I suspect that the imposition of austerity/the crushing of leftwing populism in Europe is going to mean a massive resurgence of rightwing populism, which very likely will yield lots of antisemitism. If the past is prelude, I mean.
Pool on time remaining till Golden Dawn government?
Christ, I had no idea this was going on.
It hasn't exactly been a secret.
I have, shamefully, been sort of reading past stories about antisemitism in France thinking that they were probably overblown. I should stop doing that.
It's not great in the UK either. There's a Muslim school and a mosque down the road from me. The only security they have is locks on the doors, and grills that they put up on the school windows at the weekends. Not even a fence round the school grounds. Same as you'd see at any other school or place of worship, really.
Except for a Jewish one. Synagogues and Jewish schools have CCTV cameras, high fences, permanent security guard presence...
The article does sort of hint at a way in which people had their eye on the wrong threat by continuing to focus on the (limited) neo-Nazi danger rather than the (growing) Islamist danger.
Great, now I can spend the rest of the day enhancing my periodic worries about an Israeli-American friend who lives in Paris with his small children with the visuals from that article. I really should catch up with him and ask him how he can stand it. It must be so draining, on top of every other draining thing in daily life.
I don't think any of the synagogues by me has any special security, probably because we attract a higher quality of gentile than you get in some places.
Jeffrey Goldberg had an article on this in the Atlantic a few months ago, but I ignored it, because he's such an idiot about Netanyahu.
Some of the (many) synagogues around here have big "No Nukes For Iran" signs up. I let it slide.
I'm in NYC, so I wouldn't know. I mean, I don't think there's any violent antisemitism around here, but that doesn't say much about anyplace else.
Man, I don't know if I should say anything to another member of my family, observant, and lockstep pro-Israel in FB discussions. Response to the latest was:
-The choice wasn't no deal or this deal, it was this weak deal or a more strongly negotiated one;
-Since Iran is happy and Israel and Saudi Arabia are in agreement that it's bad it's obviously bad.
Even the Islamic extremist Saudi monarchy....
Is the opposite of 'observant Jew' 'unobservant Jew'? Because that just makes me think of a rabbi who keeps walking into lamp-posts.
The opposite is "liberal with conflicted feelings about the Palestinians."
I think the take-away for liberals is that being oppressed does not necessarily make someone nice.
There are two separate problems in terms of how to react - injustice to Palestinians and to Muslims in France generally, and injustice by [some] Palestinians and Muslims in France generally, and everyone wants to mix the two of them up - either from the liberal side so that anti-Semites are only anti-Semitic because they are sadly misunderstood and therefore everyone who gets beaten up should just deal with it, or from the right wing side, where "Islamists" are the real danger and we can now conveniently be against Palestine, crypto-racist, etc.
I'm struck by how the Vanity Fair article seems to handwave away the reality of the Algerian War, as if Ghazan's youthful flight from Algeria somehow doesn't have anything to do with colonialism, and of course no one would possibly object to the French presence in Algeria. Also, this whole thing seems to connect to the Euro-French history of anti-Semitism - this article seems to frame the whole thing as "look at those liberal white French people who aren't cracking down on the Muslims", but I bet there's a lot of people who aren't cracking down on the protesters because they're still anti-Semitic themselves.
It's really depressing, but exactly what you'd expect - there's a shitty situation, and the oppressed don't band together to be heroic and noble, they band together to be shitty and violent, making the whole situation worse and much, much harder to resolve.
23: If you think there's some susceptibility to reason I would echo or link to Kevin Drum
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2015/07/i-want-hear-good-argument-against-obamas-deal-iran
23?? Where did that come from?
21 to 15.
I don't know- this is a family member I actually interact with regularly, not crazy uncle twice removed or something, so I don't want to get into a political argument. More arguments:
-Even pro-Obama opposition in Israel are opposed to the deal;
-You shouldn't accept this weak deal based on the argument that it's impossible to remove all hazards therefore this is better than nothing; we can always do more to reduce risk if we try (At least I think that's the argument, I really don't understand exact what was said)
20: the Algerians had it coming, though. They lived off the slave trade for centuries and devastated communities all around the Med. A century of the French trying to teach you to read Balzac and vote for de Gaulle is pretty mild by comparison. Drops of blood drawn by lash vs. drawn by sword, etc etc.
20: I may be misunderstanding your point, but it's not particularly likely that a Jewish family that left in 1962 was part of the French presence in Algeria. Algeria, like most of the Arab world, had a significant Jewish population since Roman times, almost all of which left the nation in the 1960's, and not because they had previously identified with the French.
25: it actually mentions that the guy was Sephardic. So, yes, exactly.
It's no secret how badly the French have treated the north Africans over the years. That, plus Israeli abuses, plus the Islamic extremism promoted mainly by the Saudis has created a truly toxic situation. Although by reading some of the comment, mindless, violent bigotry is not a monopoly held by Islamic radicals.
It was my understanding that Arab/Islamic anti-semitism of the virulent, vicious type was a modern phenomenon, and that pogroms, etc were more or less a European phenomenon. Was I misinformed?
Yes, basically a modern phenomenon, starting in the post-WWW II era, partly in reaction to the creation of Israel. But persecutions were well underway by 1962.
25: True enough. I was confused by the whole "fled the country...in the wake of the Algerian war". Regardless, though, the article doesn't seem to draw any connection between France's imperial role and contemporary events in France.
Wikipedia suggests regular old French anti-Semitism among the non-Jewish pieds-noirs, so like a pretty unwinnable situation.
Oh man, I started reading that article, but it was waaaaaay too fucked up to continue. Every stupid Muslim-hating canard was in there! Isn't it funny how people who want you to "never forget" the Shoah are perfectly okay with using "they're breeding like rats!" as long is it's only applied to dark-skinned people and Muslims? What a bunch of racist, colonialist bullshit. Anybody who agrees with that crap is a fucking racist and ought to be strangled to death in a jail cell.
When that Jewish cop was drumming up anti-Muslim sentiment from the comfort of his spacious apartment, it was MUSLIM YOUTH who were battling Nazi skinheads in the streets of Paris in the 1980s. But do they ever get any credit for that? No, of course not. They get a kick in the face an another billion dollars for Israel to murder Palestinian babies with.
Give me one thing to say to the average ethnically Muslim youth in Paris that would convince them that they should give a shit about what happens to Israelis or Israeli fifth columnists with French citizenship.
In my opinion, "dual loyalties" sounds less antisemitic than "fifth columnist".
34 is beyond the pale.
Also, no one is asking for them to give a shit about French Jews, they're just asking them to you-know not murder them.
I appreciate that your first response was to make a very bad pun.
I was expecting Minnie to turn up and justify the violent persecution of Jewish schoolgirls in the banlieues (because maybe she has an uncle or someone who is a medium-ranking official in the Israeli government). He did not disappoint.
And in my opinion, 35 made me laugh out loud.
I at least partly agree with Min of Polis; the article is pretty objectionable for the almost complete absence of curiosity about what's behind these attacks and the role French bigotry (against Muslims and Jews) plays. And yet, you can't go around killing people for their religion.
As Ogged said, certainly a point there which could be made in a way that's not anti-semitic. But Natilo chose instead to make it in a way that is clearly anti-semitic.
I found the article troubling, too, but not nearly as troubling as Natilo's comment. So that's neatly accomplished, whatever it was.
Maybe he thought the post title was a request?
Somebody should check the monkeys then.
Oh, there's plenty of monkey torture going on.
I was viscerally pissed off by the VF article, but Natilo has now neatly paired that reaction with anti-Semitic nonsense. Swell.
(Bah. Things deleted. What ogged and Tweety said.)
The thing about this issue is it's useless now to speak of antisemitism because too many boys cried Wolfowitz.
That said, Natilo, kid, when you write shit like 34, it makes me glad I don't really know you.
Though it is pretty funny that Natilo reads an article about a bunch of people who have rallies where they attack synagogues, chant "death to the Jews" and draw swastikas on things, and still insists in his gormless way that these are the true antifascists. Kind of #slatepitch for the Jacobin/Just Seventeen crossover demographic.
I did some ethnographic research on French Muslims in Paris a bit over 10 years ago, so I know quite a bit more than the average person, though less than someone whose made it their sole research career.
1) Muslim anti-racist groups and moderate (i.e. most) Muslims, like French Jews, are also caught in the middle of this. 10 years ago, the Muslim groups I talked to were equally concerned about rising religious extremism and terrorist recruitment as they were French racism. The problem is that both used each other in self-fulfilling/defeating ways, and neither were completely wrong. I.e., the extremists would point to French racism as why Muslims would never be French, and the French pointed to Muslim extremism as their justification for racism. I can't imagine, with ISIS recruitment, that this has changed much, except for making the people at Muslim anti-racism organizations even more depressed.
1a) Antisemitism among Muslims is a real (as in actual, not as in giant) problem, one that is also concerning to moderate/anti-racist Muslims, who have no idea what to do about it. The leftist instinct to handwave it away isn't helpful, and neither is the rightist instinct to demonize Muslims as mini Hitlers. How it interacts with French antisemitism, which is also real, is something that is complex and probably requires ethnographic study to understand.
2) Jews in Algeria of course predated the French, but were not completely innocent in the French colonial regime. The French used Jews and Berbers, both of whom were considered more "civilized," as middlemen and generally favored them. Pitting various ethnic groups against each other, with one being considered "better" than the other is a very common colonial strategy and has contributed to lots of postcolonial violence, like in Rwanda.
3) Abusing Godwin's law has a long history in France, particularly by the French Right wing. In particular, anti-colonialist movements (including the Algerian war) and anti-racist movements have often been referred to as "Nazism" or fascist or promoting one or the other. This obviously doesn't explain Muslim extremist antisemitism, but it means that the war mainly gets dragged out in public discourse in the most cynical of ways, and has done much to dilute the power of the horror of the War and the Holocaust.
#28-29:
"Pogroms spread through the Middle East and North Africa: Aleppo (1850, 1875), Damascus (1840, 1848, 1890), Beirut (1862, 1874), Dayr al-Qamar (1847), Jaffa (1876), Jerusalem (1847, 1870 and 1895), Cairo (1844, 1890, 1901-02), Mansura (1877), Alexandria (1870, 1882, 1901-07), Port Said (1903, 1908), and Damanhur (1871, 1873, 1877, 1891)."
"the Nazi Arabic radio service had a staff of 80 and broadcast every day in Arabic, stressing the similarities between Islam and Nazism and supported by the activities of the Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husayni (who broadcast pro-Nazi propaganda from Berlin). The Nazi regime also provided funding to the Egyptian Moslem Brotherhood, which began calling for boycotts of Jewish businesses in 1936."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisemitism_in_the_Arab_world#Nineteenth_century
So no, Arab anti-Semitism is not caused by the declaration of the State of Israel.
Others have observed that for someone to have " had no idea that this was going on" means that someone has been a very selective observer of the world we live in. Perhaps someone suffers from confirmation bias and worse yet is working to confirm some pretty flawed ideas.
After this thread, I'm getting adds for Hebrew National hotdogs.
34: what on earth are you trying to say, especially the last six words? You've pulled me out of lurkerdom to let you know I'm really concerned about you. From one lefty to another and in the gentlest way possible, I need to ask: would you consider talking with a professional? Those kind of words don't come from a healthy place.