Is this anti-semitism?

tom, you read this thread sometimes right? thought about posting it to uk thread but u kno
http://www.timesofisrael.com/hate-crimes-against-jews-sharply-increasing-in-britain-audit-finds/

The National Antisemitic Crime Audit from the non-governmental group Campaign Against Antisemitism said that nearly 1,000 incidents were reported in 2015, representing a 25.7% increase in anti-Jewish crimes on 2014, and making it the worse year on record.

Data collected from all of the country’s police forces showed that during 2014, UK police forces recorded 746 anti-Semitic crimes; that figure rose to 938 in 2015.

Violent crime jumped to 196 incidents, a 50.8% rise, in 2015 and accounted for 20.3% all crime against Jews, compared to just 126 incidents representing 16.9% of violent crimes the year before.

However, “despite the growth in antisemitic crime, police forces charged 7.2% fewer cases in 2015 than in 2014, meaning that only 13.6% of cases resulted in charges being brought,” the CAA said. In total 138 charges were brought in 2014, but just 128 in 2015.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/04/opinion/the-british-lefts-jewish-problem.html?_r=0

without following this controversy very closely, this article seemed reasonable:

https://www.opendemocracy.net/uk/adam-ramsay/multiple-truths-of-labour-antisemitism-story

Was just reading that. v dismissive of the controversies and polls, mostly agree in the wider context as an attack on the current Labour leadership although Livingstone should've kept his mouth shut and not stepped in.

Also quite a few schoolboy errors eg. Diane Abbott is a shadow cabinet minister, not a 'spokesperson'.

Sorry - this is the piece I was talking about, from the open democracy too:

https://opendemocracy.net/uk/jamie-stern-weiner-norman-finkelstein/american-jewish-scholar-behind-labour-s-antisemitism-scanda

http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/14493679.Freedom_of_speech_row_as_YouTube_refuses_to_take_down_Scots_Nazi_Dog_video/

saw this bumped and thought it would be about #renegadejew

xp. lanarkshire is never in the news for a good reason

Not sure where to put this, but an old guy in the pub (moving around while homeless has been enlightening) just told me that people are called 'Jews' because you're 'due' them money. And he wasn't kidding - late 60s ex-miner, and, at a guess, semi-literate. I actually don't encounter much anti-semitism in Scotland, because there aren't many Jewish people here. I have a book on the history of he's in Scotland, which I remember being good - if I can find it when I get a place I'll recommend it.

not really a question mark on this one

i've noticed this phenomenon on twitter (could've sworn i posted about it here?), and that it wasn't searchable, but i didn't know its specific history

https://mic.com/articles/144228/echoes-exposed-the-secret-symbol-neo-nazis-use-to-target-jews-online

jesse singal critique's that article's interpretation somewhat: they're not trying to be secret about it

http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/06/understanding-the-alt-rights-jew-parentheses.html

stray apostrophe there, whups

Ha, I wasn't questioning the anti-semitism, just wanted to express my wonder at it, and this seemed the most likely thread. I've never heard of that connection, I wonder if it's of his own creation...

I never realized O was Jewish

yeah, the parenthesis thing was new to me.

watched this over the weekend, really heartbreaking the moral equivalencies people draw up to justify the actions of people they love:
http://www.pbs.org/independentlens/films/my-nazi-legacy/

In defence of the pub here, someone was drunk and going on about how the holocaust didn't happen and he was told to shut up or get thrown out. Which surprised me because it's fairly right wing/racist. Nice to know they have limits.

https://mic.com/articles/145105/coincidence-detector-the-google-extension-white-supremacists-use-to-track-jews#.oAbzmKkaM

alt-right antisemitism is spreading - the forward just closed the comment section for this article bc it was literally all hate speech + holocaust denial memes in the comment section

this is fascinating: http://www.nybooks.com/daily/2016/06/06/the-first-anti-jewish-caricature/

Google bans plug-in that picks out Jews.

i think alt-right antisemites are a bunch of cowardly anonymous online pieces of shit who amount to nothing in the real world and i don't really want to give them a second of my attention or focus but i do want to say two [i think obvious] things about their jew-locater program: 1. they think they're so fucking clever w/ their goebbels quote (the paragraph beginning w/ "The Jew is immunized...") - I see it all over the place in memes and quotes. obv they're too fucking stupid though to realize that jews are frightened of being named on lists as jews not because they've been "found out," but bc they know that ppl don't make lists of Jews just for edification's sake - it's the first step to acting against jews, and relatedly, 2. what kind of idiot white supremacist needs an app to know who is jewish -- all these so-called hidden jews have jewish last names, are involved w/ jewish organizations, and are publicly proud of being jewish. wow good for u you discovered that mr. rosenblum is a jew - i guess you really found him out you brilliant antisemite you.

it's the same sort of circle-jerk in-joke that characterizes the entirety of 4chan, etc. it's not about efficacy but about ingroup snark.

The thing is, as a Jew, I actually already can see the parentheses around other Jews without a special extension, not just around their names, but around their actual IRL faces.

when you think about it, aren't we ALL jews, really?

i thought those were ears

Lol took me a sec xp

Mordy and goole looking strangely goyish on thread

Under the logic of the anti-semite, the Ashkenazi Jew is merely a white man with a mental disorder adopting something akin to a black Israelite identification that leads him to other-ize himself in white society. This propels him to subversive attitudes toward that society. As such, identifying Jews is a matter of "belling the cat." Of course, the anti-semitism itself would tend to counter-productively entrench Jewish identity, but I suppose once one discovers "the 'truth' about the Jews," one tends to ring the alarm bells rather than calmly think about tactics.

As such, the parenthesis don't seem to be about making a list of Jews, it's about emphasizing the Jewishness of people that they feel have an anti-white agenda ie promoting mass immigration, miscegenation, liberal policies of racial recompense, and also other attitudes that they feel are damaging to traditional society such as gay tolerance, feminism, and trans-acceptance. That's the reason it was called the "coincidence detector," as in "why are all of these people promoting this liberal anti-white agenda Jewish?" --- "Oh just a coincidence goy."

Of course, to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay, whites who adopt these "subversive" attitudes are dismissed as "shabbos goy."

Interesting. I have definitely seen the immigration thing come up a lot in that context, as though Jews are the driving force behind it (nevermind that Sheldon Adelson backs Trump). I haven't seen the Jew-as-confused-white-man thing though, that's a new one. Is that really the dominant white nationalist thinking these days, cuz that's really, really different from the thinking of their Nazi predecessors.

ime the false consciousness argument is a minority opinion in the white supremacist movement and not shared by major figures like david duke or kevin mcdonald. i also think xp you're overlooking the meaning of that goebbel's quote which i think definitely implies my interpretation (that the jews are trying to stay hidden in society) and not merely pointing out the coincidence - though i agree there's an aspect as that as well. also you're leaving out another piece imo which is the idea that while progressive western jews are encouraging miscegenation through mass immigration and racial equality, at the same time right-wing jews are promoting ethno-supremacist ideologies in israel vis-a-vis immigration, the wall, etc. of course this implies that progressive jews and right-wing jews are working together on a hypocritical political platform and aren't just u kno different ppl with different opinions. interestingly tho i do think this anxiety gets to some major faultlines in western discourses that are looming atm in terms of indigenous rights, who has the right to their country, what are a people's obligations to other cultures, etc, so it's not surprising that like other major discourse shifts in the past the Jew finds himself in the middle once again and blamed for it from all sides.

saw a dude on twitter with the dn (((.)))(((.))) lmao

I don't know how popular the false consciousness narrative is, I just recently came across it in a very vivid comment on the Atlantic website from one of the Right Stuff trolls.

I don't want to split hairs over the rationale for the coincidence detector, but I don't think it's a question to them of whether Jews are hiding or out in the open. I really think it's about "red-pilling" people on anti-semitism. If every time you see someone advocating "degeneracy" or "subversion," it is pointed out that that person is Jewish, it's going to have an effect on people. So their line of thinking goes.

A Brief Introduction to Pro Holocaust Twitter

This is so depressing. Jonathan Weisman from NYT left twitter yesterday. In the tweets leading up to the one I linked here, he shows how twitter did not find all this garbage a violation of its terms...

"Cucks", ugh, I hope that never makes it way across the Atlantic.

there's plenty of misogynist fucks in the UK, but that word takes a really special kind of misogynist fuck to apply

The gamer-PUA-neonazi axis is something I never could have dreamed up prior to the internet.

xp term is intensely racialized in what seems a US-specific way, like, it doesn't just mean 'lol ur the type of guy whose wife fucks other men', it always carries sense of 'ur the type of guy who allows his wife to be defiled by animalistic racial inferiors'. For whatever reason, for all that we have plenty racists and misogynists here, that angle doesn't seem to grip so much.

Perhaps the historical lack of actual jim crow/anti miscegenation laws within Britain itself has some effect on the tone of race-hate here as compared with US. Mind you, we copy all our culture wholesale from the US these days, so I'm sure the term will popularize itself here shortly.

cool that Atlantic dude finds time to equate this Streicher level stuff with "the anti-semitism of the far-left which frequently masquerades as 'anti-zionism'" never a bad time to exercise that hobby horse

a ton of the wall-to-wall coverage i saw of the recent livingstone incident was explicitly apologetics about how he was not actually saying anything antisemitic, but i think, as long as we're detouring here for a moment, it's interesting how jews are so often the referent group for what it looks like when bigotry /is/ taken seriously when talking about disparate cases that have nothing to do with them (like someone in connection w/ this case might have noted that jewish places + events have been under extreme vigilance for years now - i've mentioned before on ilx how disconcerting it is dropping yr kids off at a school w/ an armed guard in front bc jewish schools in the neighborhood that week received bomb threats, but instead the discussion is "hey how come those jews get taken seriously" when also 'jewish hysteria' is also v much a serious trope). anyway, whatever.

this is the appropriate place for this conversation i think as posting about it in light of the pulse attack is just more of the same - but anyway i wanted to add that obv this idea has a lot to do w/ the form antisemitism takes which is a conspiracy about the powerful - so it fits that there's an assumption that jews are taken seriously (even while they're simultaneously making it up). schraub makes the pt in one of the links i posted in the other thread that likely every group thinks other groups get more attention than them bc none of them see all the behind the scenes work it took to get the establishment to recognize what was at issue, etc. i've definitely heard this before - treesh mentioned oberlin and i've heard ppl say "if there was an associate professor like karega using classical anti-black tropes the way she was using antisemitic ones they'd for sure be fired by now, or at least not defended by the students," which is this entire dynamic running in the opposite direction.

and tom, re livingstone i don't know how to quantify the level of apologetics but the whole havara agreement becoming a major part of the story existed exclusively to justify his comments. "no, you see he was referring to a real historical event," etc while it was obv simultaneously a misrepresentation of the event in question and totally not relevant to whatever nonsense he was saying.

As regards the specifics I mentioned in the other thread, I was completely wrong - I embarrassingly hadn't watched the video of Owen Jones, but now I've read the transcript - it was he himself who brought out the synagogue as the top-of-his-head comparison, which I agree is interesting and a little depressing.

"likely every group thinks other groups get more attention than them bc none of them see all the behind the scenes work it took to get the establishment to recognize what was at issue, etc."

this is true.

more so today when you have so many different groups living together in a country like the uk (i would go into personal experience of this, but i cant imagine it would come to any good).

perhaps not the thread for it, but it reminds me a bit of the recent MIA comment about saying how it is okay to say #blacklivesmatter, but less so, to say #muslimlivesmatter, and how that angered a lot of people.

The way I read it, he wasn't saying "you would care more if this was Jews," he was saying "if this happened in a Jewish house of worship, it would be obvious that it was targeting Jews, yet this happened in a gay club and you're not recognizing that gays were being targeted."

i gotta run out but i just wanted to add in response to hurting's comment in the other thread that his comment only makes sense if you ignore all the times antisemitism is excused as antizionism, including literal attacks on synagogues (cf that attack on the paris synagogue a couple years ago).

like they were saying "gays were targeted as gays in the broader context of an attack on our freedom in general" which is ignoring the particularistic in favor of the general. the argument that an attack on jews isn't antisemitism but rather anti-zionism isn't the exact same kind of syllogism but it's similar - a deflection into broader terms that ignores the particulars of the victimized group

"likely every group thinks other groups get more attention than them bc none of them see all the behind the scenes work it took to get the establishment to recognize what was at issue, etc."

This is something I think about a lot and that gives me minor head cramps at times. It sort of bumps me up against the limits of liberal/progressive ideology, bc at some point a minority group only gets anything through the use of some channel of power or other. Nothing is given freely.

Like, even though I have problems with the ADL at times, they are partly responsible for me living in an environment where I'm not constantly experiencing obvious antisemitism. We have that partly because we organized and fought for it, or our ancestors did anyway.

like they were saying "gays were targeted as gays in the broader context of an attack on our freedom in general" which is ignoring the particularistic in favor of the general. the argument that an attack on jews isn't antisemitism but rather anti-zionism isn't the exact same kind of syllogism but it's similar - a deflection into broader terms that ignores the particulars of the victimized group

― Mordy, Monday, June 13, 2016 11:08 AM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I understand what you're getting at but the analogy doesn't really work, in fact it kind of goes in the wrong direction. You're comparing a situation where someone wants to over-universalize the victims into a situation where they want to over-particularize them or guilt them by association.

to be able to take offence, and have that offence recognised, is a power of sorts, if a not particularly productive or positive power (though hey, most people will take whatever power they can), hence why even middle class white men want to act as though they can have it bad...