Is this anti-semitism?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roth_%28surname%29

it is a common name in Scotland

Uh, no it isn't!

imagine saying that US muslims "pay the price" for ISIS violence with harrassment. oh wait, plenty of people—on the right-wing—would say something like that. pot, meet kettle.

― he quipped with heat (amateurist), Thursday, March 5, 2015 8:32 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is the sort of thing that has me coming to the position that Islamophobia and anti-Semitism (in the US) are m/l two sides of the same oppressive coin, with this fixation on the inscrutable motives of these others and holding the collective accountable for the crimes of a few, often violently and openly.

and if Muslims and Jews are subjecting one another to such prejudices in this country then there's a gap to be bridged.

(I like to imagine that there's conversations to be had about the relationships between Muslims and Jews as immigrant & diasporic peoples in the West that have nothing to do with Israel, it's a nice dream isn't it?)

those conversations do happen! but they don't make the news.

been awhile since I've met/made any immigrant muslim friends but for awhile I had a coworker who was married to yemeni immigrant and I loved hanging out w that guy at work functions, v smart, v interesting cat. those conversations can be had! but it's hard and rare.

(we did not make the news)

I'd actually attribute a lot of the evolution of my views on Israel to my teenaged friendship with a single Palestinian dude. I think there is a lot to be said for having a real person in front of you who seems similar to you in every way except views on Israel (or anything) to make you think that there might be non-crazy reasons to have different views on Israel (or any other subject) from your own.

I mean up until that point I was pretty much spouting echo-chambered talking points. The fact that he was cool and not hateful and yet had totally reasonable responses to a lot of my talking points started the process of me understanding that some of them were just talking points.

"up until that point" being only up until age 13, to be fair, not like I was all that politically sophisticated yet.

i grew up in a milieu that included a lot of jews (i'm one of them) along with a bunch of palestinian intellectuals, for what that's worth.

(this is in the US, not the middle east.)

I want to express my frustration with my right-wing friends on Facebook who are uncritically posting articles about how muslims are bottling and selling the blood of Christians to drink. It is utterly beyond me how anyone can be aware of the long history and current liveliness of anti-Semitism (and these guys, like me, are) and simultaneously take "they drink Christian blood!" as a credible accusation.

In fact I feel like it's borderline anti-Semitic to participate in the perpetuation of the idea that drinking Christian blood for fun and profit is a thing that actually exists in the word.

i have never seen this - that's insane!

my FB friends in this vein like to source "JewsNews" for material of this kind -- feel free to go there yourself, I'm scared to.

in this vein
hah

http://i.imgur.com/hF0iv4W.png

that's news to me

news Jews can use

http://www.politico.com/story/2015/03/cynthia-mckinney-dieudonne-115988.html

wow, cynthia mckinney a know-nothing anti-semitic moron, no long public record indicating that

birds of a feather...

Staff often found themselves with students they had zero authority over. I've read articles where it is "revealed" that Emwazi used "Jew" as a slur and went on anti-Semitic rants. This would be no revelation to anyone who went to the school. "Jew" was a standard insult. There was normally no conviction to this—it was teenage rebellion no different really to the "edgy" comments made in any other school. At Quintin Kynaston, however, these comments often went unchecked.

Pro-9/11 statements were also commonplace and teachers, often not from the local community, did not have the intellectual resources to tackle this rhetoric because it was totally outside of their experience. Many ignored it, some tried to curry favor by joining in. I remember a student calling a teacher a "Jew," and the teacher replied that it was the student who was the "Jew." Another teacher, totally at a loss at how to control the class, talked about 9/11 conspiracies, how it was an inside job—yes, "Sheikh Osama" had nothing to do with it.

yes, that is antisemitism

what is the context for that, nakhchivan?

maybe worth starting another thread on this subject so rubes stop posting that xp

http://www.vice.com/read/quintin-kynaston-jihadi-john-531

http://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/Attackers-yelling-we-will-kill-you-storm-synagogue-in-London-suburb-leave-worshipers-bloody-394684

Ellen Willis on anti-anti-zionism from 2003 but it easily could've been written yesterday:
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/181449/willis-anti-anti-zionist

Sure. Pete Beinart could have written it. Or anyone from J Street. Why is this surprising? The politics of the region are locked in a static cycle and so people are saying the same things in 2015 people said in 2003 because people see no way out of their present positions.

But just when I think Tablet speaks with only one voice on Israel they run something like this:

http://tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/189842/confessions-non-zionist-jew

Good for them for running it, even though I'm closer to Willis than I am to Gitlin on this. (I am a Zionist, after all.)

a piece I wrote about about an old haggadah I used to have and how "in every generation they rise against us to annihilate us" can resonate, even when Jews feel unprecedentedly safe + secure:
http://tabletmag.com/scroll/190077/jewish-power-and-jewish-powerlessness

Taffy Brodesser-Akner has a related piece that ran w/ mine in a package that's explicitly about Jews + privilege that I think is also good:
http://tabletmag.com/jewish-life-and-religion/190070/being-jewish-polite-society

(lol "also good" i just meant also relevant to this thread)

an excellent essay, mordy

thank you :)

✓

That was great, Mordy. I hadn't read your formal writing before.

"There is much talk going around now about so-called Jewish privilege"

Is there? I feel like there's a lot of talk about white privilege, which is something that Jews who are white (like me) have, but in no greater measure than do other white people, most of whom are Gentiles.

But more importantly, Mordy's piece is great. So I compliment Tablet yet again in this thread!

How inauspiciously this has begun, as sulphurous Peter Mandelson risks contaminating those too quick out of the traps to claim his “Blairite” mantle.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/may/12/labour-forget-blairism-radicalism-blair

Is there some kind of British Labor Party soul-searching thread this was accidentally not posted to, or does nakhchivan have some kind of argument for placement here? Otherwise I've wasted precious trolling minutes.

like i said, mordy

I keep forgetting this is a conversation between two people evidently.

[tiptoes out]

was nakchivan's post in english? google translate isn't helping me.

his post was a quote from the link

sulphur libel

toynbee has form in this regard iirc? she attracts spectacular amounts of bile from otherwise mild-mannered folk. i've never read anything of hers i've liked tbh - she seems fairly nasty