Is this anti-semitism?

xp I wouldn't treat anything a Kahane said as indicative of anything. They're crazy.

Sixty-five years after the liberation of Auschwitz we should reclaim our history and ask why? Why were the Jews hated? Why did European people stand up against their next door neighbours?

HEY BLACK PEOPLE ISN'T IT TIME YOU ASKED YOURSELVES WHY SO MANY OF YOU GOT SOLD AS SLAVES??

I was at an ADL fund-raiser w/Foxman once. It was really weird and I kept worrying that they would suddenly notice the liberal goy in the back and turn on me.

Atzmon's probably crazy too. Good clarinet player though. (xxp)

Waiting to hear from Alex in SF how he "defends it pretty handily."

Has anybody here read The Warburgs: The Twentieth-Century Odyssey of a Remarkable Jewish Family?

Also, what's that organ trafficking charge?

Mordy, for me, that pretty much hits a) and b) -- I wouldn't say it does much to rehabilitate Hitler, or to flirt with Holocaust denial, but it is indeed bad, wrong, and depressing. I think it's pretty bad form for him to include fictional Jewish characters as evidence for the moral claims he's making against our co-religionists!

....Jewish texts tend to glaze over the fact that Hitler's March 28 1933, ordering a boycott against Jewish stores and goods, was an escalation in direct response to the declaration of war on Germany by the worldwide Jewish leadership.

If 'The Warburgs' teaches you anything about German Jewry, it's that they were incredibly proud Germans, too. Also 'declaration of war'?! I'm pretty sure 'the worldwide Jewish leadership' didn't have any means of conducting warfare and I'm also pretty sure that anti-Semites started this, not the other way around.

xp I wouldn't treat anything a Kahane said as indicative of anything. They're crazy.

Quite true, but this was posted on the FB feed of a relatively mainstream-Republican friend of mine. The narrative of "rich secular Jews who own everything inevitably bring havoc down upon themselves" is alive in all sorts of weird places, and while the Kahanists are often called crazy they are seldom called anti-Semites.

i think the angle of that one is more "obama = pharaoh" than "jews have it coming"

HEY BLACK PEOPLE ISN'T IT TIME YOU ASKED YOURSELVES WHY SO MANY OF YOU GOT SOLD AS SLAVES??

― summer sun, something's begun, but uh-oh those tumblr whites (Noodle Vague)

ffs can't you start a different thread?

totally disagree, it is more "obama = pharaoh today, gop pres = pharaoh tomorrow, jews who stubbornly refuse to move to israel, become orthodox, and forswear material wealth are asking for trouble"

i agree with mordy that it's a fringy viewpoint tho

hm i see your point

yes but he also says that Obama is going to enslave Jews faster than any given Republican president

tbf wasn't that one of his platforms?

i may be misremembering that

In any case it's a fairly low hurdle to clear.

Like, neither Bush I nor Bush II managed to enslave very many Jews at all!

jews who stubbornly refuse to move to israel, become orthodox, and forswear material wealth are asking for trouble

Is this really all that uncommon amongst the fundamentalists in Judaism?

'become orthodox'

What happened to make Paro wake up one morning and suggest enslaving the entire Jewish people? (It could not have been irrational anti-Semitism because Christianity and Islam were not yet even thoughts in anyone’s mind).

i have to admit this gave me a chuckle

orthodoxymoron?

but he's comparing Obama to Romney/Paul/Gingrich/Santorum

I'm sorry, I just am still to this day amazed at how it seems that every group who has faced discrimination still has another go-to discriminated-against group that they blame all of their troubles on.

like ilxuk and the tories

"Waiting to hear from Alex in SF how he "defends it pretty handily.""

I meant he defended blurbing the book pretty handily. He didn't address any of Jeff Goldberg's specific "quotations" (not clear why he should.)

"I think it's pretty bad form for him to include fictional Jewish characters as evidence for the moral claims he's making against our co-religionists!"

Those are a whole bunch of separate quotes. They are not contextual to one another.

"Also, what's that organ trafficking charge?"

Didn't you hear the story about the dude who woke up in hotel bathtub with his kidney missing? THAT WAS ISRAELIS THAT DID IT!

Tbf, Dan, Jews have tried several times over the course of their rather lengthy history to assimilate and the results haven't been all that great. Either they succeeded and are no longer Jews or there was some kind of backlash. I can see how Kahanists would think there's only safety in Eretz Yisrael following God's rules closely.

I think he's referring to this

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8608053.stm

Police smash Israeli organ-trafficking ring

inappropriate roffles

I meant he defended blurbing the book pretty handily.

Where did he defend it? His defense seems to have consisted of: "I wrote what I wrote."

"...and I stand by it." He wrote a blurb, not a treatise.

That's not a defense.

Really? I think it works quite well given the circumstance.

Why did you give a positive blurb to a book that contains anti-Semitic rhetoric?
I stand by my blurb.

Defended!

No, but seriously, are you just trolling or are you making some kind of really subtle point that I'm not picking up on?

Atzmon can't really win, though. He's a self-defined proud self-hating Jew. Okay, whatever but he also says shit like this,

"The Holocaust became the new Western religion. Unfortunately, it is the most sinister religion known to man. It is a license to kill, to flatten, no nuke, to wipe, to rape, to loot and to ethnically cleanse. It made vengeance and revenge into a Western value."

I will utterly defend his right to loathe Israel or religion or whatever but saying stupid shit like this should 'cause fewer ppl to listen not more. Vengeance and revenge have been part of humanity for eons and this thesis is basically a dim exegisis of Borges' 'Deutches Requiem'.

Oh wait he actually did defend it detail:

http://walt.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/09/25/mearsheimer_responds_to_goldbergs_latest_smear

I hadn't seen that defense. It looks extensive tho. I'll have to read it in a little bit.

Vengeance and revenge have been part of humanity for eons and this thesis is basically a dim exegisis of Borges' 'Deutches Requiem'.

^^^

ugh i just spent a lot of my lunch hour looking into the whole josh block firing fiasco, and it's all very washington-y and sick

that basic gist of it, as far as i get it, is that block, former aipac spokesman and resident conservative (i think?) at the democratic-leaning truman center, didn't a little more than just accuse some people of being anti-semites. he had a whole big file of quotes from all of these dem-progressive writers painting them as anti-semites and was pushing them on a conservative listserv. not just nutso atzmon types but people who are, or work for, washington liberals in good standing. so basically the whole town turned on him.

glenn greenwald has several hundred words on it if you're interested

Mearsheimer's defense is pretty good

the guy who said hitler had some good ideas had some good ideas too. what?

Yeah he pretty much destroys Cohen and Goldberg's points.

Without going a bunch more into this bc I don't really want to spend significantly arguing about Mearsheimer - his defense is more serious than I gave him credit for, and in that particular piece he comes off as perhaps more nuanced than the impression the Commentary article gave. At the same time, some of his critiques are kinda disingenuous and I can never help but feel like his tone is a really clever guy who is good at "just asking questions" without ever addressing the subtexts of some of those questions. If he can't see how some of the assertions he makes (or that MANY of his commenters seem to think he's making) would be terribly upsetting to Jewish people, then he's particularly myopic. If he can, he's cruel.

Thats' why I said that that Talk of the Nation I heard with him and someone like Cohen was eventually unlistenable - they talked past each other and gave themsleves every permission for exageration and mischaracterization. I was largely sympathetic to him but then he'd say something so tone-deaf I'd wince.

I strongly recommend not reading the commentary to that piece btw.