Antisemitism

What it is, what it isn’t, and where it shows up.

Anti-Zionism Is a Form of Antisemitism

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The freedom to fully live by our covenant in the land of our ancestors is an expression of the human right to choose the very order of one’s earthly existence.

It does not preclude other rights or others’ rights – but it is an inalienable right nonetheless.

If you deny my brothers and sisters that freedom, then you are maintaining a prejudiced belief towards them.

Criticism of a policy, of a politician, of a government, of a state is one thing.

So is criticism of the ways in which minorities in diasporas use and abuse the scanty social privileges granted to them in the hierarchical societies in which they’re enmeshed.

But blanket denial of the freedom to fully live by our ancestral covenant in the land of our heritage, free from foreign colonialism, imperialism, oppression, persecution, intolerance, and hierarchies, is something else entirely.

It’s taken decades of thinking and rethinking and rethinking this issue again and again for me to come to the simple conclusion that yes,

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Anti-Zionism is a form of antisemitism.
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May the war in Gaza stop, may Hamas be uprooted, may the hostages be freed, may the occupation end, and may we rebuild our Home – together.

Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

Imagine If Atlas Shrugged

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I’m not a Jewish supremacist, an Objectivist, or even a pure Capitalist anymore…

I don’t think that Ayn Rand was a fantastic novelist and I haven’t read all of her books.

But Israel is Galt’s Gulch and Atlas’ biggest shrug would be if the Jewish people of every country and every continent simply left the hostile cesspools of reactionary bigotry in which they’re currently drowning, and came Home.

If our innovators and creators said Thanks But No Thanks to anyone and everyone who wanted to buy or benefit from our wide variety of essential technological, medical, or ecological marvels, our breathtaking works of art, beauty, or laughter, our groundbreaking scientific research and discoveries, without recognizing our right to exist without being genocided.

I don’t hope for such isolationism. I think it’s ultimately a betrayal of our national ethic and mandate.

But still…

Just imagine a world where Jewish people actually put our own well-being first and decided to stop carrying the rest of the world forward, in every country on every continent. Tirelessly, often selflessly, and with xenophobia and contempt as the inevitable recompense.

Imagine if Atlas shrugged.

The Intersection of Antisemitism

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By the way I watched the latest Kanye West single.

You know, the one where he got a bunch of actors to dress like slaves and chant “Heil Htler” while he complains that (((they))) won’t let him see his kids.

…mark my words, the element in American society personified by Kanye is the meeting point for right-left antisemitism.

Kanye West is not America’s leading Nazi, by far – but he is normalizing and promoting the intersection of the reactionary right and the reactionary left via the virus of antisemitism.

Antisemitism Is Suffocating

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Antisemitism is so triggering.

And when it pervades a social climate it becomes suffocating.

Cuts off oxygen to the soul.

People start defending the indefensible.

Breathe, my friends.

Learn. Study. Pray.

Together.

Then respond with righteousness.

And Come Home.

On Platforming Hatemongers

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Attention New York synagogues and Jewish schools, museums, and community centers:

You can not feign outrage over accusations of genocide and then eagerly platform and fawn over an Israeli parliamentarian who has repeatedly called for genocide.

Defending his mob of fans’ thuggish and racist behavior because you “understand the context” is really a self-own in the context of our struggle with the Iranian axis in the court of public opinion.

Have more respect for our soldiers than that.

Have more respect for yourselves than that.

Still I Rise

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Seduce me.
Betray me.
Attack me.
Raze me.
Deport me.
Forget me.
Hate me.

Still I rise.

Control me.
Colonize me.
Crucify me.
Conquer me.
Convert me.
Blame me.
Burn me.

Still I Rise.

Play me for my willing riches.
Mark me for the spear and sword.
Suspect me for your spreading plague.
Conjure me as your darkest demon.
Accuse me of your midnight crimes.
Condemn me in your halls of power.
Cleanse me of your many sins.

Still. I. Rise.

Never Again Is Always Now

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Never Again
Is always Now
The eternal moment after
The gates of hell opened
Ready to devour bodies and souls
The moment of arrested
Time
Antipode of history
To the dawn in Eden

But within the darkness
Of the moment born at Auschwitz
Lies the seed of another moment
The eternal “To Life”
The eternal uprising
Against the Other Side
Against the blasphemous machinery of death
Fueled by rhetorical hate and power-lust

There is life after Auschwitz
There is life after Warsaw

We live in both moments

Both moments are Now

The Chapter 9 Project

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Belated, but: I’ve been catching references to the “Chapter 9 Project,” which seems to have become linked by some pundits to a modern blood libel, accusations of genocide committed by Jewish Israelis against Palestinians in Gaza.

I respect many aspects of the more progressive denominations of Ashkenazi Judaism, but this project and the association that has developed between it and the recent war in Gaza seems extraordinarily vapid. (And no, Prof. Leibowitz doesn’t get a pass on promoting the basis for this weird reading, back in his day.)

The Persian Empire, under the reign of Xerxes, contained some 49 million people. Chapter 9 of the book of Esther records that the Jewish people killed some 75,000 people across 127 countries, people who themselves were not targeted for elimination but killed (in self-defense) by the actual targets for elimination by an actual governmental edict. For those who are as bad at math as I am, 75,000 is far less than 1% of an imperial population of 49 million. That is not genocide.

On a completely unrelated note – and it should be stressed how unrelated this point is, and how laborious and contrived its linkage is to the above – while no confirmed number exists, higher estimates suggest that some 48,000 Gazans have died over the past 1.5+ years of this misbegotten war, out of a population of just over 2 million. That’s roughly 2.5% of the population – a much greater percentage than that of the Persian Empire above, but still not nearly a genocide.

For a frame of reference, 60% of Europe’s Jewish population was killed in the Holocaust and 77% of the Tutsi population was killed in the Rwandan genocide.

Just Say No To Propaganda, People

On Mahmoud Khalil

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I think that Mahmoud Khalil is pretty clearly a tool of the Russo-Iranian propaganda and influence machine and its support of fascist proxies in the Levant and Gulf,

But

That doesn’t mean he, a Green Card holding legal permanent resident of the USA, should be arrested without a warrant or committing a crime or sent to a concentration camp and held without charges or a trial, for being a tool.

If he committed a felony, then investigate him, arrest him, charge him, try him, and punish him.

This fascist police state sht is nothing to celebrate and כל רעיי who are praising Khalil’s arrest have seriously lost the plot.

I’ve heard rumors that the ADL praised his arrest as well. I can’t find anything on their website, but if true – it would fit a disturbing pattern of transactional sycophancy emerging in their response to the rise of American fascism. I’m not impressed with what I’ve been seeing from them these days: they should be seizing the moment to be all over the ruling party’s neonazism and white nationalism.

It Can’t Happen Here

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I was concerned about the welfare of American Jewish communities when the level of antisemitism was holding at semi-random vandalism, physical assaults, and widespread bloodlibels about Israel. The people at the top occasionally repeated some of those bloodlibels, it’s true, but at least it was clear that they weren’t going to oversee the mass disenfranchisement of Jewish citizens anytime soon. That’s just not where the previous administration was holding at any point.

While it started with mass deportations of illegal migrants, it quickly grew to rescinding the legal status of immigrants, and now the POTUS and the party are talking about building concentration camps to hold tens of thousands of prisoners and the corporatists forcibly taking over the bureaucracy of the American government via its treasury and oversight departments are talking of deporting (sorry outsourcing) American citizens to foreign countries for internment. And it hasn’t even been two weeks.

But Jewish communities are safe, you say. They became white over the decades and were accepted by the tolerant folks who want to see competent white men in charge of everything. Their rights are safe in the emerging social order in the US of A. And on top of that, many Jewish Americans voted for POTUS and party! Surely POTUS and party would not turn their backs on them.

Oy. The same corporatists, by the way, who are now grabbing hold of the American government by its administrative b@ll$ with the full mandate of POTUS and party, have also been busy promoting white nationalist propaganda, sieg heiling at presidential events, and absolving German right-wing nationalists of the weight of the millions of souls their grandparents murdered in the Holocaust. They’ve been joking about the Holocaust and then handing the mic to neonazis. And the neonazis appreciate it: they’re looking forward to the dawn of a new age where their beliefs and ideas are not anathema to American society but normalized at every level, all the way to the top of the American government.

In such a situation, when analyzed from all angles – how could I not worry for the American Jewish communities???

“It can’t happen here.”

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Here’s to me being entirely wrong and the new reign of POTUS and party ushering in an age of prosperity for all.

May I be so very, very wrong.

Cheers! 🍻