Is this anti-semitism?

Could be they are just really really really stupid and don't know wtf they are doing.

i'm reluctant to believe in nefarious conspiracy, or some kind of expert message calibration to thrill the nazis out there. i think it's better to focus on a habit of mind. trump and his people are historically and politically illiterate. the statement was terrible in a bunch of other ways beyond its non-specificity about the event it commemorated. trump's mind cannot look at victimization honestly. stating simple facts like who did what to whom and why is not something his character can allow.

i mean the first sentence is "It is with a heavy heart and somber mind that we remember and honor the victims, survivors, heroes of the Holocaust." heroes... of the holocaust? someone wrote that?

the last paragraph (of 3) is "In the name of the perished, I pledge to do everything in my power throughout my Presidency, and my life, to ensure that" blah blah i mean, what the fuck is this?

it's all vague storybook generalities that lead to self-aggrandizement. some stuff happened, i'm the hero here

And of course the movement white supremacists are over the moon about it, since their Holocaust denial has long since moved on from "there's no such thing as Auschwitz" to "the Nazis killed lots of people, war is terrible, look how the Poles and Russians suffered, somehow the sneaky Jews in the media managed to make it all about them like they always do, trying to drum up sympathy from gullible whites"

Hard to believe that Tom, this shameful speech has Bannon written all over it. He's dangerous, not stupid.

the point is, i'm pretty sure there's nobody in the white house whose attitude is "the jews are a cancer and need to be exterminated," but most of the history of anti-semitism is just not like that (one reason the jews of europe were taken by surprise) and yet is still pretty fucking terrible

goole otm

Yeah. And also what symsymsym said. Trump is far down the line that admitting the persecution of non-Christisn minorities exists would be a "gotcha" moment for the press

yup goole otm

I'm sorry pretty certain Steve Bannon has read a history of Germany in the 1930s, he's been meaning to check out the other volumes, but this is just such a page-turner.

becoming sadly regular today but worth mentioning that our local JCC in wynnewood (where a few friends send their kids) got their v own bomb threat today

My gf teaches at a JCC and is increasingly freaked out about this. Feel like the FBI's investigative route toward solving this string of crimes is pretty straightforward (seeing as how they keep targeting the same organization over and over) so I'm not sure they're doing a fucking thing about it.

i don't have much to say about it. a graveyard in philly got hit this week too. these are pretty cowardly acts - terrorizing children and the dead.

i guess i just feel pretty numb about the whole thing.

http://www.tabletmag.com/jewish-news-and-politics/226013/sarsour-odeh-anti-trump-movement

http://www.clickhole.com/blogpost/if-my-son-and-his-friends-are-going-deface-jewish--5690

Do Jews have to make common cause with people who want to kill them?

A lot more of my relatives would have been murdered if we hadn't made common cause with Stalin so my answer is yes

last few paragraphs are p odious. Women, black people, latinos etc. have had to make common cause w racists/misogynists etc. in the Democratic Party since forever. There's always gonna be people on the left I think are insane or misguided or too strident or (possibly even) legit dangerous, but I'm not gonna lose too much sleep over it. Fringes of political movements are always like that.

xp Or let me put it another way -- it's not actually up to us who we make common cause with. People who are fighting Trumpism are fighting Trumpism. They are on the same side as us whether we want them or not. This is not Iran, we're not going to hold off Trump only to be ruled by the BDS/Sharia Law party.

otm

on an even less pleasant note i took a brief survey of some of our country's most illustrious antisemitic forums and they all agree to a man w/ the POTUS that the grave desecrations are probably a false flag attack. i wonder if any of the pos jews i know who are still defending this human garbage will agree with this conclusion.

I'm sure our man Jared does

i took a brief survey of some of our country's most illustrious antisemitic forums

I have to say, you have an admirably strong stomach, Mordy.

On a much less important level: would it be insensitive for me to call my dog's 13th birthday a 'bark mitzvah'? I wouldn't make him learn Hebrew or anything, just a name.

lol you have my jewproval for that

xp

has he been circumcised tho

I've given him lots of dog bris-cuits.

sounds like a great kohenine companion

I can't find a link but somewhere there is an instagram for :Kugel the Jewish Goldendoodle," who has some sweet Purim costumes.

fwiw there seems to some question of whether antisemitic incidents are actually increasing or whether there's just more attention being paid to them cf oppenheimer in wapost + frantzman. neither of whom i should make clear are remotely apologists for antisemitism or afaik for trump. i certainly don't think the current events and administration have been helpful and finding out that there is a correlation between increased hate crimes against jews and the trump admin would fit w/ my own biases + understandings. i was happy that trump unambiguously denounced antisemitism in his speech last night tho i do wonder about the ultimate value of that - he's stoking bigotry and anti-muslim bigots and anti-immigrant bigots are also anti-semites. you can't cleave one bigotry from another. there's a quote that i can't remember either the source of or its direct wording but it's something like "hate doesn't always begin w/ the jews but it always eventually gets there." (obviously the hatred that trump is stirring up is horrific enough even if he could somehow "protect" the jews from the wrath of the mob - but just speaking to the presumably measurable question of whether antisemitism is increasing in the US or not.)

I did see something on Twitter pointing out that his words ("Recent threats targeting Jewish Community Centers and vandalism of Jewish cemeteries, as well as last week's shooting in Kansas City, remind us that while we may be a Nation divided on policies, we are a country that stands united in condemning hate and evil in all its forms") weren't actually saying "Anti-semitism is bad", and that this was some form of Nazi-whistle - though I think they're probably reaching.

http://www.theonion.com/article/expert-international-jewish-conspiracy-has-never-b-55354

OMG they just arrested someone for the bomb threats and it's a former Intercept writer!

This story is really, really weird. http://abcnews.go.com/US/man-accused-making-threats-jewish-community-centers-arrested/story?id=45884069

this is the craziest shit ever. i hope ppl realize that this doesn't mean that bc he's nominally on the left it's fake antisemitism. it's left-wing antisemitism; it's not like intercept types have a big love affair w/ the jews.

Juan Thompson was fired from the Intercept for fabrication.

tweet from three days ago:

@JuanMThompson

The @SecretService visited me looked at my tweets, questioned my politics b/c some awful white woman I date reported me. I won't be silenced

xp he appears to be kind of an MRA type, too? I'm not sure there's a real clear left/right divide amongst those types, but idk. In any case, that still leaves a lot of these unexplained.

tweet from Feb 27:

Juan M. Thompson‏ @JuanMThompson Feb 27

Another week, another round of threats against Jewish ppl. In the middle of the day, you know who's at a JCC? Kids. KIDS.

+ obviously this dude hasn't been traveling the country desecrating cemeteries. still it's insane that at least some of these lead back to a former intercept guy. it's like this shit is scripted. (oh wait.)

This is great news. My gf just had to attend a JCC staff meeting with police last night that did nothing but freak her out more than she already was.

As far as I can tell, he's not implicated in the big national wave of calls, it sounds like he's an insane stalker who, seeing how much publicity the bomb threats were getting, decided to call in some more threats using his ex-girlfriend's name. What a fucking shit cocktail of terrible.

+ obviously this dude hasn't been traveling the country desecrating cemeteries.

Yeah, probably not, but he was arrested in St. Louis, where the first cemetery attack occurred.

http://imgur.com/sUWCRyL.jpg

fuck people forever

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

i sincerely think we could be headed towards a better equilibrium in jewish-muslim relations in America in the face of a common threat

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2017/03/02/jews-rally-support-burned-florida-mosque-18-time/98630894/

Please tell me that tweet is a bad joke and not the end of a thread, please tell me that tweet is a bad joke and not the... Oh for fucks sake.

lots of MAGA types on twitter triumphantly posting screenshots of this headline from the other day:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C6Ak86lVAAAMrXE.jpg

the article is here, under a revised headline, but otherwise unaltered, Juan Thompson being arrested doesn't really contradict anything it says

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/28/trump-suggests-anti-semitic-acts-might-faked-make-movement-look-bad/

Looks like this has made it's way to the greater Cleveland area: http://www.clevescene.com/scene-and-heard/archives/2017/03/06/swastika-carved-into-door-of-lorain-synagogue

http://forward.com/fast-forward/366240/end-jewish-privilege-poster-circulates-on-chicago-college-campus/

it scans to me like a right-wing production (the use of the word goyim, discussing 'jews' forthright rather than using euphemisms) but it's interesting how it utilizes left-wing memes (the top 1%, 'privilege') to make its argument. this reminds me of the jacobin piece about compatibility btwn identity studies concepts & far-right racialists/racists.

'the top 1%' is hardly and identity studies concept, though.