controversy - http://www.salon.com/2013/10/22/were_the_onions_anti_semitic_slurs_fair_game/ - i have no criticism of the onion's article

wow, i'm a jew and somewhat sensitive to thoughtless anti-semitism but it didn't even occur to me to take offense at that onion piece

the only actual offended person that's mentioned in any of the articles about this is some unnamed person's twitter...theres prob already a thread about this but the new media way of trying to gin up controversy about something by writing an article faux-innocently asking "Gee..Is there a controversy about this?" is deeply irritating

http://forward.com/articles/185720/will-we-ever-be-forgiven-for-the-holocaust/

Wait we've talked about this piece already iirc

yeah, but this is the first time i saw a complete transcript. i guess i really need to read the finkler question

here's something new

https://twitter.com/DaftLimmy/status/394108118126575616

lol Mordy not gettin jokes

that was my fault for sending that to mordy without contextualizing the fact he posts all sorts of confused shit on his twitter with varying degrees of sincerity, though he could probably do with avoiding antisemitic tropes when clowning russell brand fans

"joekz"

Tough for a bro

Most confusing anti-semitism ever: http://gawker.com/crappy-bigot-beat-up-hebrew-speaking-men-for-speaking-1453315223

A Wisconsin man who thought he was committing a run-of-the-mill hate crime against two Spanish-speaking men was probably red in the face from shame after learning that his victims were actually speaking Hebrew.

According to the official criminal complaint, Dylan Grall of Janesville was strolling around early Sunday morning when he encountered two men, aged 22 and 23, speaking a foreign language he believed to be Spanish.

The 23-year-old then swore at the men and "demanded they speak English," leading to a confrontation "where the victims were both struck in the face."

One of the victims reportedly fell to the ground while the other had his eye "nearly swollen shut."

Grall, who was charged with battery and two counts of Hate Crime, denied hitting the men, but acknowledged telling them to stop speaking Spanish and start speaking English.

An eyewitness later confirmed the attack to police and said the men were speaking Hebrew.

was probably red in the face from shame after learning that his victims were actually speaking Hebrew.

was he tho

yeah, he was a real redskin afterwards.

(xp) Yeah surely beating up some Jews would top beating up some Spaniards to this dude?

certainly i wouldnt be assuming much about him in terms of where he draws his own personal shame boundaries, yeah

Ha gawker's all like beating up on hispanics is cool but lol at this guy getting racism wrong

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/local/wp/2013/10/30/livingsocial-apologizes-for-adding-dreidels-to-greed-room-at-party/

I have to believe that it was an accident where the dreidels were part of the games in the room but still, wow

Is the person on the US side of this 1949 Soviet propaganda poster supposed to be Jewish?

http://i.imgur.com/ersffTt.jpg

idk, it's a weird image -- what's wrapped around his face?

he has a tootache, too much Coca Cola