Is this anti-semitism?

xp not unreasonable - i think the urge for punishment + expungement of moral contamination to be v understandable but i prefer rehabilitation + forgiveness as a general model for justice. vick served his time in prison and through his speech and actions demonstrated that he had repented from his former behavior and was striving to be a better person. in a field like sports where the stakes are so low modeling this sort of journey can i think be useful for pro-social transformation.

tbf he's a football player not a politician; my expectations are different.

He'd have still been hung out to dry.

I think if the Riley Cooper incident happened today he'd be cut pretty quickly so I don't think that's a fair yardstick for Jackson. No one's entitled to earn millions of dollars playing football if their employer would prefer not to associate itself with his commentary.

xpost

I generally agree with you, but abusing animals is psychopathic behavior.

https://www.theonion.com/redskins-kike-owner-refuses-to-change-team-s-offensive-1819575738

Hmm, yeah I don't really think that accomplishes what it sets out to, not good

And somehow I can't imagine them doing that with another ethnic group

I think the problem with it is that, while I get that they are trying to ironize the owner's stance, using slurs is by its nature an attack on an entire group, not just on the target individual. So the "taste of his own medicine" approach doesn't really work.

just realized that's like 7 years old fwiw

Abe Foxman agrees with you: https://www.adl.org/news/media-watch/onion-article-oversteps-bounds

And uses a racial slur in his letter to really drive the point home

I think the onion article is good, idk. It's just as anti-semitic as an Eli Valley cartoon

where is the slur in his letter?

It starts with an R

does the autoreplace still work on ilx?

Redskins

guess not

Jews are all rich!
Okay, and?
Jews control the banks!
Okay, and?

Go out get a job and become rich too, maybe even the CEO of a bank, hating on Jews won’t get you anywhere, and if you are too stupid or lazy to do so, blame yourself, not the Jews.

End of class.

— Reagan Battalion (@ReaganBattalion) July 15, 2020

Some very helpful stuff by "Reagan Battalion," thank you

That is anti-Semitic, yes

Indeed. On par with Trump stating that 'the only kind of people I want counting my money are little short guys that wear yarmulkes every day'.

It's incredible that I'd almost forgotten about that quote until I read yr post.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/celebrities/2020/07/15/viacomcbs-fires-nick-cannon-over-anti-semitic-remarks/5440835002/

Good on him for apologizing but that quote is still fucked up and – from a non-American perspective – a clear-cut, inexcusable instance of racist hate speech:

"The people that don’t have (melanin) are – and I'm going to say this carefully – a little less,” Cannon said. "When they didn't have the power of the sun, it started to deteriorate them so then, they’re acting out of fear, they’re acting out of low self-esteem, they’re acting out of a deficiency.”

Cannon continued: "So, therefore, the only way that they can act is evil. They have to rob, steal, rape, kill in order to survive. So then, these people that didn’t have what we have – and when I say 'we,' I speak of the melanated people – they had to be savages. … They’re acting as animals so they’re the ones that are actually closer to animals. They’re the ones that are actually the true savages."

Running with race as a social construct to further equality is a defensible stance but essentializing it will always be wrong as far as I'm concerned, regardless of intent.

Ah, the miracle of melanin! I haven't heard that one since the '90s.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/07/28/politics/david-perdue-jon-ossoff-takes-down-ad/index.html

Let's talk about the anti-semitism on the left some more, please.

is it possible to call something out in one instance without snarkily downplaying others

^^^ true left speaking.

You are right (of course).

the right does get away with murder on this issue, often literally

they want to make it about the left all the time but there’s no need to play along

Reading this on "Black Antisemitism"

https://newsocialist.org.uk/black-antisemitism-and-antiracist-solidarity/

like you read my mind, been thinking a lot about these issues since posters for the Blackhammer Organization started appearing in my 75% Black neighborhood. i'll let you do some searching, but Gazi Kodzo is the 'chief' of said organization, a splinter from the New Black Panther Party, and very recently wrote some absolutely despicable things about Anne Frank on the Twitter....but also made some necessary points about the way the education system works in the US, and how a philosemitism has been allowed to replace any sort of nuanced understanding of colonialism and the horrors of chattel slavery, particularly in a US context.

thanks a lot for posting.

so you're saying he "had some good points"

silby, before you attack me, perhaps you ought to read the article that was posted...which much more elegantly describes the way in which actually valid critique is mixed into vile anti-Semitism due to any number of complicating factors, most of which have to do with the WASP coupling of a false philosemitism with anti-Blackness.

Believe it or not, one can write something objectively vile and still make valid arguments after that vile statement! Kodzo wrote that many Black children in the US are never taught about the extent of the horrors of chattel slavery and the genocides that killed millions in Africa. He's right, and that should be corrected! But where he's wrong is in saying that people shouldn't have to learn about Anne Frank and the Shoah, as if the problem is that learning about one thing replaces learning about another, which is ridiculous on its face. If saying that he's partially right in one sense and fucking awful and wrongheaded in another sense goes beyond your moral understanding, then my apologies.

I read some of the article which, seemed fine. James Baldwin on this topic seems pretty relevant. Forgive me for not reeeeeeally caring what good points are made by vicious antisemites, though.

also like

how a philosemitism has been allowed to replace any sort of nuanced understanding of colonialism and the horrors of chattel slavery, particularly in a US context.

― blue light or electric light (the table is the table),

what the entire fuck is this

My inelegant way of trying to explain the way that philosemitism has been coupled with anti-Blackness in US racial discourse as well as the US racial imaginary. That is, an opposition was formed by those already existing as racialized White in the US between Jewish people and Black people, and the Jewish people were given some amount of White privilege as long as they did not band with Black people. It's the same playbook that Ignatiev talks about in re: the Irish, in many ways, the difference being that anti-Semitism is part and parcel of a conspiracist, flattening thinking about power and control in the US as elsewhere, whereas anti-Papist (and thus anti-Irish) tendencies have faded drastically over the years.

philosemitism

You clearly didn't read the article

I told you I didn't finish it!

I'm complaining about you

Too many prominent white Jews have reacted to the rise of antisemitism not by trying to join in solidarity with a broader antiracist struggle but by clinging to the institutions of racist states and accepting the leadership of racist communal organisations. Too many Jews are not seeing antisemitism as being connected to other forms of racism, including the racist and colonial structure of Israel, nor are they seeing antisemitism and colour-coded racisms, with all their specificities, as being imbricated in the structures of racial capitalism. Too many Jews have seen antisemitism as emerging only, and in its most dangerous form, from the radical Left. Many of the arguments mobilised by Jewish (and many non-Jewish) self-styled leaders of the fight against antisemitism have, for years now, singularly failed to stop themselves from engaging in their own racism, while also relentlessly attacking and delegitimising left wing Jews. This past weekend, Wiley’s comments have been met with flurries of claims by prominent Jews and philosemites that antisemitism is somehow allowed to flourish in public life like no other form of racism. This is an extraordinary claim in the world we live in. This claim of exceptionalism has been a constant refrain during endless debates about Labour and antisemitism in recent years. Wiley’s tweets have been linked to the Black Lives Matter movement for no other reason than that he’s Black. It has been demanded that other people involved in the grime scene take responsibility for Wiley’s comments.

I hate when people try to hold me responsible for the words and acts of all Jews. Examples abound of some Jews in recent decades making alliances with reactionary governments and even far right formations. Such far right projects can work through a focus on anti-Blackness, Islamophobia, and “immigrants,” dropping traditional antisemitic frames for a philosemitic admiration for Israel and a highly limited construction of acceptable Jewish identity. Figurations of “the Jew’‘ through time are highly adaptable and offer different tropes to suit various political impulses or subject positions. Discourses of the greedy or capitalistic Jew can often be less tolerated by some Western societies, though antisemitic conspiracy theories about the spread of “Cultural Marxism” or around the figure of George Soros are increasingly mainstream on the political Right, as well as among some centrists and even some on the Left. These discourses are peddled regularly by Conservative and Republican politicians, on the front pages of national newspapers and enjoy wide global traction, especially in online spaces. The antisemitic structure and content of such discourses are often denied (or remain deniable) and can sometimes be given cover by Jewish establishment institutions. This is emblematic of the unevenness of how antisemitism is currently received or censured in the public sphere.

When Wiley tweeted: “What do you do when you realise the people moaning about anti Semetic are actually the most racist ones out here?”, in some ways it rings true. Britain’s political and media culture has, in recent years, managed to transform a genuine problem with antisemitism on the Left and in the Labour Party (not to mention in the general public and on the right) into political victories for the hard right and the far right. Boris Johnson can write antisemitic caricature in his novel (the least of his long history of public racism), Michael Gove’s wife can show off their collection of holocaust denial books and eugenic tracts, and the BBC’s Andrew Neil - chairman of the consistently antisemitic Spectator magazine - can have his own foetid history of publishing David Irving in a national newspaper, and face no political consequences for it. Nor has the mainstream’s supposedly deeply held rejection of antisemitism seemed capable of applying these standards to the legacies of rabid antisemites like Winston Churchill and Nancy Astor, both publicly lauded in recent months in the face of largely rejected counter-histories offered by racialised people. These political figures and dynamics of the centre and Right have been able to cynically wield antisemitism as a political cudgel to attack the Left and delegitimise struggles against anti-Blackness and Islamophobia.

As Alana Lentin writes in her new book, Why Race Still Matters, that “the political utility of antisemitism today is not to illuminate the operations of race, but rather to obscure them.” We must apprehend the functions of contemporary philosemitism as a primary and mainstream form of antisemitism, particularly in the West. Such philosemitism, practiced through state power and media discourses, homogenises Jews. It erases our various diversities and works to hegemonise Zionism as an inevitable outcome of Jewish life, rather than as the product of European antisemitism, racism and colonialism that it is. Philosemitism, like Zionism, often erases or deprecates Jewish diaspora and non-Zionist traditions. In recent years we have been subjected to the ugly spectacle of liberals & rightwingers cynically latching onto continuous cycles of “debate” and “controversy” over antisemitism with a gross philosemitism that objectifies the figure of “the jew,” freezes the Holocaust as a detached ahistorical event and cares little about other forms of racism. Lentin again,

publicly performing opposition to antisemitism and support for Israel - the two having been made equivalent - has also become a proxy for politicians and public figures’ commitment to antiracism. Leaning on antisemitism as the sine qua non of racism and associating it singularly with the Nazi Holocaust, reinterpreted as a unique and aberrant event rather than the manifestation of a 500-year process, silences any questioning of this professed antiracism.”

The writer James Baldwin broached these issues, with particular attention to the relation between American Jews and African Americans, in an extraordinary article in the New York Times in 1967. In it Baldwin explicated how the reception and discourses around anti-Jewish racism were fundamentally different to those experienced by Black people in American society. In many ways this is still true. The philosemitic public recognition of the unimaginable horror of the Shoah hasn’t led to the elimination of antisemitism or the discourses that sustain it, as we’ve seen. But Jewish suffering is honoured, even if instrumentally, in a way that the horror, mass death and lasting legacies of slavery and colonialism never have been. Baldwin wrote,

the Jew can be proud of his suffering, or at least not ashamed of it. His history and his suffering do not begin in America, where black men have been taught to be ashamed of everything, especially their suffering. The Jew’s suffering is recognized as part of the moral history of the world and the Jew is recognized as a contributor to the world’s history: this is not true for the blacks. Jewish history, whether or not one can say it is honored, is certainly known: the black history has been blasted, maligned and despised.”

The philosemitic public recognition of the unimaginable horror of the Shoah

This is so fucking tendentious

my mans here should've just copy-pasted the baldwin essay and called it a day

The writer is Jewish.

Also, for the record, I'm half-Jewish. My best friend is one of the main translators of Yiddish poetry in the world, and has dual citizenship. I grew up going to multiple mitzvahs on most weekends.

some of your best friends etc

I can't vouch for the US but my high school history classes devoted a significant amount of time to the Atlantic slave trade *and* the Shoah. I don't know anyone who came away from them with a binary axe to grind, except for a few dodgy motherfuckers.

Lol okay silby, you do you.

I bet you'd say the same thing to Ilan Pappe.

I don't know her

the exact same relevant points are made by people who are rabidly anti-semitic and turning it into an either/or thing where you can either support black people and hate jews, or accept jewish people and denigrate black lives, is the binary that groups that are hopefully fringe are capitalizing on

I think the use of “philo-semitism” is iffy at the very best because it implies that there is a specific affinity for jewish culture or people among those in power that connects an oppressor class. It’s not that. In the UK, from what I’ve observed online and read, there has been a weaponizing of claims of anti-semitism in order to cut down those who are anti-capitalist or socialist. Claiming those further on the left are anti-semitic is just another rhetorical tool used for attack, and it doesn’t imply those making the claims have any interest in jewish people at all! A lot of the people who used that claim are worse!

I think the Baldwin quotes in the article are good, but the framing fails by assuming the people making claims of anti-semitism have the interest of anyone jewish in mind at all. Through actions and words, it’s pretty obvious they don’t give a shit.

if there's anything at all to the charge that the Holocaust is focused on disproportionately compared to slavery & Native American genocide, surely the root isn't "philosemitism" so much as white Americans being cast as heroes/liberators rather than slaveowners/murderers

otfm