Is this anti-semitism?

"Yeah, this is not his argument."

Really? Coulda fooled me.

Mearsheimer's book isn't anti-Semitic bc he blurbed this other book. His book may be anti-Semitic bc it traffics in classical anti-Semitic tropes. Also, the fact that he blurbed this other book certainly indicates that he himself may be anti-Semitic. You're just reading the causality incorrectly.

when this thread got bumped i thought i might be about this, blogger IOZ, today, writing about the NYPD using anti-muslim "training" videos put together by a right-wing Clarion Fund:

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2012/01/to-be-or-maccabee.html

Having been raised in the Jewish faith, I retain a sentimental soft spot for the religion . . . if you can get over The Prayer for the State of Israel that's wormed its way into the service, the high holy day liturgies are really quite lovely . . . my long-lapsed Catholic father even enjoys them, in keeping with his dictum that he enjoys all religions carried out in languages he can't understand. Saturday mornings still recall for me pretty fond memories of preparing for my own Bar Mitzvah, and I do still celebrate a raucous Passover; you can't beat the Seder as a festival meal.

But good god, I hate Jews. I hate this Israel shit. It drives me absolutely batty. This preening, violent desire for a damned national identity, this ragged, atavistic, vicious rejection of exile, and the unforgivable, unspeakable treatment of the Holocaust not so much as a sorrow but as a collective embarrassment . . . oh, watch us pay lip service to the magnitude of our catastrophe while uttering a pugilistic "never again" like a skinny kid who got knocked down by a bully at recess. Well the bully got killed when he was run over by a drunk Russian, so let's pick on some even smaller kid, some little faggot, in a demonstration of compensatory toughness. Oh, and it helps that our big brother is the biggest kid in school.

Anyway, there is a majestically kooky symmetry to the whole thing: a bunch of Israeli nuts producing cryptoeugenic hit job videos which are in turn aired as continuing ed for a gang of New York cops who aspire to get out of the frisking random nigger business and in on the next bad action movie plot.

apologies for that last line, yeesh

this piece would be more convincing if all the anti-semites he found in american society weren't jews

"One would think this was categorically indefensible stuff."

But amazingly he defends it pretty handily. But he's clearly an anti-semite because there is no other explanation for blurbing a book which I have summarized in likely the most oversimplified fashion above. But he hasn't been tarred and feathered yet so clearly no one can anti-semitic anymore in this awful new post-The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy world. Also poor Josh Block.

ioz is great on some things and reallllllllly iffy on everything else

whoa

xxxp to that ioz blog post

Oh, how does he defend it? xxp

IOZ seems like a charming young man

Mearsheimer positively blurbed a book that promotes Holocaust revisionism, argues that Hitler was justified in killing Jews, and considers anti-Semitism an appropriate reaction to Jewish behavior.

Without knowing anything about Atzmon beyond what's in this thread I would like to express very great confidence that his book is

a) bad and wrong and depressing;
b) not accurately paraphrased by Commentary.

Mearsheimer vs Commentary-type orthodoxy is annoying and I frankly wish a pox on both houses.

Time and again, this strategy of deflecting and denying anti-Semitism has proved reliable. Following the recent controversy over claims by Josh Block, a former AIPAC spokesman, that left-wing outfits like Media Matters and the Center for American Progress are pushing the dual-loyalty canard with growing brashness, the commentator David Frum wondered “whether it is more unacceptable inside today’s liberal Washington to use the language of anti-Semitism—or to protest the language of anti-Semitism.” Frum got his answer when Block was relieved of his title at the progressive Truman National Security project for issuing group e-mails citing Jew-baiters in the left-wing media.

this is, as i understand it, not an accurate gloss of what happened!

Justifying Hitler is for amateurs! Rabbi Nachman Kahane (Meir's brother!) explains why Pharaoh had no choice but to enslave the Jews.

http://nachmankahana.com/?p=648#more-648

Paro was indeed evil, but in the name of truthful objectivity, one must agree that the Jews themselves could not “wash their hands in innocence”.... The situation became so chaotic that Paro had no choice but to convene his inner cabinet and enslave the Jews in order to prevent social and political unrest, and by then it was too late for the Jews to escape to Eretz Yisrael.

Fast forward 3000+ years to today. The social unrest, unemployment, animosity towards those who “have,” and the ostentatious lifestyle of very many Jews – it’s all there today in the US. As King Shlomo says in Kohelet, “There is nothing new under the sun”.

But it is still not too late for the Jews of America to escape. The clock on the wall is ticking ever faster, and when the guillotine of history begins to fall, no one will be able to alter the outcome.

Things are going to change drastically beginning in November. If Hussein Obama will be re-elected, they will come about quickly and dramatically; if another candidate will be elected the downhill change will come about but a bit less quickly.

If anything, I tend to see all of this less as manifestations of anti-Semitism than as a huge internecine battle between various visions of Judaism and Israeli politics. Atzmon sounds an ass but he also sounds like a wind-up artist gone too far.

Man so much shit gets projected onto Obama, I wonder if it ever fazes him at all?

... this rabbi thinks Obama is going to enslave rich Jewish people in America? Am I reading this correctly?

Without knowing anything about Atzmon beyond what's in this thread I would like to express very great confidence that his book is

a) bad and wrong and depressing;
b) not accurately paraphrased by Commentary.

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? Why are the Jews hated in the Middle East, surely they had a chance to open a new page in their troubled history? If they genuinely planned to do so, as the early Zionists claimed, why did they fail? Why did America tighten its immigration laws amid the growing danger to European Jews? We should also ask for what purpose do the holocaust denial laws serve? What is the holocaust religion there to conceal? As long as we fail to ask questions, we will be subjected to Zionists and their Neocons agents' plots. We will continue killing in the name of Jewish suffering. We will maintain our complicity in Western imperialist crimes against humanity...

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.

Not many people are aware that in March 1933, long before Hitler became the undisputed leader of Germany and began restricting the rights of German Jews, the American Jewish Congress announced a massive protest at Madison Square Gardens and called for an American boycott of German goods...

....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.

Fagin is the ultimate plunderer, a child exploiter and usurer. Shylock is the blood-thirsty merchant. With Fagin and Shylock in mind Israeli barbarism and organ trafficking seem to be just other events in an endless hellish continuum.

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.