Anti-semitism online June 3, 2016
Posted by WorldbyStorm in Uncategorized.trackback
…I’m always dispirited at the sheer noxious volume of anti-semitism that there is about in certain quarters (dispirited in no small part because it seems incomprehensible, to me anti-semitism is like all other racisms, some sort of profound personality disorder and the thought that such a vociferous minority share it is grim). But this is a particularly unpleasant spin on the vileness of it… the use of brackets to indicate the so-called ‘Jewish cowbell’ – used around the names of people who happen to be Jewish. So Weismann, in a tweet becomes (((Weismann))). Revolting. Katy Waldman’s takedown in Slate is good in giving a sense of the history of this, coming straight from the heart of alt.right apparently – Somewhere I don’t want to go.
The Cedar Lounge Revolution 
There’s one particularly vicious Irish Trump fan who seems to think claiming to support Israel means that he (the fan of Trump) is not an anti-Semite when he (the Trump fan) spreads anti-Semitic propaganda. He also associates with the alt-right types.
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Urghhhh… don’t even want to think about that level of cognitive dissonance. Actually that’s a question re Irish Trump ‘fans’. What drives them?
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“That level of cognitive dissonance” is deplorably common.
There have always been people who support the State of Israel while hating Jewish people as a whole, like Richard Nixon and Pastor John Hagee:
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hagee-pro-israel-anti-semitic/
There’s also been some controversy about the Polish politician Michal Kaminski, an Israel supporter and opponent of Polish apologies for the Jedwabne massacre of Jews by Poles in 1941:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2009/aug/21/stephen-pollard-michal-kaminski-jews
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True that. A lot of the Christian right in the US is like that.
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A lot of people making noise during the latest British Labour Party scandal about antisemitism were noticably reticant when unsubtle analogies were being made about Ed Miliband.
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You know a lot of that passed me by, apparently the way he ate a bacon roll was some sort of thing for some. To me it just seemed unfair knocking of a man who was palpably decent in the original sense of the word by a right wing media that is out of control in terms of its partisanship.
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I see quite a bit of it from f/b friends who are pro Palestinian and pro most good causes. They seem unaware of what they are posting. I def#riend after a few attempts of persuasion. If I knew how to put a photo here, I would share a counter post of New World Order, Rothschilds etc. crap I see. What surprises me is that when I lookup mutual friends, I seem to be one of the few to see this anti-semitism.
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+1
I see and hear that stuff a lot.
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I can tell you that my African Americans friends are terrified of Trump in a way none of my Jewish friends are.
That you hear more about Jewish concerns is an indication of their power & white privilege that they are made and heard. It will be the AAs that will bear the brunt of a Trump presidency.
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I can well appreciate that. But I can’t blame those who are Jewish being concerned. And with a guy who seriously puts forward ideas such as walls, barring Muslims from entering the US, etc, etc, it doesn’t matter how powerful or privileged people are, and it is hardly news that not all Jews are that powerful and privileged. This from Eva Wiseman made me think of how historical memory alone in families can shape responses and reactions.
http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/may/08/scenes-in-the-life-of-a-liberal-jew-column-eva-wiseman-observer
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Oh, every single group that’s ever been on the boot end of fascism should be concerned. Long gone are the days of “Dirty Dancing” and the Jews, like the Irish and Italians, have been co-opted into whitedom. So I’d reckon that AAs & the left are higher on the target list for Trump supporters than the Jews. But everyone different is on the list see Niemöller.
There will be regional variations – for instance in Appalachia anyone different (even yer white, male, cis-gender, heteronormative with long hair is on the list) probably has about equal footing in the being dragged behind a truck stakes.
Eva Wiseman’s anecdotes are far harsher than ones I’ve heard from major metropolitan areas in the US. Although I’ve heard of similar from the deep south. I remember a Jewish friend from Indiana telling me about his town being a sunset town up until the early 90s. He never once experienced any crap for being a Jew in the mid-west or east coast.
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That reminds me of a story my uncle who is an RC priest had of a parish he worked in briefly on the East coast, but I think close to what would be considered the south. The previous incumbent woke up on occasion to find fiery crosses burning outside the house he lived in. This would be the 60s IIRC.
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One has to remember to remember that the US is a vast place and observer bias can be a real problem.
In reflecting on this conversation I realised that all of my Jewish friends are privileged CA/NY folks. Not from the deep south and/or militia MidWest thru West. There are certainly plenty of places where Jews & AAs would get about the same treatment. Not sure how bad RCs are considered outside of the Protestant south but not sure I’d risk it.
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Well that was a long time ago the fiery cross, but… it is indicative of sentiment in some places at some times. And of course the Kennedy election looked pretty shaky due to far from residual anti-Catholic bias.
I think that’s very true, it depends where one is, etc. I hugely worry about not just AA, Hispanics, anyone who some define as ‘other’ are going to be in the rhetorical cross hairs should Trump win. The manner in which the US far-right is aligning with his presidential bid is stunning. I don’t think he’s an anti-semite, but as we’ve seen he’s not averse to being ambiguous in the extreme and trying to corral certain attitudes if he feels it is to his advantage. Perhaps that makes him functionally anti-semitic,racist, etc.
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And yet not that far below the surface, in some places.
Trump is tapping the Islamophobia torrent because that’s the zeitgeist, but it doesn’t matter how it gets started, once the ball is rolling the usual suspects are always targeted.
Not sure what to make of Trump – did you ever see the time he was on Ali G? He figured out it was a waste of time and made a prompt exit. That showed some insight and courage of action that none of the other guests ever displayed. Otherwise I’d have him written off as a buffoon like Mussolini.
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I’ve seen a lot of people like him in various workplaces, bluff, buoyed by rhetoric, bullying in many respects, convinced of their own rightness and very unempathic, so his type isn’t unknown to me (and I’m sure most of us). He’s clearly intelligent, reflective. I think I mentioned it before, a journalist who was with him for a year or two back following him has the assessment that his campaign never imagined they’d get to this point, it was literally an ego trip that has gone right for him. But I think the element of what could almost be described as playfulness taps into a deeper thing, a sort of contempt for the people he’s playing which seems to be a significant element of his internal psychological landscape. There was a comment on Slate on a piece on him the other day that noted when you look around the poker table for the sucker and can’t see them then you’re the sucker, and that I fear is who his support base are.
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Trump is precisely that alright. An ego trip that stumbled into a victory is a great summary of the campaign.
Trump’s man on the road (Lewandowski) and the campaign manager (Manafort) are feuding and refusing to talk. If Trump’s campaign is serious that will get resolved sharpish. If it doesn’t Trump and/or the RNC aren’t really interested in victory.
Gonna have to keep eye on the supreme court calculations. Given business is willing to burn the GOP senate majority to prevent Obama putting another nominee on the court, they might have to go all in on making Trump president.
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100% agree. The SC is a whole another ball game.
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The more that minority groups and liberals react to Trump, the more his core supporters like him. They don’t like immigrants, political correctness or any sort of nuanced talk about just how great the US is. He’s not so much a leader as a mascot.
I suspect that Trump in power would be far less socially conservative but would probably be less predictable. He wants to win this competition but I don’t think he really knows what he’ll do if he wins.
It really is a pity that Sanders will not win the nomination for the Democrats. Anybody could beat Trump. This also works for Clinton because I suspect she’d lose to almost anybody else.
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Very interesting point you make re Clinton and Trump.
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Google is dropping an anti-Semitic “cowbell” app from their store:
So much for the much-vaunted promise of online communication technology bandied about in the 90s. Instead of bringing humanity together, it’s given racists, religious sectarians and jingoists of various stripes a bigger platform than ever before. Racist filth about Jews, black people, Armenians, Roma etc is only a mouse click away.
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Yeah and it has mainstreamed it in a way.
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Are the apps creating racists or advancing racist agendas? Or are they allowing racists to publicly identify themselves?
My own view is that increasing visibility of racists/racism forces society to deal with it – although there’s a fascinating conversation to be had about the directionality of causality there.
Think of the number of anecdotes you’ve heard over the past 10 years where racists being racist in public has backfired spectacularly on the racist. And with each event of public condemnation reverberates through society until finally it becomes “weren’t the olds silly to run society that way?”
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“Are the apps creating racists or advancing racist agendas? Or are they allowing racists to publicly identify themselves?”
Well, the app in the article advanced a racist agenda by
putting “cowbell” brackets on any “Jewish” names on the user’s computer (wonder would it “cowbell” Alfred Rosenberg?).
In my view, being caught making racist remarks seems to damage the careers of entertainment figures (Michael Richards, Mel Gibson) more than it does to politicians (look at Trump).
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That’s thought provoking Starkadder. I think it sounds plausible that politicians get away with it more easily (curiously in relation to matters of sex scandals they don’t).
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In general I think it’s important and good that society have these conversations and the repeated public spectacle of rejection of prejudice will eventually triumph.
Setting aside free speech, I like my racists to upfront and public about it so I know who they are.
There’s an increasing frequency of anecdotes where racist behaviour is captured on video, individual(s) identified and karma served.
To be fair, a racist politician is not going to lose his racist supporters by making racist remarks. But it also hasn’t been the convincing ticket to victory in the red states that it once was.
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Trolling thru Gendjinn (4 June) my reaction to his not writing Trump off as ‘a buffoon like Mussolini’ would be to ask : ‘more like Hitler?’
However, joking apart, while I would be reluctant to write off the man as a Fascist, his phenomenon is the product of a similar political crisis to that that produced Fascist regimes after WW1. Today, it is the political crisis of Neo-Liberalism. The contradiction between draconian nineteenth century economics and late twentieth century lifestyle reform is being emphasised by sections of our rulers to protect the first, after its obvious failure by using the second as a scapegoat. AS an whole, the left has contributed to this by concentrating on the symptoms of economic collapse, rather than the causes, allowing a space for ‘the ignorant goodwill’ of such as Syriza and Podemos. Sanders and Corbyn may be slightly more effective; if successful, they’ll have more money with which to play. Nonetheless, all these people are too ready to assume that the enemy will play fair.
As it is, a lot of people are desperate enough to take a leap in the dark with Trump, rather than follow an all too predictable path with Clinton. The trouble is that the leap is in the wrong direction and, anyway, that the dark does not obscure the fact that T’s policies are, in fact, very old ones of letting the ruling classes off the hook by targetting the cultural others, Christians under the Roman Empire (and Gays under Justinian), Jews in the Christian Middle Ages, Muslims and Morriscoes in C16 Spain, Negroes, Hispanics, Christians today in the Middle East, you name the minority. then, of course, once the majority it will be surprised to find that its bread is no cheaper, and possibly even more expensive. By then it will probably be too late for it.
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