Dude, the good post on this is from Spackerman. We want stories!
http://toohotfortnr.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-see-you-crawling-in-your-garden.html
Agreed, good on Yglesias. Also, Jesus.
It's always hard for me to take charges of anti-semitism seriously. It's like being accused of polio or or inbreeding: sure, it was nasty in its day, but now it's just joke material. I guess I'm sheltered, in that I didn't learn that actual anti-semitism existed until I was fairly grown. I grew up in an regular/upper middleclass neighborhood where the big Jewish conspiracy was getting extra vacation.
Both of my best friends are Jews. Well, no, one of them isn't, but I thought he was one a them non-practicing types for several years. Turns out the feeling was mutual; I made a comment ,and he acted surprised, revealing that he had assumed that I was Jewish.{/comedy gold} We cleared that up pretty quick. Then we went to the Gap. True story (except for the gap bit)
It's easy for me to take charges of anti-Semitism seriously (cf. the deicide comment that showed up on Ackerman's blog) -- just not when they're being used to shut up people who oppose Islamophobia and illegal wars of aggression.
This has been a joy to watch. TNR is clearly taking on our man Matt as a way to fight a proxy war against Spackerman (at the same time that they are, whether they realize it or not, laying the rhetorical groundwork for a non-proxy war against Iran).
Matt is doing brave and great work. As a Jew, it really is depressing to admit that, in some respects at least, the last 6 years have been like an anti-semitic fantasy brought to life. Powerful American Jews are using their money and influence to nudge us toward wars that they (wrongly) perceive to be in Israel's interests.
The rivalry between The American Prospect and TNR is much more fun now that TAP has genuinely established itself. I had a brief, not very substantial, association with TAP back in the mid-90s. At the time, there was no place that an aspiring liberal pundit could go to launch his or her career other than TNR. (Chait had just left TAP for TNR when I got there, and my editor was in the process of making that move.) So while everyone bitched about TNR, they also had to suck up to it. Matt and Ezra are in the nice position of being able to call TNR on its bullshit, something that wasn't possible for someone in their position as recently as 5 years ago.
So, how is dear spackerman ever supposed to work again?
P.S. I worded my comment inelegantly. It is hard for me to take charges of domestic anti-semitism seriously. Clearly, there are people out there who don't like Jews, but few live in the U.S., and of those that do, even fewer are afforded soapboxes. Am I wrong? Pat Buchanan comes to mind, but that's about it.
Good heavens, the Wikipedia article on Peretz has some damning quotes.
Is it possible to expose and marginalize Peretz without destroying The New Republic?
Oh, and goddamn, just read the comment thread. Way to fuck up my argument, punk, I guess soapboxes come cheap these days. In terms of Christian theology, is this "deicide" thing the greatest example of point-missing in history? As a bad Lutheran, I answer the question, "Who killed Jesus?", "We [Man] did". Apparently this approach hasn't caught on.
If I were jewish I'd buy a t-shirt reading "I Killed Your God, Bitch." Or maybe one of those joke buttons.
Am I wrong? Pat Buchanan comes to mind, but that's about it.
I think there's a fair amount of soft antisemitism, maybe more in the older generations. I don't know that there's much intense antisemitism, but the joky but still kind of serious stuff exists.
6: I'd say there's a fair amount of domestic anti-Semitism in the US. The movementarian phrase "liberal coastal elites" is quite widely understood to be code language for Jews, for instance.
It's just that much of that anti-Semitism is now lightly submerged. Its purveyors are in the ironic position of finding the Israeli right a convenient ally in getting at the even juicier target of the Global Muslim Terrorist Conspiracy; so, they have to masquerade as sort-of philo-Semites and "friends of Israel" (which basically means "friends of the usefully militant Israelis").
... and yes, of course, the really old-school anti-Semites are still around in remnants.
6: I'm with you in thinking anti-semitism seems so very retro; so much so that sometimes when I see it I have to do a double-take to go "oh, yeah." Alas, though, I do think you're wrong. I mean, think of the major Christian fundie figures, just to start with.
I'd think the same thing about homophobia based on my circle of friends and acquaintances, though.
The movementarian phrase "liberal coastal elites" is quite widely understood to be code language for Jews
It bothers the hell out of me when people say things like this, because I'm very sure this is wrong. There may be a subset of people using it that way, but most people haven't the least idea that "Jewish" is buried anywhere in that epxression. I'm quite serious about this. I did a tour of red-state America investigating this very question.
There's plenty of anti-semitism in America. That's one of the reasons why bullshit charges of anti-semitism rankle so much, because it means your local anti-semite occasionally gets to say something true.
I don't doubt there's an undercurrent out there, and I can't claim to have any expertise on red-state types, but, the only explicit anti-semitism I've ever heard is from old black men. The most racist individual I've personally encountered is my grandmother's German Jewish friend: she once asked me (an IT guy) whether the hispanics were teaching the blacks how to use computers to steal.
But what problems do people have with "liberal coastal elites"? Hmm, they're cosmopolitan, they make money, they have liberal values, they're rootless, and you have to wonder if they're responsible for your country's defeats in war because they aren't really loyal to the fatherland.
13: Yeah, I don't think that's actually very "widely understood." At least down here, it just means "big-city secular liberal," which is way, way worse than being Jewish.
what problems do people have with "liberal coastal elites"
No ostentatious displays of religiosity, mostly.
Only a smart, tough Jew could have done it, and Yglesias has been up to the task.
I think the implication is that most Jews are neither smart nor tough; ogged is an anti-semite.
s. At the time, there was no place that an aspiring liberal pundit could go to launch his or her career other than TNR. (Chait had just left TAP for TNR when I got there, and my editor was in the process of making that move.) So while everyone bitched about TNR, they also had to suck up to it.
This, definitely. A deeply troubling and unremarked aspect of the whole problem with TNR. I don't think TAP is a sufficient competitor yet, but someday it might be. And if not yet, some other mag may come along and fill that roll. At least now it's not clear how much "TNR" on the CV is a plus.
Is it possible to expose and marginalize Peretz without destroying The New Republic?
For gawd's sake, why?
13: Yeah, I don't think that's actually very "widely understood." At least down here, it just means "big-city secular liberal," which is way, way worse than being Jewish.
The characteristics you associate with "big-city secular liberal" are supposed to match up well with Jews; that's the underlying claim.
The movementarian phrase "liberal coastal elites" is quite widely understood to be code language for Jews, for instance.
Quite widely among liberal coastal elites, maybe. I'm not so sure that most people in the Midwest worried that Yale is going to make their bright young stars eat their babies, renounce God, and hug trees, however, are winking and nudging about fears of Jews. Historically, definitely. I think there's been a reference shift, though.
But a lot of the codeword, the knowing whose last names are Jewish are things I had to have explained to me after leaving redstates for bluestates. I could be completely naïve about all of this, but if it's a codeword, I'm thinking a lot of people don't know the code.
That's not to say there isn't anti-Semitism, and that it doesn't pop up all over, just that if 'liberal coastal elite' is a codeword it's probably code for 'probably gay' ime.
18 is right. It used to be that in America, "Jewish" was a word that meant "big-city secular liberal who isn't loyal to America". Now it isn't. People who don't like "big-city secular liberals who aren't loyal to America" are not anti-Semites, they're just closed-minded and have generally been fooled by the power elite into believing that said liberals are actually the power elite.
It's very enticing to believe that our opponents are racists, but they often are not. Martin Peretz is, of course.
The characteristics you associate with "big-city secular liberal" are supposed to match up well with Jews; that's the underlying claim.
This just isn't true. The characteristics of "Jews" are supposed to match up well with those characteristics, which is a big reason of why people have been suspicious of Jews in the past.
(this is different from the belief that Jews are undesirable neighbors because they drink blood or are devils or secretly control the world's government. people who believe these things, of whom there aren't very many in America, don't bother with referring to "big-city secular liberals")
Most Jews (in my experience) distinguish pretty sharply between sentiments that are anti-Jewish and sentiments that are anti-Jewish interests (and thus fail the old "Is it good for the Jews?" test). The fact of the matter is that my people, the Jews, are doing great in this country, and have been for some time. As a result, heartland-style casual anti-semitism is really neither here nor there. It does not reflect an ongoing institutional assualt on our dignity and, frankly, our regard for those people is so low that we really don't care what they think about us. (You should hear what my family lets themselves say about the Goyim, right in front of my non-Jewish wife.) What does frighten many American Jews is the possibility that this country will abandon Israel. Thus, it is not so much that many American Jews thoughtlessly conflate anti-semitism with criticism of Israel. It is that they actually care more about the latter than the former.
I doubt Israel is in any danger of being abandoned, but I sure would like to see AIPAC get kicked to the curb.
re: 25
I find the whole idea that an ethnic group even has an interest pretty worrying. I can understand the historical reasons for that being the case, but still, it's the flip side of the same stuff that the anti-Moslem fanatics always go on about -- loyalty to the ummah, etc.
Why is "anti-Semitism" a much worse charge than "anti-coastal-elitism"? Other than, er, the historical record?
Talking out of my speculation here, but could it be that the "liberal coastal elites" concept might once have meant "Jews" but has grown to mean "those who don't share rural values." The red/blue split is, simplistically, that of urban/rural ideologies, yes? "Rural" is in this case only etymologically accurate, because the central conflict is between the values of 1960s urban and rural America, which maps onto the current political climate (metaphor blender) imperfectly. My point is, in 1960, "liberal coastal elite" meant jew. Today, the disgust prompted by that term is applied much more broadly.
on the liberal elites things--like someone said, they hate us for the *very same characteristics* that they used to hate Jews for: we hate Jesus, control the media and the universities, etc. etc. For a Jewish person it feels much the same, and my in laws are completely convinced it's anti-semitic. On the other hand, I really don't think they care whether a liberal cosmopolitan sort is atheist, Unitarian, UCC or Jewish. So, they don't hate The Jews. They just hate most actual Jews.
That said, that war on Christmas stuff is straight up anti-semitic.
Regarding #13 and its children, I think the acid test is surely that the "liberal coastal elites" are regularly accused these days of being anti-Semitic (in the modern sense of "insufficiently supportive of the worst and craziest strain of right wing Israeli politics"[1]). The old-fashioned anti-Semites have had their phrase stolen by the garden-variety morons.
[1] I used to say "Likudist", but in the space of only two or three years, American politics has moved on to the stage where I'm pretty sure that a mainstream member of the Likud party could get himself stitched up as an anti-Semite and terrorist sympathiser.
30: yes; I don't think they differentiate a bit between Jews and Athiests, say, who otherwise share these characteristics. I can see how from a Jewish perspective it might be hard to see the distinction, given the history of it being more focussed in previous generations.
30: I think this is right for a lot of red staters. They don't hate Jews, they just hate non-Christian intellectual cosmopolitans. But this is worse, in my book, than simply hating a group. They are actually hating important human values like intellect and tolerance.
31: I always thought `likudnik' rolled off the tongue better, but agree the distinction has lost it's pep.
I find the whole idea that an ethnic group even has an interest pretty worrying.
This I don't get. It's not like Jews are the only ethnic group that has one. Every group has one. I'm sure there is a Lur Association out there somewhere. And because of that wide usage, it turns out to be mostly fine.
The first few of Greenwald's examples seem like real stretches to me. So MP speculates that Hussein's evil may come from a combination of genes and environment. Don't we engage in this kind of speculation all the time about moral character without it being a code for racism? J.M. Coetzee does the same thing for Hitler in the current NYRB, and I didn't once think that it might be an anti-Aryan thing.
33: Oh it doesn't make it any better, no. It's comtemptable and pernicious.
Also, Greenwald tries to make MP's sympathies for Berbers out to be an anti-Arab thing, but it totally conflicts with the claim that Peretz is anti-Islam.
The first few of Greenwald's examples seem like real stretches to me. So MP speculates that Hussein's evil may come from a combination of genes and environment. Don't we engage in this kind of speculation all the time about moral character without it being a code for racism? J.M. Coetzee does the same thing for Hitler in the current NYRB, and I didn't once think that it might be an anti-Aryan thing.
The problem is that these sorts of charges are hard to prove. There is always a charitable and innocuous explanation. That's why Buchanan was allowed to roam free and unfettered for so long. But we do seem to have some sort of ill-described heuristic for sorting these things out. "You know when you know" is a deeply unsatisfying answer, particularly because it can be and has been misused so much. But that really seems to be the way it works; the actual explanations are mostly cover for whatever really creates the realization.
Helpy-chalk, you plant killer, you have to be kidding. Here's what Peretz wrote:
But surely there are tests that could have been taken of Hussein about what makes for evil. A certain level of testosterone combined with certain genes. It's a promising field, these inquiries into the biological origins of cruelty.
The cruelty gene? Passed down from whom, among what population? If you don't think that's racist, I'm not sure where to go from here.
I'm sure there is a Lur Association out there somewhere.
There doesn't seem to be a Lur Facebook group, possibly making it unique among ancestries. Lurs are welcome in the "Aryan Iran & Aryan Germany Club", though.
Throw me in as one more vote for the "Liberal Coastal-Elite" isn't a code word, at least not anymore. This is probably breaking down by age lines, judging from the thread thus far, but I know that I thought "hey, why do they hate me?" when I first heard that phrase used derisively, and I'm technically baptized Anglican (and only from the third coast, too).
PJS, why is it that your family would be concerned about American support for Israel? I've never understood how so many otherwise liberal and not-too-religious people could always support the foreign policy of a nation they have no tie to other than religion over the interests of what is, as far as I can see, their new homeland. (This is meant as a genuine question, by the way. I don't have any Jewish friends who support Israel in this way and I've always been curious.)
39: Do you really want to make an argument that undercuts itself so much? Andrew Sullivan does the same thing every day - but he's Andrew Sullivan.
I agree with 36 - it seems to me that MP is an idiot, but that's all.
They don't hate Jews, they just hate non-Christian intellectual cosmopolitans.
Okay, I'll bite. This distinction is one I'm not sure is important. It seems to me that all that's being said here is that people can be taught the essence of X prejudice without actually knowing what the target is. Does that matter? Maybe in terms of absolving said people of intentional bigotry, but in effect?
I say this as someone who is *so bad* at the codes, as Cala says, that I consistently fail to realize that friends with last names like Goldstein and Lieberman are Jewish until it comes up at some point. But I'm not sure that that's really a mark of my lack of anti-semitism so much as it is of my ignorance, and I'm pretty sure that ignorance about other people's existence isn't especially commendable.
42: pjs can obviously answer for himself, but I think it's because Jews had rather a bad time of it between 1939 and 1945, and that it more less sucked at various times before that. Quite sanely, nobody fully trusts the new homeland. Cf. ogged's claim that his mom would be more comfortable in Iran if the US were to start bombing it.
35: I know that this is a touchy subject, so I'll try to tread lightly.
re:interests
This I don't get. It's not like Jews are the only ethnic group that has one. Every group has one.
Ok, the rub here is that jews have a state explicitly identified with an ethnic interest. There's a whole heap of IR issues created by this situation, and this particular identity has encountered problems in the past. Comparing ethnic interest groups w/ Zionism is an (understandable) category error.
39: Do you really want to make an argument that undercuts itself so much? Andrew Sullivan does the same thing every day - but he's Andrew Sullivan.
I have no idea what that means. But, on a guess, no, I don't find myself particularly attracted to "bears."
re: 35
It just seems strange to me that globally spread ethnic groups, as such, have an interest. Particular polities will, and particular ethnically homogeneous groups, but that's not the same thing. I can make sense of what people are saying when they are saying 'policy X is detrimental to members of ethnic group Y' but not so much sense of the idea that ethnic group Y has an interest, iyswim.
Perhaps I'm just suspicious of any strong group identification of that type?
Ogged, you Persian shoe:
Sociopathy probably has a genetic component, and I am perfectly willing to believe Saddam was a sociopath. The current research on genes and sociopathy is dubious, if only because a lot of it has been promoted by crazed genetic determinist David Lykken, but the basic hypothesis is quite plausible.
Sociopathy is also an obvious example of a trait subject to frequency dependent selection. Thus there is simply no way that we would ever see it come to dominate any population, nor be completely wiped out of a population. The standard numbers are that 3% of men and 1% of women are sociopaths. It wouldn't surprise me if this is true across all cultures.
42: My parents (young adults during the depression and WW2) always insisted Israel was the escape hatch for when the pogroms started in the US. That made perfect sense until I was old enough to start reading about economics, geography, demographics, history, etc.
It's an emotional attachment. No mountain of piled-up facts and logic makes any difference to a belief strongly implanted in one's teens, cognitive dissonance will neatly dispose of any contrary evidence.
And, near as I can tell from my Jewish friends, there's no monolithic support for current Israeli policy, I'm getting lots of emails from all sides.
The standard numbers are that 3% of men and 1% of women are sociopaths.
Probably based on diagnoses from the caught-criminal population. Many of us are far cleverer than those people.
JAC,
Personally, I don't identify with Israel much at all. But, given the recent history of the Jews, doing so strikes me as, at the very least, an emotionally intelligible phenomenon. Most American Jews come from families who have been in this country for between 90 or 100 years. That's a long time -- more than 1/3 of America's history -- but, generationally, does not put a lot of separation between them and some pretty brutal history. My parents were raised by parents who were young adults during the Holocaust, and whose parents had themselves been kicked out of their previous country for being Jewish. Against that background, it is not hard to understand how Jews could view their continued existence as dependent on the survival of a Jewish State, despite the fact that Jews face much more danger in Israel than in America. My sense is that a lot of these feelings are fading, and can be expected to continue to fade. But they're there, or were there at least.
45: Yeah, I mean, I understood that much, and Ogged's mother's statement made a lot of sense to me. That's where she grew up, that's where her family is, that's the familiar homeland. Also, she'd be living in a country with nasty and rising anti-Muslim sentiment if she stayed in the US, since we'd be bombing Iran under this hypothetical.
American Jews don't face anywhere near the hostility as a group that Muslims do, and the greatest danger America poses to Israel is that we'll stop sending it $2 billion a year (and actually a detachment from the US foreign policy in the middle east could even help Israel, but that's another argument).
But what really confuses me is that that vast majority of the Jews in America did not actually come from Israel, their family's familiar homelands are much more likely to be Germany, Poland or Russia, but no one seems to be aching to return to them (for obvious reasons). Israel has some issues due to location and Orthodox power that seem like they'd be completely foreign to most liberal Americans, regardless of religion. I just always figured that, to be honest, if anti-semitic feelings suddenly spread like wildfire in the US, American Jews would probably find a more agreeable and similar life in Canada, Australia or the US than they would in Israel.
Whoops, 53's last sentence should end "in Canada, Australia, or the UK than they would in Israel".
And thanks, SCMT, Biohazard and pjs. I guess a lot of it comes down to the generations above me, who I rarely interact with. It makes sense since the people 50 years older than me would be the ones with all the money, but it's still hard for me or my friends to imagine those fears holding so much weight.
49: I think you're really stretching too far here to try to be charitable, Rob. Especially given the other stuff MP says in the various links.
I'm finding this whole argument that most Americans aren't really anti-Semitic kinda bothersome. Correct me if I'm woefully out of date on current historical understanding, since it's not my field, but isn't it generally agreed that pre-Hitler, German Jews were pretty well assimilated and most Germans weren't especially anti-Semitic in any conscious way?
Among my jewish acquaintances unequivocal support for Likud/Kadima positions is markedly less common than among random people whose politics I know. (was in Bay Area, am in Boston now) Not to say there aren't wingnuts among them, but at least they're informed.
The scariest political experience I've had was backpacking with Israelis. We were a couple days out when, like an idiot, I asked about the political logic behing the Liberman thing. They told me not to worry, this wast just a step, and that the whole "H-arab Bidyness" would be settled." They were only two guys, but I had to spend two more days with them and they scared me.
For a related example, there seems to me to be be pretty much immediate `anti-semite' reaction reported in the US media to any sort of commentary about Israeli Palestinian relations lacking enough anti-Palestinian sentiment. I've never actually met a non-Israeli Jew who held this sort of belief (and actually also met a couple of Israelis who weren't nearly so black and white), so this confuses me. Besides the categorical error, I mean. I don't have a really good feel for where this comes from though. Perhaps it's due to not having grown up in the US? Is there a small but well organized Zionist group that chases things like this down? Am I just missing reporting that doesn't have this sort of response?
56 is a good point. Also, how would we know?
56: Hm. George Steiner's father got the family out of Vienna in 1924 because he could see it coming.
re:56
No. Or, at least, there's some controversy about it. Daniel Goldhagen (whose book Hitler's Willing Executioners is far from universally accepted) argues that Germans were pretty damn anti-Semitic and that the Holocaust was as much an expression of widespread German anti-Semitism as it was particular to the Nazis.
He's quoted on wikipedia, thus:
The German perpetrators of the Holocaust treated Jews in all the brutal and lethal ways that they did because, by and large, they believed that what they were doing was right and necessary. Second, that there was long existing, virulent anti-Semitism in German society that led to the desire on the part of the vast majority of Germans to eliminate Jews somehow from German society. Third, that any explanation of the Holocaust must address and specify the causal relationship between anti-Semitism in Germany and the persecution and extermination of the Jews which so many ordinary Germans contributed to and supported."
45: When I was younger and the kids were small, I'd figured Canada to start with. Now, to hell with it, I'd just use the scoped rifle until I'm put down. The Iraqis are truly inspirational.
On the whole "liberal coastal elites" thing: look, AFAICT it's part and parcel of a whole system of culture war rhetoric with its roots in the Christian Right, and which is basically very thinly-veiled (or sometimes not so veiled) anti-Semitism. See here for some examples.
When I said it was "widely understood," I meant by the people who employ this kind of rhetoric. It's coded, obviously, so as not to be "widely understood" as such outside that context. Now, I'll grant that there's probably a lot of doublethink going on, in that many of these people don't consciously see themselves as "anti-Semitic" so much as just telling it like it is -- just as many of the participants in Pastra Phari's the immortal thread don't think their fear and hatred of Obama is racist.
I find the emotional tie to Israel perfectly understandable. It is very common and it does not necessarily translate to uncriticial support with Likud....Has anyone ever read "Underground to Palestine," by I.F. Stone? And actually Friedman has a decent discussion in From Beirut to Jerusalem, from before he sucked.
61: But see, that doesn't really address the issue, because it's still not addressing the question of what counts as anti-Semitism. Which is what I'm wondering about.
60: Yeah, and Ogged is thinking of getting out of the States right now, which I assume we all find understandable enough, but also a little hyperbolic. Ogged included, since he hasn't done it yet.
63: (first part) wasn't the argument earlier essentially that yes, this is the roots of the `liberal coastal elites' thing but that it has grown to include all sorts of people who aren't Jewish?
66: It may have grown more inclusive, but what I'm saying is that one should not underestimate the extent to which it's still basically about Teh Jewz and their Minions.
66: Problematic. Again, Nazism persecuted lots of people (gays, gypsies, Communists) along with Jews, and the rhetoric around this worked partly by conflating these other groups under the umbrella of the Jewish threat to Aryan purity.
The cruelty gene? Passed down from whom, among what population? If you don't think that's racist, I'm not sure where to go from here.
I have to agree with RHC on this one. If you let yourself be primed by Greenwald, it's easy to read that post as racist, but I think a much more reasonable interpretation is that Peretz was thinking of something along the lines of the hypothetical "gay gene", i.e. something that exists throughout the human population but which is only expressed in certain individuals. I think the post makes him look rather foolish but I don't see how it suggests racism on his part any more than it does for Dawkins.
The Berber stuff, on the other hand, is completely ridiculous and awful in so many ways. It must be incredibly embarrassing to work at TNR these days.
56- I never said there's no anti-semitism. I'm perfectly willing to accept that most Americans would, given the slightest provocation (imaginary, even), be glad to disciminate against anyone and everyone that could plausibly be labeled "Other". This includes Jews, sure, along with Arabs and Mexicans and unidentified brown people and gays and liberals and Mormons and the French and other wimpy Europeans and Asians and whoever else you can think of. Off to the concentration camps with them! All I said was that "liberal coastal elites" is not at all "widely understood" to be code for "the Jews."
Oh, and also, I don't in any way think this is a particularly "American" trait. It's a trait most humans share. Scary.
it's still hard for me or my friends to imagine those fears holding so much weight
JAC,
Hell, I grew up with it and while I recognize it, I don't *get* it either. My mother, for example, would every once in a great while buy a loaf of bread and throw it away unused just to re-convince herself the depression was over. My grandmother, born before the Wrights flew their plane, was convinced the Cossacks were always just around the corner.
I guess the trick is to recognize that those nutty mindsets are fully as real to the people harboring them as yours are to you.
69:If you take that particular text alone, you might have a case. In context, it's disgustingly damning.
69: I think a much more reasonable interpretation is that Peretz was thinking of something along the lines of the hypothetical "gay gene", i.e. something that exists throughout the human population but which is only expressed in certain individuals.
That might, I suppose, be a "reasonable interpretation" in isolation from the rest of Peretz' bizarre views on Arabs (though even that seems dubious). In context with the other vilifications he's fond of, I think it's much harder to make that case.
63: NYC, LA, SF and Chi-town combine for about 15 million people. Of them, only about a million are Jewish (rough guess based on Wikipedia's stats). That's a big percentage compared to the US population on the whole, but it's still not much compared to the number of WASPs, gays and intellectuals in those cities who get tarred with the "coastal liberal elite" brush.
63 and 67 are just plain wrong. Walk into any small town barbershop and ask how they feel about the liberal coastal elites and they'll be happy to jab at you for twenty minutes about the godless, communist, anti-american, gay, vegetarian, materialistic, arrogant heathens in our big coastal cities. Tell them you're in on the secret and know they're really talking about Jews and they'll look at you with utter perplexity, unless they think you're just joking, in which case they probably won't find it very funny.
70: I don't think it's primarily a question of Americans (or anyone) being willing to hate the Other. It's primarily a question of how easy it would be to move them to that position for any given group. And I suspect it's just easier to get people to move to a position of disliking Jewish people (or black people or, in weird ways, women) because someone's already done a lot of the work. If I want to find a way to slur Jews, Google will yield more information than I can possibly use. If I want to a way to slur the Lurs, it'll be harder (but I've got stick-to-it-ness!, so don't worry).
76- And what I'm saying is I don't think it'd be much if any easier to get to "Jews" than any of the other categories in 70.
SCMT: putting the lur back in slur, so we don't have to.
75: But see the second half of 63 in re: doublethink.
I haven't read the whole thread. Are we seriously debating whether Peretz is a bigot? Because holy shit my god, that man is a bigot, and to be honest I was surprised when Chait even made an attempt at challenging the notion. I mean, the man regularly hits every note on the scale - Arabs are barbarians, Arabs are subhuman, Arabs are uncivilized, etc. I feel like he could show up at the TNR offices in a pointy white hood and the people there wouldn't really bat an eye.
Are we seriously debating whether Peretz is a bigot?
No. We aren't. There's only one phrase of his that's even been mentioned as possibly not racist.
No, I guess we're talking about whether we're all anti-semites, Which is just what old- MP would want.
one should not underestimate the extent to which it's still basically about Teh Jewz and their Minions.
Yo, I didn't lose my religion, move to the coast, and join the Democratic Party and teh ACLU to be a Minion. Where's the hate, people?
... although hang on, I guess that doesn't quite address your point. To elaborate a bit, I can see how for the right outside the Christian right there may be less awareness of the general miasma of anti-Semitism that hangs around the language. Within the Christian right I don't buy that.
83: Sorry, but them's the rules. You'll have to take that up with the Elders of Zion.
56, 65: No, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in Germany before the war - have a look at some of Wagner's writing, frex.
Yeah, I don't think anyone not employed by TNR is claiming that Peretz is not a bigot. The question is just how to best prove that he's a bigot. Using weak evidence gives people who are prepared to ignore you an excuse to do so.
Using weak evidence gives people who are prepared to ignore you an excuse to do so.
Wait, where was the weak evidence? Peretz is the evidence. Did you read "The Plank" back during the Lebanon war? Jesus fuck.
56, 65: No, there was plenty of anti-Semitism in Germany before the war - have a look at some of Wagner's writing, frex.
These sorts of measurements are relative. Perhaps I'm misremembering, but didn't Nazi troops have to stop Poles from butchering Jews at one point?
it doesn't have to be your escape route for you to want it to exist as an escape route. And even if American Jews are perfectly safe, they are *sensitive* to people being murdered for being Jewish. We all get more upset about atrocities committed against people we identify more with, familiar places, distant relatives we went to summer camp with...which throws you more: a given bombing in Baghdad, or a terrorist attack in Madrid in London?
This is particularly true 60-70 years after the Holocaust, which was only the most spectacular in a long line of massacres of Jews for being Jewish....the summer my husband traveled through Europe, he could barely stand even being in Germany after he visited Dachau. I don't think it's a great tourist destination anyway but that wasn't coincidental.
The stories of upper class doctors in Prague and Budapest, who thought of themselves as Czech and Hungarian and were perfectly assimilated, are the ones that tends to freak out my family. I don't think the situation is comparable: it's one thing to be a safe, assimilated minority in a tiny newly independent country in between Russia and Germany between the world wars, and another thing in the world's only superpower. But even so...and again, it need not be a personal fear.
Take a look at this website. Israel contains 40.2% of the world's Jewish population. The U.S. contains 40.5%. Next on the list are France, Canada, and the U.K., clocking in at 3.8%, 2.9%, and 2.3%, respectively.... Canada is the only country besides Israel and the U.S. where Jews crack 1% of the total population.
One of the asylum cases I heard last year was a guy from Albania, about my age. He was apparently one of only 40-100 Jews left in the country--he had met one other, once (his family had fled to Greece some years before.) Actually he wasn't even Jewish: his mother was Muslim, so while he could have gone to Israel, they wouldn't have regarded him as Jewish and would have denied him some rights, and he was completely non practicing. Nevertheless, his passport gave his nationality as "Israelite" rather than Albanian, so every time he had to go back there he tended to be detained at the border until someone bribed the guards for him.
There was some other stuff which I'm not going to get into but as asylum stories go, it wasn't that bad--nevertheless it got to me a bit more than a lot of cases. He was an appealing guy, but this was surely also related to the fact that he had to deal with this crap because of a characteristic he shared with much of my family and closest friends. I don't think they're going to have their U.S. passports start listing them as "Israelites", but that's not the point. It's the flip side of greater Arab indignation about the Palestinians than about Arab-on-Arab atrocities that are far worse.
It's human nature to care more about people you have more in common with. It's not a bad thing in itself--the synagogue I used to go to talked a fair bit about Israel and thought they had an obligation to it, but they had a hell of a lot more in common with Yglesias's views than Peretz's.
89: didn't Nazi troops have to stop Poles from butchering Jews at one point?
I'd say almost certainly not true. If anything, the Eastern Front exceeded previous Nazi standards for anti-Jewish aggro.
72,73: My problem with that is that that seems sort of like putting the cart before the horse. I'm not sure whether I have a good philosophical basis for that, but I still feel that pragmatically speaking, it's not a great example.
Take a look at this website. Israel contains 40.2% of the world's Jewish population. The U.S. contains 40.5%.
USA! USA! USA!
93: This is what bugs me about the otherwise laudable academic instinct for dispassionate analysis of evidence. Is quibbling over one bad example (which I don't think is bad, but for the sake of argument) really more important than the big picture?
Actually, I have to admit that I hadn't, um, really read the Dawkins' column that Peretz was referring to and just assumed that, what with Dawkins being a geneticist, the hypothetical "evil gene" was his big example of what could be learned by studying folks like Saddam and Peretz was basically just repeating what Dawkins had said. Instead, I find that Dawkins talked about psychology as much if not more than genetics and so I do find the focus on genes in Peretz's post a bit...suspicious. I'd still say it's not the best example in the world but, yeah, maybe a bit suspicious.
I'll also throw out there that I think that "If Not Now, When?" by Primo Levi helped me a lot in terms of understanding the psychology of Zionism (or the psychology at some points in time, at least).
92: I'm almost certain I was misremembering this:
The Iron Guard have become infamous for their participation in the Holocaust. In The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg writes, "There were... instances when the Germans actually had to step in to restrain and slow down the pace of the Romanian measures." The annihilation of the Jews of eastern Romania (including Bessarabia, Bucovina, Transnistria, and the city of Iaşi) had more the character of a pogrom than of the well-organized transports and camps of the Germans.So I slandered the Poles, I guess. Sorry about that. And it looks like it's just one guy making the claim.
6: Well, I certainly haven't done any work for the last three hours.
which throws you more: a given bombing in Baghdad, or a terrorist attack in Madrid in London?
This explains more than it excuses. If, as a random ignorant schmuck, I wanted to go to war with Iraq with the tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths that would probably ensue because I was still pissed over a mere three thousand American deaths on 9/11, my devaluation of Iraqi life in respect to American life might be a common phenomenon, but it isn't an acceptable one. And if years later, after reading the Lancet study and learning of the six hundred-odd thousand Iraqis which have died to satisfy my anger over the three thousand dead Americans, I haven't learned to intellectually correct for these kinds of imbalances in empathy when confronted with the sheer weight of their consequences, then I am a moral monster.
As loath as I am to agree with Brock, "liberal coastal elites" is not a codeword for Jews. I'll grant stuff like "liberal New York international financiers" as codewords, but "liberal coastal elites" means exactly what it says (except that it excludes the coastal parts of the south from "coastal").
But Stras, Katherine's point wasn't that one's identification with London bombing victims makes one pro-war, or that this would be valid. It was that one's identification with London bombing victims makes one feel vulnerable.
And as a lot of people have pointed out, most American Jews aren't uncritically behind Israel's policies towards the Palestinians. But someone asked why American Jews would feel a connection to Israel, and I think Katherine's answer is a pretty good one.
Is quibbling over one bad example (which I don't think is bad, but for the sake of argument) really more important than the big picture?
Well, like I said, weak evidence gives those who are primed to ignore you an excuse to do so. Especially, as in this case, if that's the first piece of evidence you put forward, since that further primes them to be suspicious of all your other evidence. Now some people - I won't name names but let's just call him "Strasmangelo J." - seem to say "Well, who the fuck cares about anyone who doesn't think that Martin Peretz is a bigot? It's so fucking obvious that there's no point discussing it." But if that's the case then, well, there really isn't much point in things like Glenn Greenwald's post, is there? If the goal isn't to covince anyone who isn't already convinced then all the discussion and presentation evidence is nothing more than intellectual onanism (not to knock intellectual onanism: it's argument with someone I love).
I don't think I'm really approaching this from the viewpoint of academic dispassionate evaluation of evidence. In that context, a bad example of a non-bigoted statement by Peretz doesn't really do very much: you throw it out and judge based on the rest. (If you want to be technical, I think it very very slightly lowers the chance of him being a bigot) What I'm talking about is the psychology of changing people's minds. In that context, I think a bad example can have a much more negative impact because when you're talking about changing people's minds, the key thing to remember is that, in general, people really don't like changing their minds and will take any excuse not to do so.
"liberal coastal elites" means exactly what it says
Yeah, I'm pretty certain that for most righties, the first faces that come to mind as LCEs are Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton. Barney Frank too, probably, but not for his Jewishness, IYKWIM.
But Stras, Katherine's point wasn't that one's identification with London bombing victims makes one pro-war
I really wasn't saying that at all. What I'm saying is this: it may be commonplace to empathize more with people who are like ourselves, but it is not acceptable to uncritically do so. That support for a campaign against al Qaeda translated so easily into an invasion and occupation of Iraq demonstrates that many, many Americans were willing to wildly undervalue non-American life. Hell, American response to the war in Afghanistan demonstrated that. Katherine said that it's "not a bad thing in itself" to "care more about people you have more in common with" - but it really, really is. Just because it's the most common vice doesn't mean it's also the most pernicious and grotesque.
95: Perhaps I should explain why I raised the objection. Actually I hadn't heard the Martin Peretz was racist before know. I don't follow TNR, or that particular branch of punditry at all. So I click on the link, and the first two examples seem weak. So I come back here to check it with you guys, because you have a good sense of these things.
I wasn't nitpicking, nor simply engaged in an academic argument strengthening exercise. I honestly didn't know the basis for the charges and was confused by the evidence given.
I don't think I'm really approaching this from the viewpoint of academic dispassionate evaluation of evidence. In that context, a bad example of a non-bigoted statement by Peretz doesn't really do very much: you throw it out and judge based on the rest. (If you want to be technical, I think it very very slightly lowers the chance of him being a bigot)
The problem is that people (properly) make judgments looking at the whole of the material; any one example is likely to have a charitable explanation. By your process, you end up throwing everything out b/c, by itself, no one thing is determinative.
Nancy Pelosi, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton
Ted Kennedy was supposed to be in that list.
104: you're misunderstanding me. Greater empathy for people you identify with more CAN and very often does lead to callous, immoral indifference to other people's suffering, but it doesn't have to.
it is not acceptable to uncritically do so.
Only if one is a member of the chattering intellectual onanists is it unacceptable. The vast majority of people don't think critically and celebrate their not doing so. How many people remember the whole of Decatur's "right or wrong, our country!" ?
108: Isn't that a bit like saying lack of labor laws doesn't have to lead to abuse of labor? Sure, in theory it doesn't, and you can even find isolated examples that seem to work. But the overwhelming historical evidence tells you it is almost certain.
"The vast majority of people don't think critically and celebrate their not doing so. How many people remember the whole of Decatur's "right or wrong, our country!""
Liberal, coastal elitist.
to be more clear:
"it may be commonplace to empathize more with people who are like ourselves, but it is not acceptable to uncritically do so. That support for a campaign against al Qaeda translated so easily into an invasion and occupation of Iraq demonstrates that many, many Americans were willing to wildly undervalue non-American life."
I completely agree with this and have done my share of agonizing about it.
108, yes of course it's almost certain. But we're not talking about labor laws here, are we? We're talking about very basic facts of human nature. I'm not immune to it--and really, my-bleeding-heart-liberal-who-cares-about-the-lives-of-foreigners credentials are pretty good.
If you guys are honestly immune to this prejudice and honestly as torn by every single death in Iraq and Afghanistan as in New York or London, more power to you, but that's exceedingly uncommon....
97: It should have occurred to me that you might have the Iron Guard in mind.
100: I suppose it may be that LCE is a poorly-chosen example of the coded language I have in mind; "humanism" is probably better. But basically, I think it's fairly well-established (if not very well publicized) that the Christian right in particular -- which forms a fair chunk of movementarianism -- is pretty egregious in terms of coded and not-so-coded anti-Semitism.
112: I wasn't trying to slam your characterization. I think both situations are rooted in pretty much the same basic facts human nature: classifying people as `other' whether by location, by class, by religion, whatever, makes it easier to ignore them as people. Hence an aristocrat migh have no qualms about the lives of his peasants, a manager about the lives of his assembly line workers, a north american about the lives of some random persian. I think that stras was saying (correct me if wrong) that one has to recognize this is the default `tribalism' (in a broad sense) and has to be questioned and whatched for. It is a fact about human nature, but it isn't a particularly attractive one, and should be distrusted implicitly.
I'm certainly not immune to this. I can honestly say the deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan bother me as much as the ones in NY or London --- but I haven't lived in those places either. I don't for a moment believe I would have the same response to an event down the street, or in a place I was intimately familiar with. Even so, I'd try my best to not let that sway me in thinking about larger issues.
If you guys are honestly immune to this prejudice and honestly as torn by every single death in Iraq and Afghanistan as in New York or London, more power to you, but that's exceedingly uncommon....
Actually, I think the ability to do that would make you a superhuman. I'm pretty certain that my ability to feel 'torn' about a death varies directly with distance.
That's what ethics and reason are for, because feelings are pretty useless when it comes to the suffering of some you've never met, never will meet, and don't know existed until they died, and had they not died, the effect on your life would have been even smaller.
It's one of those "family resemblance" thingies: Jews, some other minorities, gay men and women, artsy people, academics, urbanites, trendy people.
A gay artsy Cuban-Jewish intellectual New Yorker would by a sextafecta coastal elitist. Sausagely is one blow job away from winning it all.
one blow job away
Do we need a volunteer?
Sausagely is one blow job away from winning it all.
I dunno, he could probably use a couple more piercings and a boyfriend who's a well-known actor (just to get the "Hollywood" in there too).
there was one day last year where I spent the day writing a decision to grant asylum to a black bisexual illegal immigrant (kind of a jerk too) and then went home and did some research for to help Human Rights Watch protect the terrorists...all made possible by my Ivy league elite degree. I was pretty proud of myself.
My old state senator had a pretty good claim too. Gay Cuban intellectual lawyer from Camridge. Not Jewish though, as far as I know, and I couldn't speak to artsy.
Jackmormon, you fool, you wouldn't count.
She's just stepping in as blowjob broker.
Now that our match-maker-in-chief has left us, somebody's got to step up.
(just to get the "Hollywood" in there too)
That's already taken care of. (It's his father.)
She's just stepping in as blowjob broker.
I'd moonlight in this, but people get put off by my commission schedule.
Two almost-identical blowjobs: one from a male, one from a female. And neither of them could have known that this would make all the difference. From that day one, their paths would diverge, leading one to fame, wealth, and world domination, and the other to a squalid death at the hands of the deranged Christian woman he had chosen to marry....."
Note the artful avoidance of homophobia.
regarding Peretz--this should remove all doubt, I think.
Well, I hope by now everyone knows what I think of Exalted Cyclops Marty Peretz, Imperial Wizard Alan Dershowitz and their ilk.
But on the bus today, I was reminded of the increasing obsolescence of voices such as theirs. Two pairs of working-class women got on with me downtown. Both included a white woman and a black woman. Both of the white women clearly identified themselves with aspects of black working-class culture. (In fact, the white woman in the older pair referred to her friend as "Mom", although it was unclear whether this specified a relationship, or just a nickname.)
Of the younger pair, the black woman was fairly butch, and by their conversation, it seemed pretty likely that she was a lesbian, although it wasn't as obvious what her friend's sexual preference was. At one point in the conversation, the white friend burst into gales of laughter at the punchline of a story about a failed hook-up attempt at a party. I was reminded of the phrase "our revenge shall be the laughter of our children."
But it was the older pair that interested me more. They seemed very close, implying that perhaps "Mom" was intended to denote an actual familial relationship. They interacted somewhat more quietly than the younger women, but there was still a sense of joy at being able to share a bus ride and a conversation about fairly mundane details of their lives.
Another white woman got on shortly after they did, who was known to them, and the first white woman started asking her about a complex web of relationships (many apparently interracial) that centered on the south Minneapolis block on which both had previously lived. The recitation of friends, former lovers, children and grandparents and siblings probably included at least 20 people. There was sadness as well as joy, for the loss of a month-old child and the break-up of romantic relationships that had previously appeared stable. But the overall sense was again one of pleasure at reconnecting with someone who, while perhaps not a close friend, was still inextricably bound up in one's own life and social network.
So what does this have to do with anything? Just that these women, never famous or infamous or in fact much noted by the rest of the world, live lives every bit as compelling and full of meaning as any of the stories that come to us over these internets.
Moreover, it confirmed for me again that if we want to address the terrible problem of race in this country we must look at the ways in which class, gender, sex and sexuality both determine and make permeable the color line that is so jealously guarded by the likes of these idiots-in-fancy-offices who are castigated above. The masses aren't asses, certainly no more so, and probably less than the grandees and elites who grind them down every day under the merciless iron heel of economic inequality. The alliances that regular people form in their daily lives, the shared burden of hope and despair and work and pleasure, these are the things which will abide long after stuck-up prats with too much money have decayed into dust.
105: Yeah that's understandable. It's hard to prove when each individual example has plausible deniability, but at a certain point you just run out of excuses to make. (And if one read the Plank around the time of the recent lebanon thing, it was inescapable. The only question was whether he hated Arabs specifically or just all Muslims. viz:
Malaysia has pledged 1,000 troops to whatever international force is placed in southern Lebanon. This would increase Hezbollah's numbers by 10 percent, and it would be an utter sham. Another sham for the United Nations.
And nobody believe me the last time this came up...
131: You were arguing at the time for a very strong thesis: "Peretz is perhaps the most virulent racist in mainstream American intellectual life at present." I argued with you then because you had a heap of what I considered weak examples, esp. given the charge. But the Malaysia quote is really bad. Not racist though - it's bigotry against Islam.
132: Not racist though - it's bigotry against Islam.
Bit of a porous boundary, that.
Charges of anti-Semitism are used too carelessly at times leading to resentment and intellectual dishonesty. It is hurled not merely at non-Jews, but sometimes at Jews who are deemed not Jewish enough, or at least within families if one does not hold the right thoughts and opinions. A first-hand experience came from within the ranks of my own family.
I lived in London for most of the 1980s, and when I returned to the USA on holiday, it was my mother who wanted to know how European media was reporting the first Infitada. I answered candidly about reports of Israeli brutality towards Palestinians, specifically, news accounts of an Israeli soldier trying to break the arm of a subdued Palestinian man.
After a moment of silence, I started mumbling something about twists of fate, about being born Palestinian in hypothetical terms instead of Jewish, about children and grandchildren having no right to self-determination and no future. Under such conditions, I told her, I could see myself in sympathy with the Palestinians. In response, my mother said: "Son, I always knew you were a closet anti-Semite."
I reminded her that there was a peace movement in Israel that enjoyed more freedom of conscience and expression that I had within my own family. When I hear charges of anti-Semitism hurled at people for the purpose of controlling their thoughts and opinions, I think of oppression. I think of the mindless charges of anti-Semitism against Wesley Clark (who has Jewish ancestry). When the term "anti-Semitism" is overly used and abused, it causes resentment and renewed anti-Semitism. It looses historical meaning and context.
Hitler's Willing Executioners is wildly controversial in the historical profession and by no means a generally accepted hypothesis- I recommend Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men.
132: I gave the Malaysia example at the time, and really, Shafer's slate piece should be sufficient to cure all doubts.
Here are some comments taken from Matthew Yglesias' weblog from the last few days. One blog posting in particular was about the hackishness of Max Boot but devlovled into a discussion about wikipedia being controlled and owned by AIPAC within 10 comments.
The "anti-semite" slur is reserved for goy who challenge zionist orthodoxy. The correct term for jews who have the temerity to call bullshit on Zionism uber alles is "self-hating jew"
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The CFR adheres to the AIPAC agenda word for word, so I wouldn't doubt that they would pull out all the stops to protect the reputation of one of the agenda's chief propagandists.
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It's fairly well established that wikipedia is a huge priority for AIPAC and the organization regularly employs it's lackeys to whitewash any Israel related article of any of the less savory aspects of recent jewish history
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Every wikipedia article even remotely related to Israel should carry the tag; This is the official AIPAC sanctioned account of events.
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I have no doubt Marty Peretz scowers wikipedia daily editing any Israel articles in attempt to minimize any Israeli culpability in Arab suffering and to paint as monstrous & bloodthirsty a portrait of Arabs as he possibly can.
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AIPAC sanctioned account of events = history written by the butchers.
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Traction on Israel IS HAPPENING NOW precisely because more and more responsible leaders, scholars, activists etc., etc. are not falling into the crypto-Zionist quicksand of letting Israel and its Lobby, neocons, amen corner, "liberals" off the hook. Calling as it is: Zionism is THE EVIL OF OUR TIME is not only long overdue- it's goddamn refreshing.
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In their misguided and in fact neurotic attempt to bury or minimize their own complicity in "The Jewish State"s Apartheid Evil- I repeat- are actually harming everyday Israelis
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The Bill Kristol formulation ("Benevolent Global Hegemony", i.e. "We are the Zionists- you are the slaves")
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I always find this part of the discussion interesting, We can all acknowledge the violence, bloodshed & turmoil begotten by Israel; we can even identify the shameful role large swathes of wealthy American abd Israeli Jewry, but by no means all Jews, have in perpetuating this horror in the middle east. We can even acknowledge as adults, no matter how knee-jerk mud is flinged our way, that yes, the large majority of both American political parties are all but controlled by a bi-national cadre of ideological/theological zionists who would be regarded as nothing less than a 5th column if we could discuss this situation like adults.
Yet for some reason, whenever this process reaches it's logical conclusion; a full-scale condemnation of Zionism for the violent, tribal, racist, murderous religion it is, and the primary source of anti-arab (the real anti-semitism) dehumanization in the
middle-east, certain people still close their eyes.
----------------------------------------------
it seems obvious that the motives of every scurrying pissant who's tried (in vain) to "question the motives" of anyone who's identified Zionism as The Evil Of Our Time are to-
1. Silence or mute harsh criticism of Israel.
2. Try and keep the American public in the dark about how U.S. support for Israel was THE PRIMARY CAUSE OF 9/11. (that Brit Peter what's his last name? who wrote "The bin laden I know" corrected Anderson Cooper to say that bi Laden's been riled up about Israel's persecution of the Palestinians for years.
and...
3. To try (in vain) to convince the American people that anyone who's successfully reached a wide audience exposing the Evil of Apartheid Israel is in fact "an anti-Semite."
4. To somehow(in vain) persuade a gullible public that the murder of Rachel Corrie was just a "problemmatic, beaurocratic slip."
History is pissing on all your cowardly lies now, and just like Apartheid South Africa- Apartheid Israel's days are numbered.
-------------------------------
The late, great Prof. Israel Shahak kindly translated the Middle East Roadmap for us. While a little behind schedule with the Iraq-Iran war having failed to do the trick, it appears to be back on course: www.freearabvoice.org/ZionistConspiracy_DivideTheArabWorld.htm
A quick quote might be of interest:
Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the
other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its
dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria.
Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power
which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon.
Of course, there's no question that Osama did 9/11; it's just unfortunate that Zionists turn up at all junctures in the drama. Very briefly:
1) PNAC's call for another Pearl Harbor
2) the sale of unprofitable, asbestos-laden WTC to Larry Silverstein who loads up on insurance covering terrorism
3) author of Patriot Act and 9/11 crime scene evdience remover in chief - Michael Chertoff
4) gatekeeper and author of the 9/11 Commission report - Phillip Zelikow
5) the Mossad film crew seen celebrating the WTC attack ("we were just there to document the event")
6) head of Pentagon accounting ($2.6 Trillion announcement missing on 9/10/01), Dov Zakheim
The interviews with journalist Christopher Bollyn at www.iamthewitness.com are an excellent resourch if you can't swallow unlimited coincidence.
-------------------
For those who feel Israel's situation, and 'centuries of persecution', justify almost anything, characterizing the actual record as one of 'restraint' is true but not very meaningful.
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You just hit on one of my biggest pet peeves regarding how they justify their barbarism.
Could Israeli jews please explain just how many brown people "centuries of persecution" entitles them to kill & maim? The arab world would please like and answer this. K thnx bi.
-----------------------------------
If I could have hacked my way through the complexity of the formatting, I think that would have been disturbing.
I'm not saying all of this is evidence of anti-semitism. I 'm not sure what I'm saying. My opinion is, whatever the mania is that afflicts certain people when the subject of Israel comes up, I don't think it's primarily motivated by antipathy towards the Jewish people or religion. I think that many that employ certain anti-semiticish rhetoric I.E. mocking of the term "centuries of persecution" merely find anti-semitic tropes convenient when Israel bashing. But if it isn't anti-semtism, I wish I knew what it was exactly.
Sorry, I'm apparantly not much of an htmler. That thing is a mess. Please feel free to delete it but also please check out the source material on Matt's blog.
, I wish I knew what it was exactly.
It's called "nut-picking." Thanks for playing.
Okay, your last comment was completely unclear as to which bits you were quoting and which you were, yourself, saying. I'm feeling better now that all of the anti-semitic sounding bits were quotes.
And exactly on the 'nutpicking'. Yes, what you've quoted sounds antisemitic. And what that demostrates is that there are people who will say antisemitic things with internet access, rather than anything about the site they're commenting on.
Sorry but I have to protest the charge of "nut-picking". "nut-picking" is where you try to assassinate the character of a blog by cherry picked random comments. I don't think these "nuts" say anything about Matt's blog, other than that they gravitate to anywhere the word "Israel" pops up.
If were' discussing anti-semitism than what are anti-semites but nuts? You can't charge "nut-picking" when subject is, well, nuts. And considering all those example come from 3 posts, over 2 days. Only one of which has more than 100 comments. I think that's a lot of nuts no?
Re: Lizardbreath I wasn't trying to make a statement about Matt's blog. I do not do not donot believe Matt or his weblog is anti-semitic. As I said in my previous post, all that shows is that "nuts" can gravitate to anywhere the word Israel pops up.
If someone nutpicks Unfogged by cherrypicking (or popping cherries? what happens when you go cherrypicking and end up with nuts?), we got a whole lotta anti-Iran, anti-Mexican slurs, whole lotta accusations of sexism and racism, and occasional quasi-deifications of the host pbuh.
Oh, and cock jokes. Context, character of the blog, character of the commenters, before we run off making cherry pie with pecans (?) out of the comments.
Only the first paragraph of 137 was written by DRR; the rest consists entirely of quotes from Matt's comments.
And yes, many of those comments do sound rather anti-semitic, which just goes to show that anti-semitism is indeed still around and tends to show up in discussions of these issues.
There are a certain number of obsessives that show up on every thread that's in any way related to Israel. Since it tends to be the same few people every time, I'm not sure the greater significance of it is. It's some annoying shit to have to read, though.
How prevalent do you all believe the self-hating Jew thing to be in this day and age? I use it as a framework to explain some of my mom and grandma's actions. Anyone else ever run across it?
You mean in terms of people being self-hating Jews or accusing others of it?
Being it themselves. Like you doing the accusation, but politely to yourself. Then telling me behind their backs.
I would expect the "self-hating Jew" phenomenon to be much rarer these days. It's related to passing, it seems to me. At a time when African-Americans were segregated, and there weren't a lot of other prominent minorities, Jews would have been the only obvious member of the Not Quite White crowd. Now, though...there are so many other members of the NQWs (Latinos, Asians, the culturally white, etc.) that slol might be right: Jews are white. In which case, no worries about passing.
I don't think I've ever run into the phenomenon personally, no. Tim's probably right about the reasons; these days Jews aren't as self-conscious about fitting into American society as they used to be, so there's less reason to do that sort of thing.
Yeah, those points make sense. Being Jewish seems to be considered an asset to everyone besides the folks who fear liberal coastal elites. Whereas having a strong southern accent carries a pretty big stigma nowadays. At least to the liberal coastal elites.
There are different flavors of southern accent that vary in their stigma apart from their strength alone. I wonder how accent and political orientation in the south are related. Do liberals speak with a more Midwest accent?
I doubt there's a correlation, but I haven't spent enough time in the South to know for sure.
"Whereas having a strong southern accent carries a pretty big stigma nowadays. At least to the liberal coastal elites."
Is this true? I'm from the South (Texas) and haven't spent much time on the coasts so I don't know. What are the potential ramifications of speaking with a southern accent in the presence of "liberal coastal elites" ?
They'll just think you're a hick. It's not an insuperable problem.
I'm a liberal coastal elitist and I've never seen a stigma. Some possibly condescending cooing over how charming the southern accent sounds, sometimes, but not really with the stigma.
Pretty much cooing and 'oh, where are you from?' And maybe the ability to sound derisive without working too hard. ("You mean to tell me that Nietzsche believed in the will to power? Now that's just crazy talk." is more derisive in a southern accent. I don't know why.)
The only time I've ever heard the phrase 'self-hating Jew' used was to denote someone who was Jewish who questioned an Israeli policy, and I'm pretty sure that was only on the internets.
I think HG is talking about using the accent as a proxy for Bush supporters. There's probably some of that.
160: That's the most common usage these days, but it originated to designate Jews who would put down other Jews (generally to distance themselves from "those other Jews" back when anti-semitism was more common in polite company).
More. I was not aware that the term arose in the context of the rise of the Reform movement.
Note, from that article, that the signs of assumed self-hatred could be pretty subtle.
I think heebie-geebie has it right. SCMT cites one example in 161. I also find that people here often use a southern accent if they are trying to immitate someone of diminished mental capacity (although maybe they are just immitating me).
Is it virulent inter-regional hatred and bigotry? of course not. Not in either direction. But I see it a lot.
There's a Simpsons episode where Lisa imagines what her life would be like if she married Ralph Wiggum, and in her imagined future she's really fat and speaks with a southern accent. My mom (a liberal coastal elitist herself) found that pretty offensive.
people here
In case it was not clear, here means NY, not unfogged.
in her imagined future she's really fat and speaks with a southern accent.
The "fat southerner" isn't pulled out of thin air though. The Southeast dominates the obesity rates in this country. It's pretty noticeable when I visit my brother in Georgia.
When you put it that way, I suppose I'd back off the claim that there's no stigma associated with a southern accent; I have heard people imitate a southern accent to indicate 'dumb hick'. I meant more that I'd never noticed anyone react that way to someone with an actual southern accent. But not having one myself, maybe I wouldn't.
168: True, but if a person who isn't from the South gets fat they don't automatically start speaking with a southern accent. That's the offensive part.
It's really odd. Most of the southern accents I see on TV are very poorly done (including that simpsons spot), but once in a while I'll be watching some show and realize after a while that one of the characters has a southern accent. Those are the well-done accents. (Someone who doesn't live in the region would probably notice sooner, but might not be able to tell a good from a bad one.) I find that the latter characters tend to be portrayed less derisively, though even the former are sometimes supposed to be sympathetic. I wonder if people from other regions get the same impression.
The employment of an impromptu southern accent when making fun of dummies or rubes I'm not too worried about. Even southerners adopt exaggerated southern accents when mocking the rural & stupid. I just got the impression from the post that the sound of a southern accent heard among a group of "coastal elites" in a hypothetical enocunter was some kind of signal to mock & patronize the poor hick in subtle ways he'd never understand. Like a highschool nightmare.
Nah. New Yorkers don't do subtle all that well -- any mockery would be fully obvious and accessible.
Anyways I'm from suburban North Texas and we don't even have much of an accent. It seems (around here anyway) the older you are the more pronounced your accent is. My hypothesis is that this is directly correlated with the different levels of TV viewership I.E exposure to the "non-regional dialect" across generations.
That is a big factor; the same thing is happening in other parts of the country. Increasing suburbanization and the resulting mix of regional backgrounds in newer communities plays a role as well.
171: I've noticed this, too, but I notice it as a rural/urban dialect rather than a Southern/midwestern one. The rube sounds southern and dumb; the gentleman sounds southern and smooth; the thug sounds like he's from New Jersey or New York; everyone else is from Michigan.
Even in the very rural parts of the south (where I've lived) the accent tends not to exist in the middle or middle-upper classes nearly as much.
178: Same with the Boston accent. There are different types depending on what town they're from, but past a certain tax bracket they all speak imitation californian.
My mom and grandma are very much like the assimilationists described in the wikipedia article in 163. They are very quick to point out how much they like Christmas carols, or how disturbing it is that Passover is a celebration of the murder of first-born sons. (Really? Can't read any deeper into the holiday than that one plague?) They attend Rosh Hashanah but can't keep the details straight. They express outsider-style interest in this strange dish called kugel. Many little details that serve to indicate subtle outgroup status.
Tying together both the self-hating Jew thing and the southern accent thing, my mom named me a name very similar to "Chrystal Gayle". Which I go by. But I do get crap for it, leaving me sensitive to the southern stigma.
Interesting. Where did they grow up?
Grandma grew up on Staten Island; mom grew up in Lawrence, Kansas.
My mom and grandma both say that they aren't be Jewish because they don't believe in the religion. Grandma has two siblings who consider themselves secular Jews or ethnically Jewish or whatever; mom has two brothers who consider themselves ethnically Jewish; my dad and my brothers do without second thought. I'm the single daughter in this mother line and I'm singularly conflicted about it. I feel fraudulent no matter how I label myself and usually end up giving some stumbling explanation that makes no sense. Like I'm either betraying my heritage or betraying my mom and grandma's discomfort with our heritage.
Not particularly Jewish areas, then. I ask because it seems like the kind of attitude toward Judaism that would be more common in environments without a lot of Jews (I've heard similar things about Jews in the South, for instance). My mom's family doesn't have any of that ambivalence -- in fact, they tend more toward obnoxious chauvinism -- and I think that's at least partially because they come from a background where Judaism was very common and there was a lot of communal support.
I think that's probably it, especially in my mom's case. She's described being the only dark-haired person in third grade, for example. With Grandma, another factor is that her parents were big-time communists and hence anti-religion. I'm not sure why Grandma internalized that differently than her siblings.
(Just because I think it's awesome: both sides of my family rejected Judaism for communism.)
Huh, my family did the same thing. My branch didn't reject it, exactly, but there were other branches that were pretty hard-core. One of my grandfather's cousins was blacklisted.
Really? Awesome.
Just because it's a good story:
My great-grandparents always loved Russia and wanted to return, so for their 50th wedding anniversary in the early 60's, their three children bought them a trip to Russia. My great-grandfather, on the plane to Moscow, had a heart attack and died about an hour before landing.
The great-grandmother ended up having something of a renassaince. She lived 20 more years, went for her high school diploma and then went to college, enrolling alongside her grandson.
That's a great story. My great-grandparents used to tell stories about life in Russia, but when their grandchildren would ask if they missed it or wanted to go back they always said no, America was much better.
I'm certainly glad to be here.
How prevalent do you all believe the self-hating Jew thing to be in this day and age?
I saw some concealment among the older folks back in the late Forties and Fifties but not what I'd call "self-hatred". It was all phrased in terms of understandable paranoia. Now, I define myself by the way the most dangerous "Other" would. It doesn't matter that I think all religions are equally irrelevant to me and don't think about religion at all unless reminded, nor that I might be one of the three "ethnic" Jews in the US with a motorcycle, an arsenal, lots of tools, and ever owned and used a chainsaw.
My guess is the SHJ exists but they're a whole lot rarer than Dershowitz, Peretz. et al. would have us believe.