Open thread: The wave of antisemitic attacks

I recall a great interview Sam Seder had with Arthur Goldwag, author of The New Hate from 2012 and Goldwag explained that the “New Hate” is very much patterned on the old hate. From the fears of the Illuminati to the Rothschilds to the John Birch Society, even Glenn Beck’s mentor Cleon Skousen, the same patterns of some shadowy cabal (almost universally Jewish) out to “get you” and “your way of life.” Toss in some premillennialist dispensationalism and it gets even stranger.

Knowing that history makes it far easier to separate good faith accusations of anti-Semitism from bad faith ones. For a textbook example, look no further than Bretbug Stephens, he of the “Palestinians are mosquitos” infamy. Mere months ago, he was hiding behind a Google Books search for “Jews as bedbugs” to save face from his massive Twitter fail. This week he’s mulling over long-discredited Ashkenazi Jewish intelligence race science. These people will feign outrage over anti-Semitism in one breath and promulgate it in another. Be on guard for it, especially if they start pointing fingers at the Jewish Democratic frontrunner for President.

@Katamount

These people will feign outrage over anti-Semitism in one breath and promulgate it in another. Be on guard for it, especially if they start pointing fingers at the Jewish Democratic frontrunner for President.

I’m doing my best to explain this to people in meatspace, because this is a very real tactic right wing parties are using. I’m also very wary of any time conservatives pretend to care about Jews. The right does not have our best interests at heart, only their own interests.

Speaking of the presidential race, I am really not looking forward to a Biden candidacy. I doubt he’d win, seeing as almost nobody who is left of center actually likes him. I’d vote for him if it meant keeping Trump out of office, but I’d much prefer another candidate.

@Moggie
Is the National Front a fascist party? I’ve heard them mentioned in passing, and they still exist in some capacity.

@Naglfar to the best of my understanding yes, the NF were a fascist party but were mainly subsumed into/superseded by the BNP (British National Party); this in turn later metamorphosed into the EDL (English Defence League) + UKIP. UKIP then turned into the Brexit Party Ltd. (yes, technically not a party but a limited company! to avoid legal/financial obligations).

Much of the openly far-right-racist EDL, including its leader Stephen Yaxley-Lennon (who likes to go by the name of Tommy Robinson because it sounds more ‘street’), have now joined the tory party – some indication of the fact that the tory party no longer care about their former life as the ‘respectable’ conservative party of the establishment and are embracing their growing extremism.

@Ohlmann

Some words are tainted, and National Front have two of thoses tainted words together.

At this point I’m wary of any organization that seems interested in nationalism.

@opposablethumbs

UKIP then turned into the Brexit Party Ltd.

I assume that was after Sargon of Akkad drove the UKIP into the ground? I’ve been wondering if maybe he could do the same for the Republican Party stateside.

Stephen Yaxley-Lennon

Any relation to John Lennon?

I don’t go out or go to many places that have so much differences in views and morals so please forgive my ignorance, but is there any attacks happening in Australia?

What are some good websites to learn about Judaism?

Obviously nobody has to spend their mental energy on me if they do not wish to.

I’m very stressed about the state of the world, and it doesn’t appear to be getting better.

I hope you are all safe.

@Universal Kami

What are some good websites to learn about Judaism?

If you’re interested in learning about how to help Jews, the twitter threads David linked are good starting places. If you’re interested in learning about Jewish religion and culture, here are some starting resources:
http://www.myjewishlearning.com
http://www.reformjudaism.org

@Lainy

I hope your okay and safe.

So far I’ve been safe. My friends and family have been safe, and my local Jewish community hasn’t experienced any violence so far.
I thank you for your prayers and concern.

the fascists are coming for all of us, and so are tankies and other antisemitic tendencies on the left.

That’s my thought. They’re going after the Orthodox now because they’re easier to spot in public. They’ll eventually come after us. If Crip Dyke feels like she can take the antisemites on, more power to her. But a lot of us aren’t as confident. If anyone has some good ideas on what to do, I’d like to know about it.

It’s not that I don’t think that they WANT to get rid of all of us.

It’s that Naglfar’s right, they’re going after the ultra-orthodox right now because they’re the most visible. If you’re the most visible Jew in your community, whatever that community is, you’re going to get targeted a lot.

But the people who come to murder us come from other communities. Murderers are pretty extreme, and they don’t hang around us. Research tells us that after a period of non-lethal attacks or of verbal harassment, they spend a time avoiding us. It’s the time spent avoiding us that things build from the point where screaming racial slurs at us seems enough to the point where they believe murder has to happen today.

So partly because they aren’t regularly mixing with us (at least right before those attacks, but possibly for longer) but also in large part for the same reasons al Qaeda flew planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon instead of 3 or 4 random houses owned by expats living in Syria, the anti-semitic terrorists choose to attack highly visible jews in the midst of highly visible jewish communities.

The problem, from my point of view, is that those communities aren’t always welcome places even for other jews.

I remember when Matthew Shepard was murdered. There was an ability to communicate and even a large overlap of population between the activist left and the gay men who were most directly targeted by the terror message of his murder. What happened? Protests in every large city across the country. In Portland, I joined a crowd of thousands listening to speakers, singing songs, lighting candles, dancing and shuffling in the cold rain trying to keep warm.

But even though the Left is willing to do things like this, they don’t take the same actions. I deeply believe that part of this is the failure of the Left to communicate and even to empathize with orthodox and ultra-orthodox Judaism.

I worry that despite the famous Niemoller statement, the Left is going to sit on its hands while anti-semitic murder culls the most visible Jews in any area.

But then? The people who used to be the next-most visible Jews become the most visible, and the murderers target them.

I am among the least visible jews. I would prefer the murderers come for me not because I think I’m better able to fight them off, but because I think this slow-drip terrorism of killing a few jews every month or two isn’t recognized as the incipient genocide that it is.

I think that if they came for me, if they came for the other least-visible Jews, the Lefties that are complacent about anti-semitic terrorism (for reasons that are both understandable and not) would actually see that, Oh! They’re coming for all the jews!

I don’t think that they get that, yet. And even when they do get that, the gulf of communication and empathy between them and the Haredi communities makes organizing difficult. They’re afraid of co-opting. They’re afraid of acting without consent. They’re afraid of acting wrongly even when their impulse – to fight terrorism – is correct.

I think that the genocidal terrorists can’t help but know this. They know that my lefty, non-jewish friends won’t rise up as they did after Matthew Shepard’s murder.

But those problems of communication and empathy aren’t the same with me – or with Naglfar or with Cyborgette. I see the same problem as Cyborgette:

So IDK who I can trust other than other Jewish leftists, and I don’t feel like there are enough of us (or capable enough) to hold our own if/when goyisch leftists decide we’re disposable.

And I read Cindy, asking,

Is it time to start kicking ass and taking names on a major scale? Is it already too late even for that?

and my first answer is:

Yes. It’s time to start kicking ass on a major scale. Widespread Matthew Shepard-scale responses for each and every single victim is only the start of what we need.

but my second answer is

It’s probably not too late yet, but it’s is inevitably going to reach that point of “too late”, reach the point where the lefty goyim decides we’re invisible, irrelevant, disposable if we don’t actually respond in proportion to the threat.

and (as sad as this may be in terms of my judgement of my own social circle) the only way that I see the secular, non-Jewish left actually acting in proportion to the threat is if the blood actually splatters their front doors.

“First they came for the NY Lubavitchers living in closed communities…” is how they rationalize that shit’s not that bad even though we have genocidal terrorists walking in our midst.

I am desperately afraid that it is not the lovers and the pacifists who learned the lesson from Niemoller, but the murderers and the terrorists. They’re using Niemoller as a road map to get away with genocide because, hey, it worked for Hitler! and the Left is letting them get away with it.

I have no illusions about my ability to fight off murderous terrorists with coffee tables (which is why I have my friends throwing them in my hypothetical above). I want them to come for me, as one of the least visible Jews, because I want the “First they came for a few of us” trend to stop.

Faced with the deafening silence of people who should know better, I would rather the terrorists literally came for me if it would mean that the Left would finally act as if they’ve been tolerating genocide and they know they cannot accept that any longer.

I’m not a fan of the ultra-orthodox, but fuck the attitude that it’s okay to murder them a few at a time because even if I was a sick enough human being not to give a shit about the human lives of ultra-orthodox people, there’s no way these terrorists voluntarily end there.

And I can scream, but people just don’t seem to see it. And it’s getting to the point where I lie awake at night screaming in my head at Niemoller’s ghost,

Why did you have to teach them how to get away with this shit. Why?

I’m tired of seeing the problem while others shut their eyes. The angst of walking among people who treat this time, this violence, as normal and acceptable is driving me crazy.

If it would end that madness, I would rather the murderers would simply skip all the intermediate steps of people they could come for and come for me.

Maybe then things would be different. But they’re cowards. They’re going to murder the victims that they think are safest to murder. And so my madness, our madness, continues.

The Atlantic just posted an article about this. It quotes someone saying that the majority of perpetrators aren’t white but doesn’t go into specifics beyond that. It seems like every conspiracy theory eventually leads to antisemitism, and it seems like damn near every man I know is deep into conspiracy theories, regardless of race or religion.

@LindsayIrene

I’m… wary of this. Extremely wary. Because there’s a strong tendency among moderates and liberals to see antisemitism as a Black People Problem, and it isn’t. It’s not unique to white supremacy, but it has to be recognized that white supremacy is part of the driving force behind the conspiracy theories – if it’s not about blaming Jews for being the hidden leaders behind Black peoples’ dissent, it’s about blaming Jews for being the Ultimate White People in charge of white supremacy.

That last isn’t disconnected from white supremacy either. Remember all the jokes about Seinfeld being the whitest guy on the whitest show ever? It’s not a fucking coincidence that gentiles point to a Jew as the epitome of whiteness. It’s very systematic and very deliberate, and what it is is shifting the blame.

I’m not saying any and all antisemitism is white supremacist, but in the US? White supremacy and its defense are absolutely the largest driving force IMO. The defense more than anything – attacks on Jews as The Ultimate White People need to be seen as a divide-and-conquer tactic. The far right know exactly what they are doing, and it is working.

Also, honestly, I’m sick to death of seeing white Jews ream Black gentiles for antisemitism while letting white gentiles completely off the hook.

@Crip Dyke

offers hugs if you want, not sure what else to say really

Addendum to the above. Just to be clear I’m not saying the left doesn’t have an antisemitism problem – the left has a massive antisemitism problem, and that problem needs decisive action. What I’m saying is that thinking of antisemitism as its own thing, rather than seeing how it fits into other frameworks, is really damn dangerous and will lead more far-right successes with divide-and-conquer.

For another example: the popular stereotype of Jewish men is nebbish, effeminate, weak. This isn’t Woody Allen’s fault (though obviously fuck Woody Allen); it ties in with fascist, and pre-fascist, beliefs about Jews being the originators of queerness. Many of the books burned by the original Nazis were books on gender and sexuality, often by Jewish researchers – and the Nazis drew a very explicit link between the gender and sexual subversiveness of the books, and the Jewishness of the authors.

To Nazism, Jewishness and queerness and disability are inseparable. And for antisemites who are not Nazis (yet), the actual Nazis will still find their antisemitism useful within that framework.

BTW sorry everyone about how ranty and angry I am here, like Crip Dyke I’m just kind of at my wit’s end.

Christians… oh gods. You folks like to think you’re lawful good, in ye old DnD terms, but when you want in your hearts to be paladins on a crusade, that’s not lawful or good; that’s chaotic evil. You’re always hunting for that freedom from doubt, that purity of resolve, that white light of righteousness, and that is not what doing the right thing actually feels like.

For all the fucked up things about our cultures, we never forgot what actual lawfulness is. This is the doubt, cynicism, and civic-mindedness that scares ideologues, and I think it’s the essence why so many of you hate us – when you want to go off on another fucking crusade, we’re the ones who say, “Hey, wait just a fucking minute there.” We’re the ones who keep telling you, “Collectivizing all the peasants’ land might be a terrible idea actually,” or “What makes you think you’re better than people from Eurasia or Eastasia”, or “How are your disabled friends going to survive if you burn down all the hospitals?” We’re always there being the buzzkill.

The world is Lord of the Flies, and we’re Piggy. No fucking kidding the people of faith hate us.