The Antisemitism Thread

Now I know we have a general thread on racism, but we also have a separate thread on Islamophobia and I think antisemitism, for obvious reasons, is a big enough sub-topic of bigotry to warrant it's own thread.

If the Mods disagree, I will accept the thread not being unlocked off course.

Anyways, current studies show that attack on Jewish students are currently at an all-time high

https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/09/09/anti-semitism-rise-new-semester-starts

Edited by Mrph1 on Oct 31st 2023 at 11:45:01 AM

Thanks for opening it up :)

From the article: "Hillel, an international Jewish student organization, recently reported that anti-Semitic incidents reached an all-time high of 178 during the 2019-20 academic year at the 550 colleges and universities in North America the organization serves. Anti-Semitism on college campuses has been rising significantly since 2016, according to the Anti-Defamation League."

Sadly, Anti-Semitism is also on the rise again in Germany

https://www.dw.com/en/anti-semitism-in-germany-sharply-rising-warns-security-agency/a-55211350

Screenshot of the statistic◊

Seems like we really haven't learned anything : /

Edited by Forenperser on Oct 23rd 2020 at 9:55:26 PM

Anti Semitism is so weird to me.

Like. Why Jews. I know by definition these things are irraitonal but it's just amazing the amount of mental gymnastics necesary for them.

Honestly, the biggest reason I have come to discover is: Envy. Pure and simple. A lot of Jews are businessmen and entrepreneurs.

White Suprematists cannot really claim that the Jews are inferior to them because, well, most of them are more successful than these sorry excuses for humans could ever hope to be, so they spin the argument around, claiming that the evil Jews are actually the Suprematists who control their lifes and want to keep them down.

Centuries of scapegoating and pushing them into unpopular careers then blaming them for doing the only jobs they were really allowed to do. Turns out that if you bar a bunch of people from doing much of anything other than moneylending, a lot of them are going to become moneylenders. And you see the same repeated with a lot of other fields that at least used to be undesirable or unseemly but are now influential, such as just about everything involved with filmmaking.

To me the calculus seems to be that anti-semitism is justified on a corruption of the (far more reasonable) fear of the invisible hand of capitalism and market controlling your life. People have ample reason to dislike the wealthy and the elites. The part where it stops making sense is when you make a 1:1 between the invisible hand of the market and Jews but that is the underlying principle.

It's also the stuff that holds the white supremacist worldview together. If you're supposedly the master race, why aren't you already in charge of everything? Why are low class white men not at the top of everything? Enter "The Jews" as an explanation. With subterfuge and manipulation they keep them from their "rightful position" or so the thinking goes.

I think Philosophy Tube explains it better in this video:

Edited by Antiteilchen on Oct 23rd 2020 at 11:26:40 AM

As a recent explanation, it makes some sense, but the thing I'm wondering about Antisemitism is that it's really old, maybe Older Than Feudalism, which begs the question of not only why jews, but why jews for so long ?

Then again, I think it mutated from hating the jew as a different religion to hating the jew as the other. (the fact that we do not call it Semitiphobia or Jewphobia but Antisemitism says a lot)

Plus, I think there's a really difficult question to answer: "Is it better hiding his religion and be safe or revealing his religion and risking the attacks ?"

Edited by Thesegougou on Oct 23rd 2020 at 12:00:36 PM

Besides those arguments, it is also an unfortunate fact that e people just love to discriminate against others in order to feel themselves superior.

The same kind of reasoning lies behind discrimination of LBGTQ-community who are in no way affecting the life of straight people, yet receive often a lot of hate.

x7

Sadly, Jews (and LBGTQ) are targets that both the far-right and islamists can agree on. The rise of the Af D thanks to the refugee crisis gave attention to politicians who like to downplay the Shoa, and antisemitic conspiracy theories are very popular among their voters (e.g. that Soros is trying to eliminate white people by replacing them with migrants). Case in point, the guy who tried to attack a synogogue in Halle (and after failing at that, shot several unrelated people) believed in a lot of such dangerous nonsense.

Furthermore because of the refugee crisis we have now roughly one million more people in this country who predominantly are from countries in which a pathological hatred of jews may be a state doctrin. Thankfully not all of them think like this, and some who did changed their views when given the chance, but it still means that jews are now under attack from two sides in a way that was unthinkeable before 2015.

Edited by Zarastro on Oct 23rd 2020 at 12:59:48 PM

Fascists and Islamist fundamentalists would be natural allies, if not for the former group's racism (most Muslims are non-European/non-"white) - heck, the Nazis praised Islam because they saw it as a strong, martial religion due to all the stereotypes associated with it.

You'll often find eerily similar social views in both groups - to the point that parts of the alt-right have embraced a concept called "white sharia" in recent years.

Edited by DrunkenNordmann on Oct 23rd 2020 at 8:48:59 PM

Reject modernity

Embrace monke tradition

(As we all know, the whole idea of "cultural degeneration"◊ was a major element of the Nazis' anti-Semitic propaganda)

Re: Anti-semitism and white supremacy: It's also important to white supremacists because it provides a convenient loophole to get around the disconnect between viewing other ethnicities as naturally inferior while somehow still controlling society - Jews look white (ignoring that there are several Jewish groups, some of which aren't white), which in their view, enables them to 'infiltrate' white-dominated power structures. It's basically that whole 'The Reptilians secretly run the world' conspiracy junk applied to a real-life ethno-religious group. There is also that idea among some Christians that the Jews 'betrayed' Jesus, which probably only made them an easier scapegoat for them. Plus the fact that, historically, Jewish people didn't have a nation to call their own, furthering the anti-semitic interpretation of them as 'always foreign infiltrators'; of course, nowadays, this has now turned into looking at them as 'Israeli spies', especially in the Middle-East.

I've said before that racists have two views on races that aren't them: either '[hated race] are dumb savages' or '[hated race] are master manipulators that control everything'; and racists with even a modicum of sense need to somehow reconcile these two. Of course, I'm well aware that some don't bother and just run with the Doublethink.

Edited by PresidentStalkeyes on Oct 24th 2020 at 2:53:46 PM

Report published on Labour Antisemitism, Corbyn was suspended due to comments he made about it.

Anyone can ELI5 the Labour anti-Semitism thing? Asking as someone who's heard of a few incidents here and there but is pretty trash at discerning the source biases.

I think it's like with the Ilhan Omar thing.

Some genuinely questionable statements, but blown way out of proportion by the Far-Right in order to deflect.

Labour like any political party has a problem with anti-semitism, Corbyn as someone who supports Palestine has both associated with anti-semites plenty and has some level of a blind spot on the issues.

Within the Labour Party a faction of established politicians and operators have a deep hatred for Corbyn for other reasons. They felt that anti-semitism was a good avenue of attack on Corbyn during his time as leader.

The British press hate Corbyn with a fiery passion, they are very right wing and realised that anti-semitism was a very good way to hurt Corbyn politically, regardless of if it was a bigger issue in Labour than in other parties.

The three factors combining meant that the party was pretty fucking terrible at dealing with anti-semitism. Corbyn’s people either ignoring it or got over-involved because they wanted to fight his reputation. The anti-Corbyn faction within the party would overemphasise incidents (including things like anonymous Twitter accounts claiming to be pro-Corbyn members that may well have been false flags) and have been accessed of avoiding dealing with anti-semitism because they wanted to keep the issue alive to harm Corbyn.

All of this meant that Labour as a party was heavily anti-Semitic and kept meddling with the process for address anti-semitism instead of letting it run independently of the political actors within the party. With the well-being of Jewish members becoming a political football kicked back at fourth.

Corbyn got suspended not because of what the report said but because he’s a politically unaware idiot. He could have simply accepted the report (which is from a very credible independent organisation), but instead made a statement, while the current leader was making his statement, saying how many incidents had been overemphasised. While his statement was true it rather missed the political reality of the day being that he needed to shut up for once and learn some tact.

Edited by Silasw on Oct 31st 2020 at 6:42:59 PM

Pompeo announced from Tel Aviv that BDS is officially an anti-Semitic group and any official funding from the US will soon stop.

Edited by Ominae on Nov 22nd 2020 at 7:09:42 AM

The report that came out was a long and very interesting read.

Edited by Wyldchyld on Jan 25th 2021 at 3:23:36 PM

It is somewhat harmful to the battle against anti-Semitism when a government legally proclaims that boycotting Israel is anti-Semitic. Since, you know, Jews are not responsible for the actions of Israel. It is probably best, however, if I remove myself from further discussion on this topic.

BDS statement on being declared an anti-Semetic organization:

I have no idea what the BDS is.

The short version, quote from Wikipedia:

"The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) is a Palestinian-led movement promoting boycotts, divestments and sanctions against Israel. Its objective is to pressure Israel to meet what it describes as Israel's obligations under international law, defined as withdrawal from the occupied territories, removal of the separation barrier in the West Bank, full equality for Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel, and "respecting, protecting, and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties"."

Edited by Forenperser on Nov 23rd 2020 at 12:10:52 PM

Well, whatever. Pompeo isn't going to be around long.