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#there's also that whole argument of 'is being anti-zionist anti-Semitic
your-angry-mason · 3 months
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THE RANT CONTINUES (and my laptop is burning alive) - Comment Section Part Deux.
THREE COMMENT RELATED ITEMS AND THE PROBLEMS THAT CAME WITH IT.
Okay, so earlier, I was regaling all of you with the dumpster fires that are comment sections and how bots and sympathizers try to drag any movement or argument down by using false equivalences and whataboutism.
So here are three comment related things that actually highlight a little bit of my point here.
First off, I'll bring back this handy one as my starting point though some of you may've already seen it in my last rant.
"I'll never forget the Palestinian dad crying as he carried the remains of his children in plastic bags"
"Do we need to carry our dead babies in plastic bags to get sympathy?"
These were two comments from the same thread. There are some other comments in between these. All of them mentioning war crimes committed by Israel - never the same one twice might I add. And even after every horrendous action mentioned, this person still had the gall to post that. (1) there being the original comment while (2) being the comment of a reactionary zionist trying to garner sympathy for the genociders by likely referencing the already disproven story about 40 decapitated babies.
Now, not only did that dumbass there try to make a genocide seem like a reasonable response to a fictional attack. But, let me tell you something about genocides and wars.
The scales are a real concept. The amount of good and bad actions put out into the world by a collective group/government is a real thing to consider when you're going to pick a side. And it's also a situation in which not picking a side, means siding with an oppressive force as your silence is now a tool for the oppressor to use.
The October 7th attack may seem shocking for Israeli's who thought that they were at peace the whole time. But peace for them meant subjugation for the Palestinian people. It meant the consistent oppression of the Palestinian people. It meant the annexation of their homes, their land, and their culture. Israeli "peace" was built on the terrorization of the Palestinian people. So for Israel, they believed that Palestinians either deserved their suffering as it brought peace, or that the Palestinians enjoyed suffering under the occupation.
Which, by the way, has slaughtered several Palestinians en masse every few years. The people saying that Israel was peaceful before October 7th are leaving out a lot of context.
The scales clearly do not tip in favor of Israel here.
Another comment problem involved community guidelines.
A commenter who I can't access the comment to anymore posted:
If you think it's wrong that the Israeli government is fighting back against these savages you're just anti-semitic and are telling jews to die.
To which I responded:
2. "You don't support Israel's Government and their child murder so you must be anti-semitic" is not the talking point you think it is, dumbass.
So what did TikTok do? Who's comment did they remove for violating Community Guidelines? Was it the dipshit advocating for genocide and saying that if you speak up about child murder that you're an anti-semite? No, of course they removed mine.
Because corporations like TikTok, Facebook, X - all of them have been long bought off by AIPAC money and have been scared into subjugation long ago. They benefit from the sort of barbaric things that the Israeli Government is doing - so they will naturally deter anyone who speaks up against it.
Hate Speech seems perfectly fine with them, while standing up against the people using it cannot be justified in their "Community Guidelines". FUCKING HILAROUS. A COMEDIC ODYSSEY. What the FUCK is wrong with these people.
And lastly,
These are repetitive comments. Bot comments. Drones if you will.
"October 7th"
"Israel has a right to defend itself"
"This is complicated."
And lastly, the most infuriating one of the bunch to me:
"I JUST WANT PEACE"
If you want peace, I hate to tell you this here buttercup - but there is NO PEACE without JUSTICE. Would you want to live in an unjust world where people were allowed to deprive you of every single joy in life? Would you want to live in a world where people can just come in and take your kids into military custody with no charges and put them in solitary confinement for 15 years? Would you want to forage for food in the streets of your now destroyed home and community and only be able to find partially molded food and broken sacks of flower? Would you like to be punished for collecting rainwater or grieving a loved ones passing at a cemetery? Would you like to be withheld from being able to hold funerals, religious gatherings, and even birthday parties?
You can abide by every single one of those rules and still be murdered, kidnapped, or forced from your home in Palestine. Because there is no justice. These are unjust behaviors and if they continue, this group of people will never have PEACE. You cannot be a fence sitter here. It does not create the idealistic 'peace' you claim to want.
So if you think that this is a complicated issue. You're clearly wrong.
If you think it started on October 7th, you're also wrong.
And if you just want PEACE instead of conflict. Then there needs to be justice first.
Sincerely, a very angry Iowan.
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grow-and-decay · 5 months
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Don’t normally do this & am opposed to call-out posts in general but feel like people making posts/ talking about Palestine atm should be warned about @/boymoder-republik. The blog is pretty new & is basically a troll account; rn she seems to be going thru the Palestine tag or something and responding to lots of pro-Palestine/ solidarity posts with heavy islamophobia and Zionist bullshit, just regurgitating the same shit again and again about how muslims are violent terrorists & inherently homophobic & racist, etc. Claiming anti-Zionism = anti-Semitism and yet seems to be lowkey antiSemitic herself, (as well as anti-immigrant and racist towards Native Americans…anyway). This screenshot pretty much sums it up (warning for islamophobia) (please note this is not the whole post but I thought the tags were the most pertinent here):
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I’ll include some more screenshots for ‘proof’ but it’s all pretty easy to find on their blog since as I said, it’s a pretty new one, there’s not that many posts and they’re all quite recent.
(Also if you scroll further thru the blog you can see she’s also transphobic & shit, despite being trans, but the arguments she has about transmascs/non-binary people is not exactly on the same level as her pro-Israel genocide denialism & violent islamophobia, & the Zionist islamophobia shit is the more recent too, so I’m not gonna do screenshots for that or anything)
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Block em, & also report if you want to, I have, but don’t really expect anything to happen now staff is just a skeleton crew
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a-selkie-abroad · 3 years
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God, I hate the world right now.
I’m terrified to make this post. I feel like I’m going to get a bunch of hate and this is very different to my usual stuff but. This is important, I think.
My school just pulled all of us out of classes - a week before a midterm wave of weighted assessments - to have an assembly.
We were told that the school would be increasing security at school. 
We were told to be vigilant on the streets, to stop paying staring into our phones, not out of the usual ‘spending time on phones is bad for you’, but rather because scanning the environment around us, being alert of the people around us, was going to be important. 
We were told to be careful when entering the school or traveling between the two halves of the campus to make sure we weren’t followed, and to make sure no one ‘piggybacked’ off of us students typing in the code to open the school gate.
We were told to be careful, cautious and aware because “whenever conflict happens in the Middle East, there is an inevitable rise in anti-semitism”.
I go to a small, very Secular Jewish school in a country nearly as far away from Israel as you can get. Even before all this, our school had a much, much higher level of security then the non-religious schools around us. I feel like I need to say that because I know many American schools have security due to the prevalence of school shootings, but I assure you, that sn’t normal in my country, and most schools have very, very minimal security. 
Our school is very, very secular - though we provide Jewish Studies and the school celebrates Jewish Holidays, most of the kids don’t believe in a god of any kind, and roll our eyes as the religious aspects of our education (90% of people drop JS the moment they reach 9th grade, ngl). We even have a handful of non-jewish students, and a large chunk of the teaching staff isn’t jewish, either. 
But even if my school was an Orthodox Jewish School, where boys were expected to study the torah and the school was closed on Fridays, or if I went to a Catholic school, or a non-religious one, what I’m about to say still matters.
Our school has students ranging from 5 to 18 years old. We’re a school full of kids. Yet it’s clear people are increasingly scared of getting attacked just for being part of a people-group.
I know the actions of the Israeli Government against the Palestinians is wrong. I know that they’re pushing out Palestinian families from homes they have occupied for generations. I know conflict has broken out, and though I don’t know all the details, I know that Israel’s government has destroyed a building due to suspected Hamas activity and in the process many innocent civilians including children, and that Hamas has fired hundreds of rockets at Israel.
But what I don’t understand is why this means my school, full of children, many thousands of kilometres away, has to fear being attacked because of this.
I know that many people say that they’re “anti-zionist, not anti-semetic”, and I would normally be inclined to agree, (apart from the fact people don’t seem to know the definition of ‘zionist’, and depending on your definition of it, that phrase can men different things) - rightfully accusing and holding accountable the Israeli government for these attacks and attempting to push Palestinian people our of their homes is not at all being against Jewish people as a whole. However, and I have to say it - I keep seeing this used on posts that are still clearly anti-Semitic. Like. Attack the government that’s actually doing this and not use it as an excuse to spew bigotry, please? istg. And it’s even more irritating that they use that phrase bc you have a harder time refuting their points. It’s kinda like those people that say “chill it was just a joke bro” as a way to get away with being openly bigoted.
People need to realise there is a huge amount of misinformation spreading through big news sources about Israel and Palestine’s actions that are a skewed misinterpretation of events or straight up lies - Yes, the Israeli Government’s actions are horrendous and the people responsible need to be held accountable, but no, Bella Hadid did not advocate for throwing jews into the sea during that one rally, like....
Please take away these four main things:
Always check the credibility of a source of any information and if other credible sources are also claiming the same things before helping to spread it, because misinformation is rampant and the issue is harder to solve and properly talk about when no one is sure of exactly what is true or false, and misinformation is harmful to everyone. Inform people if you know what they are talking about is misinformation, usually it’s spread through ignorance or being fooled by headlines, not malice. Even a quick search on fact-checking websites like Snopes.com is better then nothing. 
As a somewhat extension to the point above, photos, videos and quotes that are supposedly of events happening in Palestine/Israel currently are often out-of-context or reused images from events several years ago, or events that happened in other countries. I’ve seen this done especially with videos and images from the Syrian War being passed off as videos from current-day Palestine, which. They aren’t. That’s it’s own set of warcrimes.
People-groups are not monoliths. Not all Israelis are Jewish - there are christian, muslim and Druze Israelis - Not all Palestinians are muslim - there are jewish Palestinians - and not all Jews are Israeli, or even support the Israeli government’s actions. Assuming these groups all believe the same thing just is stereotyping, and just;; it’s plain false.
Don’t let people get away with being anti-Semitic (or bigoted in general), call them out! Keep an eye out for people that claim they’re just “anti-zionist, not anti-Semitic!”, but it’s clear through their words and actions that they’re just using that as an excuse to openly condemn jewish people. Again, though, this doesn’t just apply to anti-semitism! this goes just as much for people being Islamophobic! Don’t let people get away with being bigoted, no matter who they are being bigoted against!
Maybe when people start reporting and spreading news about the actual, real issues and not misinformation propagated to make one or the other side look better or worse and conflating a government’s or terrorist organisation’s actions with an entire people group’s, I’ll feel safer walking down the street in my obviously-jewish-school uniform, and Palestinian voices can actually be heard, rather then videos of Syrians from years ago being played off as being Palestinian.
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xhxhxhx · 4 years
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Saw something in the further reading section of Michael Kulikowski’s Imperial Tragedy (Profile, 2019) today:
There are countless books on the fall of the western Roman empire, and more appear annually, with variable scholarly trappings but nearly all quite conventional. Still, ripping yarns and neo-Victorian analyses can be found in any bookshop. So, for those so inclined, can thinly disguised nativist tracts on how immigration (and ‘immigrant violence’) brought down the empire. To name names would be invidious.
I thought this was a dig at Peter Heather, Professor of Medieval History at King’s College London and author of The Fall of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 2005) and Empires and Barbarians (Oxford, 2009), so I looked it up and discovered that not only was I right, but Kulikowski has serious beef with the guy:
Peter Heather has been fiercely criticized by members of the so-called Toronto School of History. Michael Kulikowski, who belongs to this group, has accused Heather of neo-romanticism and of wishing "to revive a biological approach to ethnicity". Kulikowski claims that Heather "manifests a clear methodological affinity" to the 19th-century writer of the Goths Henry Bradley.
But Kulikowki’s beef is nothing next to the righteous fury of Guy Halsall, Professor of History at the University of York:
Guy Halsall has identified Peter Heather as the leader of a "counter-revisionist offensive against more subtle ways of thinking" about the Migration Period. Halsall accuses this group, which is strongly associated with University of Oxford, of "bizarre reasoning" and of purveying a "deeply irresponsible history". Halsall writes that Heather and the Oxford historians have been responsible for "an academic counter-revolution" of wide importance, and accuses them of deliberately contributing to the rise of "far-right extremists".
Halsall got so mad at Heather, first at the 2011 Leeds International Medieval Conference and then online, at his blog, that he threatened to leave academia entirely:
Well, it's more or less a year since I started doing this blogging lark 'seriously' (the inverted commas are obviously necessary).  And, as they say, what a roller-coaster of a year it's been.  I've shut down the blog twice, brought it back twice, come to the verge of formal complaints being sent to my university twice (once justifiably, once most certainly not), lost at least one friend, lost 99% of the respect I had for someone I had hitherto held in high esteem, quite possibly lost the chance of a job I wanted because of this blog, taken some pretty visceral abuse, and so on.  All good fun!
On the other hand I have learnt some lessons.  One is that even bastards have feelings.  Another is that if you have twenty-odd followers and maybe 100 hits a day, that (allowing for hits from people looking for something else, like Elizabeth Kostova's novel The Historian or ever-popular balding guitarist The Edge) does not mean that  only twenty or thirty people in the whole wide world read your blog.   Thus you need to be a bit more careful about what you say and how you say it.  I've also learnt that eminent historians don't always read what you write very carefully, and just how deeply-ingrained the elitist culture of the British historical profession is, as well as just how few principles are actually held by the overwhelming majority of the practitioners of said profession.  And this in response to something that I actually thought long and hard about how I wrote.
And as a result of all this I have realised that no good is going to come of me continuing to smack my head against the glass ceiling that those of us not from 'a particular socio-educational background' (you know the one) eventually run up against.  I have instead come to the decision, essentially, to give up on it and 'seek my fortune' elsewhere than in the confines of the academic career-path, as it is now constructed in the UK at any rate.*  I'm actually quite excited about this as I think it offers a lot of possibilities, creatively and ethically.  It's been a liberating decision.  Those of you who know that I set most store by the writings of those co-opted into the canon of the existentialists (almost none of whom ever called themselves by that name) will appreciate exactly why I am proud of this decision.
To some extent it makes up for the bad faith I showed in backing down and removing my post on why it matters to get angry about the lazy and irresponsible (indeed, yes, just downright knuckle-headed) way in which some historians in and/or produced by our most prestigious Thames Valley-based university write about politically and socially sensitive topics like migrations.
Halsall ultimately sanitized the 2011 IMC paper that started the war with Heather --  the neutered version is still up on his blog -- but the original was apparently quite something:
Perhaps unsurprisingly for those who’ve heard him speak or read him on the Internet, this was the one that really started the war. [Edit: and, indeed, some changes have been made to these paragraphs by request of one of those involved.] The consequences, if not of this actual speech, at least of its subsequent display on the Internet, have been various, unpleasant and generally regrettable, and I don’t want any of them myself.
Thankfully, the purged parts of the original were reproduced by some noble soul on the Civilization Fanatics forums before they were lost to the ages:
Thus we can have Ward-Perkins’ sneering parody of late antiquity studies and Peter Heather’s distortions of counter-arguments. In many people’s minds the choices before us are evidently, either, that nothing happened, or, that there was a huge catastrophe caused entirely by invading barbarians. Obviously this is not the case. Plenty of people other than me -- most famously, Walter Pohl -- have written about serious, dramatic change happening in the fifth century without blaming it on the barbarians and without denying that there were migrations in the fifth century. Yet this -- if I dare call it such -- third way seems nevertheless to be very much a minority position.
But I am not convinced that a simple lack of exposure to sensible alternatives really explains the continuing, fanatical devotion to the idea of the barbarian migrations, especially outside the academy.
I have recently said that:
“When a British historian places an argument that the Roman Empire fell because of the immigration of large numbers of barbarians next to arguments that the end of Rome was the end of civilisation and that we need to take care to preserve our own civilisation, when another British historian writes sentences saying “the connection between immigrant violence and the collapse of the western Empire could not be more direct” [a direct quote from Peter Heather’s Empires and Barbarians (Oxford, 2009)], and especially when the arguments of both involve considerable distortions of the evidence to fit their theories, one cannot help but wonder whether these authors are wicked, irresponsible or merely stupid.”
Obviously, these are not mutually exclusive alternatives.
Are these writers setting themselves up as ideologues of the xenophobic Right or have they simply not realised the uses to which such careless thinking and phrasing can be put? You can draw your own conclusions, although it is worth noting that Ward-Perkins has been happy enough to write on this subject for the neo-liberal magazine Standpoint, which regularly publishes pieces attacking multiculturalism. There comes a point when one has to admit that actually the most charitable explanation for all this really is that these writers are simply a bit dim.
Outside academic circles, it is certainly the case that the adhesion to the idea of barbarian invasion has a heavily right-wing political dimension. Apart from the barbarians’ role as metaphor, already discussed, it is worth, very briefly, thinking about the other reasons why people are so ready to pin the blame on the barbarians. Slavoj Zizek’s Lacanian analysis of antisemitism provides some valuable ways forward. Essentially, the barbarian, like the figure of the Jew, acts as a screen between the subject and a confrontation with the Real, which Zizek sees, slightly differently from Lacan, as the pre-symbolised; things that haven’t been or can’t or won’t be encompassed in a world view. Zizek showed that arguments that “the Jews aren’t like that” are almost never effective against anti-Semites because what real Jews (or actual immigrants, one might say) are like is not the point. Similarly, arguments about the empirical reality of the fifth-century cut little weight with those wedded to the idea of Barbarian Invasion. Just as the anti-Semite takes factual evidence as more proof of the existence of the international Zionist conspiracy, the right-wing devotee of the Barbarian Invasions sees factual counter-arguments as manifestations of the liberal, left-wing academy peddling its dangerous multicultural political correctness. I have read a great deal of this on internet discussion lists -- including a review of my own book, and one of James O’Donnell’s! Michael Kulikowski received a similarly-phrased review from a right-wing academic ancient historian.
The barbarian is the classic “subject presumed to”. The barbarian can change the world; he can bring down empires; he can create kingdoms. The barbarian dominates history. “He” is not like “us”, enmeshed in our laws, our little lives and petty responsibilities. The barbarians -- and you only need to read Peter Heather to see this -- are peoples with “coherent aims” (a quote), which they set out single-mindedly to achieve. No people in the whole of recorded human history have ever had single coherent sets of aims. Well -- none other than the barbarians anyway.
Halsall has never resiled from his belief that Heather was essentially a fascist, nor backed away from his commitment to resign from his post in righteous indignation -- maybe not in 2011, or 2019, but certainly by 2023 at the very latest:
My anger about all this is justly infamous but has been badly misrepresented.  I do think that some things are worth getting angry about, and the misuse of the Barbarian Migrations and the End of the Roman Empire to fuel xenophobia and racism, and the way some modern authors pander to this, is one such.  However, to look at the origins of this ire and animus, I invite you to compare my engagement with Peter Heather’s work in Barbarian Migrations, and its tone, with Heather’s engagement – if you can call it that – with my work, and its tone, in Empires and Barbarians.  I never expect to be agreed with; I do expect basic academic courtesy to be reciprocated.  If people see fit to treat me intellectually as a second-class citizen, the gloves will come off.  That may stem from my own biography as (unlike so many) a first-generation academic not educated at the 'right' schools and universities, but there we are.  I will be leaving the profession within the next four years (well done, guys) so I have nothing to lose by not apologising for that.
Kulikowski might have gotten in a good dig, but Halsall will always be a true master of the art of Being Mad Online.
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robertmarch82 · 4 years
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They created a “Palestinian people” as a tactical instrument to have the right to claim land in Israel. It was Nasser, president of Egypt, who brought the Palestinian people on the political agenda first. To strengthen their arguments, they settled Arabs by the millions until today.
Ben Fladder, studied German Language and Literature & IT System at Free University of Berlin (2010)
To explain why Israel is such a big thing on Quora (at least for me), I want to tell you some of the earlier history of the State of Israel. This short part of history is enough to make Israel a big thing for me, I don’t need to go into detail about the almost 1600 years, that Jews lived there as indigenous people from 1500 BC to 70 AD (and until today).
I do not deny, that Israel has committed war-crimes, just as the Arabs have. I am not an Israeli, nor am I Jewish, so I do not have any personal connection to Israel that would make me feel I must justify anything. Just the facts are enough in my opinion.
Before the first Zionistic settlements started in the 1870s, there were roughly around 255.000 Arabic people in the rural areas and around 24.000 Jews (the numbers vary, but that’s the average) living under Osman rule. The land was totally devastated. Agriculture and livestock took place on a minimal level, just barely enough for the self – sustaining of the inhabitants. Reports from 1882 - 1913 talk about “completely sown land, with dirty dilapidated houses built of loam, catastrophic hygienic circumstances”, the little agriculture done with small wooden plows. You find these descriptions for practically all the land. People were shocked when they came there and compared the status quo with what they had imagined.
Felix Bovet wrote about his visit of the area in 1858: „The ... Turkish [Osmans] ... turned it into a wasteland ... The Arabs themselves, who are its inhabitants ... have created nothing here.“ Quote from: Felix Bovet in: "Egypt, Palestine and Phoenicia: A Visit to Sacred Lands" (Can be found in /Scheel/)
The reasons lay in a chaotic, inhuman politic and the traditional lifestyle of the inhabitants. An example is the “Musha-land”, one of six categories of land under ottoman rule. Musha-land is supposed to have been the biggest obstacle against improvement for the fellahin/fell. In addition, wells and fields were further destroyed through steady fights between the Arabic residents themselves and the steady attacks and extortions from their neighbours, the Bedouin. The population was steadily declining.
Alif I. Tannous, a Palestinian intellectual wrote in October 1935: “Until today the fellahin/fell are the object of oppression, disregarding and bad treatment by their own people and the old political regime. The feudal system extincts their life, the effendi-class looks down on them and the old Turkish regime was too corrupt to deal with this vital problem.“
Because of this always declining population, lease declined as well and so the leaders constantly let non-Arabic and Arabic workers into the country. According to the Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911 not less than 50 languages were spoken in what today is Israel.
With the new workers/peasants it went the same way as described above: They fell into poverty; the wars went on and the owners didn’t gain enough income from their land …
So, selling it to immigrating Jews was a jackpot for many of the owners. As said most of the land belonged to Arab families in the cities like the Sursock family in Beirut. They for example sold 240 square kilometres between Haifa and Beisan for over 800.000 British pounds to (among others) the Jewish National Fund. That‘s only one family. There were so many, who got rich by selling land, they had no use for because it was dried out and devastated. The money from these land sales often became the basis for their political power today. They also sold swamp land to those Jews, who had no experience with farming (swamp land was almost impossible to cultivate. If you were lucky enough to survive the first year, you gave up during the second). Jokes made the round about the stupid Jews who paid so much money for swamps.
But the Jews made it. I guess the century-long experience of being mistreated together with the pogroms that had happened not long ago, in Russia, Europe and North-Africa did theirs to motivate them. They put effort, all their money and knowledge into building up new homes. The immigrants that came there were a mix of farmers, workers, soldiers, intellectuals, medics, engineers etc. Men and women were active in the discussions and plannings of the settlements. All that contributed to the successful re-cultivation of the land and to the relatively modern and open society that evolved in Israel.
Together with the green, Arabs came to work there. Many Palestinians are descendants of the migrant workers from Egypt, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, who came between 1830 and 1945 to what is now Israel. And they came by increasing numbers, because the Jewish immigrants created more and more work and wealth.
A study from 1943 – 1947 and 1949 – 1963, as well showed that most Arabic inhabitants came from other countries. For example, the village el-Fahan (20 km west of Hadera): In 1943, out of 2.800 inhabitants 900 were from Egypt, 1.400 from Hejaz in Saudi-Arabia, 500 from today’s Jordan. 
The population of el-Fahan exploded when Jordan’s King Hussein brought ten thousands of Arabic settlers there from 1948 – 1967, for the Arabization of the city that is already mentioned in the Bible.
Since the founding of the state of Israel tenth of thousands of Arabic immigrants have come to Jewish cities, farms and fabrics and all the other work opportunities, doubling and tripling the number of Arabs.
The Peel-Commission reported in 1937, that the „… lack of land … is less attributable to many Jews having bought land, but to the increase of the Arabic people.“
So far so good. But now the real problems began. To make it short: The Arabic leaders didn’t like the thought, that the Jews were prospering, especially since the idea of an organized Arabic settlement in the areas had been existent for a while among them. There had been attacks on a lower scale all the time. 
But now a broad anti-Jewish campaign was launched, intensified especially during WW II, all over the Arabic world. Protagonists of this campaign were for example the Muslim Brothers (especially their founder Hassan Al-Banna, a big admirer of Hitler and Mussolini, who praised them in speeches) or Amin al-Husseini - the Mufti of Jerusalem (a searched war-criminal and collaborator of NS-Germany). These campaigns were supported by the Nazis. Hitler and his thugs even set up a radio-station for al-Husseini to spread anti-Semitic ideas from Germany (where he lived as Hitler’s guest since 1941) over Egypt and the whole Maghreb. Powered by the internal explosive situation in the Arab countries – poverty, political fights etc. – this anti-Semitism digged its way deep into people’s thinking.
Arabic leaders and organizations tried to destroy Israel twice with military force but lost. So, they changed their tactics and used not only terrorism but also humans as a “tactical” instrument. During the 1967-war, they actively tried to make Arab inhabitants move out of Israel by telling them horror-stories about massacres by Israeli soldiers and pretending to want them safe when they overrun the country. Similar tales as we had them in Europe during the middle ages and up to the 1940s (some statistics talk about 68% Arabs that left Israel without ever having seen an Israeli soldier. They then denied many of those refugees to enter Egypt for example and used them to “stay an open wound in Israel’s flesh forever” (see the sources). 
They created a “Palestinian people” as a tactical instrument to have the right to claim land in Israel. It was Nasser, president of Egypt, who brought the Palestinian people on the political agenda first. To strengthen their arguments, they settled Arabs by the millions until today.
A quote from the Muslim Weekly Magazine KUL-SHAY, Beirut, 19.08.1951: „Who brought the Palestinians as refugees into the Lebanon, where they came into huge hardship and destitute – no one else but the Arabic States themselves, including the Lebanon.” Can be found in: /Farah/
Since 1967 Arabs built 261 settlements in Judea and Samaria alone - but only 144 Jewish settlements in ALL of Israel were built. But we never hear about that, do we?
When Jordan overran a part of Jerusalem in 1948, the Jews in this part of the city were killed, robbed and expelled to make Jerusalem Arabic. That happened in many parts of the country: Kfar Etzion near Hebron: in 1948, all Jewish citizens except one who managed to flee got shot by the Jordans. On the north side of Jerusalem, a village named Neve Jaakov was arabized through the murdering of all Jews.
Quotes:
·         Zuheir Mohsen, a high-ranked PLO-member, said in 1977 (in a disarming honesty): “There is no Palestinian people. The creation of a Palestinian State is one weapon to continue our fight against Israel and for the Arabic unity. Since Golda Meir is denying the existence of a Palestinian people, I claim, that there is such a people and that it is to be distinguished from the Jordans ... Only for political and tactical reasons we talk about the existence of a Palestinian identity, because it lies within the national interest of the Arabs, to oppose a separate existence of the Palestinians to Zionism. For tactical reasons Jordan, which is a country with fixed borders, cannot claim Haifa and Jaffa. I in contrast, as Palestinian, can claim Haifa, Jaffa, Beerscheba and Jerusalem. But as soon as our rights on Palestine are restored, we must not delay the reunion of Jordan and Palestine not a single longer.” Quote from: W. Roxan: Israel und die Palästinenser. Darmstadt 1978. p.66·
·         Prof. Philip Hitti, Arabic American historian from Princeton university, said in 1946 in front of the Anglo-American committee: „Something like Palestine has never existed in history.“ and in 1988: “One thing is clear: No Palestinian State has ever existed not for the shortest period in the past. There is no Palestinian language either, no distinct Palestinian culture, no special religion in Palestine.” Quotes from: Mitchell G. Bard: Behauptungen und Tatsachen-Der israelisch-arabische Konflikt im Überblick, Hänssler 2002. p.50 (original from Jerusalem Post, 2. November 1991) and from /Pfisterer/ (originally from Six millions de Palestiniens ... valeurs actuelles. Paris 26.12.1988, p. 31)·
·         „The Palestinians… it could have come to a humanitarian solution, like in other parts of the world ... [But it is as] the Arabs in the Arabic League said in those days: ‘We want to keep this as an open wound und use the human beings as a pawn against Israel. Quote from: Joan Peters in, quoted in ARAB NATIONS PERPETUATED THE REFUGEE PROBLEM /Arutz Sheva-4. Febr. 2001
I did not mention all the things we can see on TV every day: Terrorist attacks and rockets that end peace-negotiations and provoke counter-attacks. There are organisations, who have no interest at all to make peace with Israel. They will not stop until Israel is destroyed or they are. The sad thing is that they use their own people, Muslims and Arabs to reach their goals. And these people get brainwashed and let themselves be used for a war, that will better nothing for them. What will happen, when Israel is destroyed? Will the Palestinians live any better in the ruins of this country? It would be so easy: Let the refugees in your countries, not like 1967 when you first called them to leave their homes and then put them in refugee camps and treated them like second class humans. Just let them in, stop telling them, that Israel is the root of all evil.
But this will never happen, I fear that peace will never come. I feel sorry for the Jews, who for almost 2000 years are expelled from their land, fought, harassed and lied upon, be it by Europeans or Arabs, Christians or Muslims. It’s a shame. Not even after the fabric-like murder during the “3rd Reich” we manage to let them live in peace. They do not want to make the world Jewish. They just want to live their lifes with their religion in their country.
When you watch the news, not from Arabic countries or Israel – no, from Europe, then you can find reports about policemen giving their microphones and speakers to people who use them to shout things like “Hamas, Hamas, Jews into the gas” through them:
http://www.faz.net/aktuell/rhein...
Did German (!) police do anything against those exclamations which are illegal according to German law? No, you know what they did? They put a young man on trial, who had stood beside this aggressive bawling people and waved a little, 5-inch-long Israel-flag. Sued him for making an unregistered counter-demonstration. Although the German constitution gives everybody the right to express their opinion peacefully at any time. But the judge spoke justice, right? No. He found that the man was guilty and since he was a kind judge, he offered him, if he would commit his crime, to just make him pay a small fee. Otherwise it would be way more expensive.
Such things happen all over Europe. Jews emigrate back to Israel out of Europe and this only place where they can feel, if not safe, then at least wanted, this place is in steady danger of being destroyed. Arabs have so many countries where they can live in, Europeans, Christians, Muslims have. Why don’t we leave Jews live on this tiny place on earth? I really don’t get it. We are drifting into something very bad. But this time no one will be able to say that they didn’t know anything. This time everybody could see the signs in the newspapers, on TV, on the radio. If you believe in god, no matter which: Beware, beware. If you do not believe in any god then: Will you be able to stand the shame?
Sources:
/Stein/: Kenneth W. Stein: The Land Question in Palestine, 1917-1939, The University of North Carolina Press, 1984
/Peters/: Joan Peters: From Time Immemorial-The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, Harper & Row, NY, 198
/Twain/: Mark Twain: The Innocents Abroad, London 1881.
/Voss/: H. Carl Voss: The Palestine Problem Today. Israel and its Neighbours.
/RBP/: Royal-British-Palestine-Commission: Report of 1913
/Goldberg/: David B. Goldberg, M.A., Haschiwa: Auf unwegsamen Pfaden- von Touristen selten betreten (Exzerpt), in: Die Rückkehr No.2/1995
/Samad/: Hamed Abdel-Samad: Der Islamische Faschismus. Eine Analyse. Droemer Verlag 2014
/Faran/: Joseph Farah, An unconventional Arab viewpoint, © 2003
/Pfisterer/: Rudolf Pfisterer: Israel oder Palästina. R.Brockhaus 1992.
/Kark/ Ruth Kark, Ed.: The Land that became Israel/ Ran Aaronsohn: Cultural Landscape of Pre-Zionist Settlements. Yale University Press. London 1990
/Scheel/ Wolfgang Scheel. Referat March 2006: Zionistische Landbegrünung als Erfüllung biblischer Verheißungen.
/Ba/ S.83, /Pf/ S.147 (Bericht der Königlichen Palästina-Kommission, S. 242, Detaillierte Protokollauszüge in J. Peters, From Time, S. 302ff). and https://www.freitag.de/autoren/b...
/Fereydoun/: Fereydoun Hoveyda: Que veulent les Arabes? Paris 1991. In German: Was wollen die Araber? Droemer Knaur. München 1992
/EB11/: Encyclopaedia Britannica of 1911
https://www.quora.com/Why-does-Israel-seem-to-be-such-a-big-theme-on-Quora-when-there-are-so-many-other-troubled-areas-in-the-world
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I’m not in the best state of mind to really get into this, but I can’t stand this whole discussion surrounding the term “zio”.
When I was a kid living in Palestine, my friends and I thought we were so clever for coming up with and using the phrase in 1999 & 2005. It wasn’t something we heard from others, it wasn’t a phrase that we’d read about anywhere.......it’s just taking the goddamn word “zionist” and chopping it in half, as kids tend to do when coming up with nicknames/new words. 
And of course, we weren’t clever...because it’s something so many others have done over the years.
Do I deny that David Duke has also used the word and allowed it to proliferate within his own racist/anti-semitic circles as well? Not at all. Do I deny that it is used by racists? Not at all.
Do I believe that everyone who uses the term must be racist or have any idea that it’s used by racists? Not at all.
The Zionist crowd has turned it into a “gotcha!” argument, that if someone happens to use the term Zio...they must be raging anti-semites who learned it from David Duke!!!
Personally, I don’t like the word. I think it sounds childish and very much like some ~entry-level activist~ term. And, frankly, those are the people I see using it most - kids and well-intentioned activists who have a long way to go when it comes to political development and maturity. 
It’s a word that has been used independent of David Duke and his disgusting cronies, a word that HE at some point picked up and began using himself. That his association/usage of the word has managed to taint its usage so thoroughly that people completely oblivious to it all are being called out as anti-semites/white supremacists is absolutely, thoroughly ridiculous and laughable.
It’s really indicative of the inability of the Zionist crowd to find something else to harp over than using the word “zionist” cut in half.
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meriwebnet · 4 years
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Myanmar struggles to digest the global anger over Rohingya’s crisis
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The world witnessed a brutal massacre of Muslims in Myanmar to which human right claimed as a “textbook example” of ethnic cleansing. The world is baffled, hurt, and is shocked to see a brutal genocide of Muslims in the 20th century.  But who cares if it’s Muslims? Perhaps, Nobody! The United Nation singled out the noble peace award holder Aung San Suu Kyi for failing to speak up for the group. The Myanmar Muslims were massacred and forced to leave their homeland mainly because of their religion. There are still no signs of any militants activity by the Myanmar Muslims, and it is evident from their past that they were pretty incompetent to hold any resistance against the powerful Myanmar army. The worst came under the statement “I have sympathy for the victims but defending our country from terrorism is more important,” by a Democrat of Myanmar. If you have forgotten the worst inhuman tactics used by the Myanmar government against the Rohingya’s, here is a glimpse: The morning of May-June 2013 marked the start of anti-Muslim violence and reprisal attacks that resulted in the displacement of nearly 2 million Muslims, along with the destruction of more than 10,000 homes and mosques across the region. The Muslims were forced to move to Bangladesh where they found refuge in the most horrific conditions. Shame could be a bit lenient word for the whole nation of Burma. There were reports of Muslims cut into pieces, women being raped, children being cut to death; Myanmar didn’t set for anything less. The stories of people getting tortured and pledging for mercy are just overwhelming. The reports described that Rohingya’s were forced to stand on the line, and were shot one by one. Their women were snatched and were raped until death. Villages were burnt and people were dismissed from their land. Some of them who escaped the horrific massacre are still wrapped under a horrible trauma. This picture defines the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims as the Buddhist monks are gathered to burn the bodies of Muslims who were massacred the night before. Who could have imagined that one day the armed forces will burn their villages and they will be shot like animals? The heart grieves and sinks over the Rohingya’s blood, while the world’s silence is clearly indicating their hypocrisy.   The Burmese officials didn’t seem to acknowledge their evil crimes as they stated Muslims as a problem for their land. The new government slammed UN reports of ethnic cleansing as highly exaggerated. On the other hand, the Myanmar government along with Israel has signed to rewrite the textbooks so that they can hide their history of genocide they did against the Muslims. Both the governments have already started their work in changing textbooks that will allow them to edit passages concerning their own history, more specifically on the lessons of “the negative consequences of intolerance”, racism, Anti Semitism, and xenophobia. The education cooperation agreement signed recently is not the only relation between these two countries since Israel manufacturers continue to sell military equipment to Myanmar. The textbooks will teach the children of one country that has killed over 100 Palestinians in the last 3 months and the other that has been accused of ethnic cleansing against Rohingya’s Muslims with nearly 700,000 people leaving Myanmar due to violence in 2017. Both Myanmar and Israel are reluctant to acknowledge their own violent, intolerant, racist, and xenophobic measures against the native people who have been living there for centuries. The agreement will also promote academic cooperation’s that would include conferences, training courses along with the introduction of Zionist studies programs in Myanmar, and Myanmar studies in Israel. This will enable them to mutually verify school textbooks, especially to those concerned passages that are referring to the history of the other state and, where needed, introduce amendments. Thereby, they can write their history of their own that may contain factious arguments, cherry-picked facts, self-serving figures to justify their inhuman crimes. The disgusting crimes are not only a shame for the Buddhist, but also it’s a slap on the Muslim world. Pakistan, being a nuclear state, seemed to be silent on this inhuman genocide of the Muslims.  One can say that the country is busy sorting out their internal matters but it still doesn’t justify their silence. Pakistan holds the tendency to give a swift response to the Myanmar government and has the power to downright them easily. But is it included in the country’s priority? Not actually! On the other hand, Saudia Arabia has joined an alliance with the Israel government and has done nothing for the Muslims of Myanmar. They are playing at the hands of Israel and America, and have truly forgotten their true spirit. The crimes of Saudia Arabia in Yemen against their fellow Muslims are raising anger in the Muslim world. The role of turkey is impressive. They have tried their best to dismantle the occupation, but haven’t been proved successful. Myanmar refugees are living in the camps alongside Bangladesh border that are in horrific conditions. The fear of being shot or getting drowned is a constant nightmare for the Muslims living in the camps. The Bangladesh government has provided little assistance but is not ready to continue it in future. No other country is willing to sort out the crisis. The UN isn’t powerful enough to stop the evils. The fate of refugees is unknown. Moreover, the ones left in the Rohingya are waiting for their death. The reason is still a mystery. Some news indicated a port that has to be built by the Myanmar government and the Chinese government. Whatever reason they might have for doing this genocide, the history will never justify the inhuman cleansing of native people. While death surrounds the Rohingya’s refugees living in the camps, the world is silent. For how long, Muslim countries will remain silent on the blood of their fellow Muslims? Only time will tell. Read the full article
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freedomss0n · 7 years
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Words by Hiba Krisht. Hiba is Lebanese and Palestinian, as well as a scholar and brilliant writer, so when she talks about Palestinian welfare and discourse about Palestine, everyone should listen.
"I'm at the point where I can't see how focus on the Israel Palestine question re: Chicago Dyke March is anything other than derailment. I'd also like to say that perception that pro-Palestine sentiment here is being silenced *as a general trend* very much does not sit well with me because I believe the silencing to be happening the other way around, and think this is in fact a longstanding destructive feature of discourse surrounding the Palestinian cause. Also, I believe most of those engaging in defense of a pro-Palestinian liberation stance right now mean well but do not understand how much its framing decenters actual Palestinian welfare.
I will elaborate on both counts. I'm agitated from all sides about this and I can't do brevity so bear with me I guess.
First, the derailment. It's of particularly troubling sort because it falls into a larger pattern of whataboutism where what *should be* a case of clearcut antisemitism cannot ever be identified and unilaterally condemned by the left without also being hashed and rehashed in exculpatory ways "because Israel."
This is ESPECIALLY troubling when: - There is a persistent phenomenon that's almost like a lefty inversion of the concept Israeli exceptionalism. Like a reverse- exceptionalism, whereby discussion of Israel's transgressions are held to singular standards of scrutiny to the exception of other nations/populations with comparable and/or far more deplorable histories and actions and crises. And in that I am including all the unspeakable injustice and destruction the larger MENA region has wrought to Palestinians, and how accountability seems no concern there, in part *because* of eternal return to obsessive, unilateral focus on Israel as the central Palestinian issue.
- Cases of anti Muslim bigotry aren't held to the same scrutiny. The fact that people will demur about antisemitism but not anti-Muslim bigotry betrays a terrible lack of self awareness re: double standards. I mean, if you want to go 'head and make weak arguments about how religious symbols are politically wielded, I'm going to have to start wondering why you aren't referencing the much more appalling and deadly scope of human rights abuses committed under Muslim banners whenever the question of banning Muslim symbols comes up. Which would be a clearly terrible argument, but maybe it's worth reflecting why the same argument suddenly makes sense when it comes to Jewish symbols.
- Casual antisemitism often manifests as (among other things) conflations between Jewish symbols or beliefs / various Zionist ones / various Israeli nationalist ones. We ALREADY know the Dyke March incident to be an iteration of this problem. Now think about how fucked up what happened next is: the ban of a Jewish symbol at a public event based on a bigoted conflation is called out as anti-Semitic. Then, as a kind of precondition for defense against or acknowledgement of such anti-Semitism, people on the left apparently see fit to hold Jewish people accountable, individually and as a group, for *the same bigoted conflations targeting them*, basically needing Jewish people to declare their politics and/or unilaterally renounce Zionism -- essentially acting as gatekeepers despite being outsiders operating from apparently rather reductive and narrow presumptions of Zionist politics, since they somehow have the arrogance of assuming they understand and can judge what any given Jewish person's Zionist adherence entails and means based on the label alone??? Who the fuck else does this? Who the fuck else has to go through this? Do we have to establish and approve of the political and ideological leanings of Muslims in order to defend them against anti-Muslim bigotry, or do we engage in whataboutism re: the scourge of political Islamism in the Middle East to determine if Muslims have the right to display their religious symbols in the west?
Now the Palestine thing. And necessary conversations. And silencing and whatnot.
Even points that are so reasonable and evident they may well be tautologies by now, like 'Palestinians are entitled to basic human rights', bear a different weight when made in these contexts. They don't exist in vacuum, but carry the shadow of a discourse that already has huge issues with privileging particularly anti-Zionist or anti-Israel Palestinian advocacy no matter how tangential to the conversation, and never mind what else is minimized and derailed in the process.
I am not doubting the sincerity and concern of my friends who are struggling to express pro-Palestine sentiment while being confused by hostility right now, but I would urge a more thorough consideration of the relative space taken up by the respective conversations thus far, and to not confuse long overdue push-back from folks who have every reason to be frustrated and sick of derailment and semantic squabbles over definitions of Zionism every time anti-semitism comes up.
If it seems like there is rejection from the left when you want to assert a pro-Palestinian stance here, it is less likely to be because people have a problem with pro-Palestinian politics as such, and more likely to be because there is a salient point regarding how cavalier antisemitism already is today and how these patterns of derailment every damn time end up gatekeeping attempts to counter an insidious kind of racism that can and must be discussed without forcing marginalized people to jump through the Israel Blame Game hoops to defend their humanity. The Israel Palestine thing needs to stop hijacking conversations about antisemitism. Palestinian welfare does not suffer if people refuse to derail conversations about anti-semitism, but conversations about anti-semitism certainly suffer when what-about-Palestine pops up.
And that's all besides the fact that no matter how well-meaning, this Palestine-specific whataboutism does not contribute anything appreciable to Palestinian welfare and is so oblivious in some ways it's kind of heartbreaking to try to navigate through. I firmly believe that the kneejerk way the Palestinian Cause is held up like a trump card whenever convenient and the infuriating reverse exceptionalism with which the conflict is treated has been a firm factor in prolonging the crisis and exacerbating Palestinian suffering. I'm struggling to find the words for why it troubles me so much to see all these conversations stuck on questions of whether anti Zionism is anti Semitism because don't forget Israel and what about accountability for Palestine.
Please. Please. Please try to understand that an anti-Zionist pro-Palestine liberation stance is not one that needs championing in the left, that nobody fucking lets us forget Israel when we try to talk about Palestine, and nobody stops talking about Palestine when anyone mentions Israel, and it hasn't done shit for diaspora or territory Palestinians except turn us into a handy slogan. Establishing a stance of basic advocacy for the rights and welfare of the Palestinian people is not what the discourse lacks, it is what the discourse needs to *move past* already. Everybody is well-versed and comfortable with the Israel Blame Game-- it drowns out and supersedes everything else, and it's everything else that Palestinian advocacy desperately needs.
This is something that frustrates me to no end because it's not reducible to something like Israeli conduct being dealt with disproportionate scrutiny in the left *as such*, but as a function of urgency and relative space. When Israel overshadows discourse about Palestinian welfare even though it is Arabs who are responsible for the most staggering and horrific ongoing Palestinian abuses, we have a problem. And it can never be talked about or addressed because only Israel's actions are viewed with agency and significance, and attributing Palestinian suffering to anything else is instantly condemned as insidious detraction.
So you can see how it is frustrating to go through the whole 'is pro-palestinian anti-zionism anti-semitic' rigmarole when it is so often a distraction from more functional questions of Palestinian welfare.
Fact: There are kinds of anti-Zionism that are pro-Palestinian rights and that are also anti-Semitic. Fact: There are kinds of anti-Zionism that are pro-Palestinian rights and that are not anti-Semitic. Fact: There are kinds of Zionism that are consistent with upholding the rights and freedoms of Palestinian Arabs, and, fact: there are kinds that are categorically not.
Educated opinion: Not only is anti-Zionism the established and normative stance across most of the Middle East, but, if we're being honest, probably the most prevalent and established type of anti-Zionism in the discourse is that which engages in solid pro-Palestinian advocacy while also falling into both gross and casual anti-Semitism. This is definitely the case in the broader discourse on the issue in the Middle East, and what's more, there is next to no self-awareness of the anti-Semitic assumptions, myths, and bigotries, not to mention the historical revisionism, threading popular and political anti-Zionism in the MENA region and popular Palestinian and Lebanese culture as well. This is a problem, and one that will never be addressed as long as pro-Palestinianism and anti-Semitism are presumed to be wholly non-overlapping binaries by well-meaning leftists. It is both possible and necessary to acknowledge and mount critique of anti-semitic elements in pro-Palestine discourse while maintaining Palestinian advocacy. Acknowledging anti-Semitism in the discourse is not going to undermine the Palestinian cause. Again, people don't need to be perfect moral agents to justify a defense of their humanity.
Educated opinion: Leftist discourse centering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is overall entrenched in rigid, binary thinking and overwhelmingly leans pro-Palestine but in unfortunately too-basic, reductive ways. It already has an ideological rigidity problem. The discourse is such that to be pro-Palestine is to be above all transcendentally righteous: the lines of oppression and blame are clear and brook no further complexity; it is the cause no reasonable person can deny or fail to center in any conversation, and Palestinian advocacy is almost synonymous with condemnation for the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and aught else.
It is troubled with issues of allegiance and abstraction-- maintaining certain principled stances re: the Cause is treated as an almost inviolable tenet for anybody who can claim to care about Palestine, despite the fact that the central narrative of the Cause pits the immediate welfare and prosperity of generations of living, breathing Palestinians against the memory of a Palestine that has not existed for decades and an abstract future promise of a right to return to a place that never again will be. The narrative may have once been in service of the people, but it has not been so in a long time. And it is only the narrative that is treated with sanctity by the most vocal champions of Palestine, and if it comes at the expense of Palestinian lives like in Yarmouk, so be it. Palestinian advocacy is more about condemning Israel than it is about supporting Palestine, and that is the problem.
It's beginning to feel like despair, seeing how pro-Palestinian discourse is framed in terms of the questions of Zionism and anti-Zionism over and again, constantly centering and recentering the question of Palestinian welfare as a foil to Israeli aggression in broad nationalistic and/or existentialist terms, assuming unilateral causes, ascribing agency very selectively to regional actors, brooking no interrogation of Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim agency in the conflict, and obsessively resistant to moving past the past.
It's been decades and Palestinians continue to suffer large-scale crises in basic resources, public health, trauma, and disenfranchisement, and they have largely been allowed to persist in the name *of* Palestine, at the hands of Arab regimes that shrug off all accountability in Israel's direction, though for fifty years diaspora Palestinians in the larger Levant have been purely at the mercy of the Arab states housing them. We do not need to hear tired pro-liberation stances when it is those very stances that are used to justify keeping us holed up in Lebanese and Syrian refugee camps, stateless, in suspended animation, without civil rights or wealth or upwards mobility, dying slowly of poverty and deplorable living conditions and isolation if we're lucky, and if we're unlucky, until a guy like Assad comes along and murders, maims, starves, and makes refugees out of a whole city of us-- and yet it is in the name of liberating Palestine that Assadist discourse proliferates, being anti-Israel, and Palestine's catastrophe is only and ever subsumed into the crimes of Israel and not of those of Syria or Lebanon or Assad or Hamas or the PA or Fatah or the GCC states or anybody else. When I want to talk about Palestinian advocacy, I want to talk about Assad and the nearly 200,000 Palestinians in Yarmouk camp that are now dead or gone or starving under siege and I want to talk about how the Lebanese state has made pariahs and a lost people out of *generations* of diaspora Palestinians practically quarantined in refugee camps because of petty sectarian concerns and I want to talk about the Palestinian political elite grievously frittering away resources and opportunities that could have prevented significant Palestinian suffering and death because of political feuds and a reckless privileging of a jihadi cause over popular welfare-- but I cannot, because the justifications, distractions, conspiracy theories loop incessantly back to Israel. Which cements *my* concern that these conversations are not really *about* Palestinian welfare at all."
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keshetaylonit · 7 years
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Transcript: This transgender Jew is tired of the anti-Semitism in the LGBTI community. After the Chicago Dyke March fiasco, where three Jewish lesbians carrying a Pride flag featuring the Star of David were kicked off the march by organizers for ‘supporting Zionism,’ the issue of anti-Semitism in the LGBTI community has been coming to light. Most recently, the Chicago Dyke March Tweeted using the term ‘Zio,’ a derogatory term for Jews coined by David Duke of the KKK. Many LGBTI advocates, like the organizers of the Chicago Dyke March, are vehemently anti-Israel, claiming the country is participating in an ‘genocide’ of the Palestinian people. One such activist is Pauline Park, a transgender woman associated with the group NYC Queers Against Israeli Apartheid, who often posts publicly about her pro-Palestinian activism, using buzzwords like ‘genocide,’ ‘apartheid,’ and ‘occupation.’ ‘That Pauline has no clue as to what genocide actually is, or what apartheid actually means, is obvious, but it is just as clear that she understands that such terms are trigger words for many whom she claims she is trying to persuade,’ writes Dana Beyer for Huffington Post. ‘That she is willing to defend a terrorist government that, upon meeting her, would ask her to kneel to be beheaded because she is a trans woman is inexplicable.’ ‘Is Israel a paradise for the LGBT community? No, not by a long shot. But it is getting better, and Israeli gay and trans people don’t escape into the West Bank and Gaza; Palestinians do escape into Israel. What is going on in the Middle East — and that includes the terror in Libya, Syria and Iraq, to say nothing about all the other rabidly sexist and homophobic regimes in the Muslim world — is not comparable to several months of demonstration against the LGBT Center of New York. Talk of “homonationalism” and “pinkwashing” as tools to stifle dissent is not just absurd; it is insane.’ Meet the fed up, trans, queer Jew Ariel Lipson is a 20-year-old queer trans man from Seattle, Washington. Lipson identifies as ‘Ay’lonit,’ which is a Jewish term used to describe someone ‘identified as “female” at birth but develops “male” characteristics at puberty and is infertile.’ Lipson began noticing the anti-Semitism of the LGBTI community upon entering high school. ‘The high school I attended was predominantly LGBTQ+, both students and staff,’ he explains. ‘While at the time I was working through my own internalised anti-Semitism, I did notice that being a part of Judaism, and being open about it ostracised me. I had people interrogate me about [the Israel/Palestine conflict], refuse to let me enter the space, and accused me of being complicit in genocide,’ he continues. ‘At this time I was staunchly anti-Zionist. As I got older, I saw the community become more and more cold towards Jews. I joined a youth group, and when I would talk about it, and people found out I was Jewish, they would be startled, and avoid me. I went to a LGBTQ camp, and while it was in general ok, there were moments of Jew = Israel. The main hub of LGBTQ+ space in Seattle is also big on activism, and being Jewish, and not willing to put up with comparisons to Nazi Germany or that your fellows control media/government/etc means that you are not going to be all that welcome in much of the spaces there.’ One moment in particular that sticks out in Lipson’s mind is the day he decided to wear a Star of David to school. ‘I had just bought it, and was so happy to wear it. I went to school, and felt proud. Here I was, accepting myself,’ he recalls. He then remembers having the following dialogue with a classmate: ‘“Oh are you Jewish?” “Yes.” “I had no idea. Sorry to hear that.” “What?” “You’re Israeli, so that means you kill children”’ ‘From that moment on I was shunned by classmates, had my trans authenticity mocked, as being Jewish meant I could not be LGBTQ+ for some reason,’ he says. Now, Lipson is sick and tired of engaging with non-Jewish LGBTI activists who often conflate Zionism with Judaism and utilize anti-Semitic tropes in their activism, such as Pauline Park. After recently being in a heated Facebook argument with Park, who told Lipson and numerous other queer Jews that their perspectives on anti-Semitism were invalid, he has officially had enough. ‘Any activist who behave as Ms. Park does is not an activist,’ Lipson states. ‘If they refuse to listen to a minority asking them to stop using stereotypes, tropes or words that oppress them, then they are not really working towards equality or freedom.’ ‘In short, I am hurt. However I am unsurprised. We saw it in [the Chicago Dyke March], we see it with Pauline Park, we see it with countless activists across the United States, Canada and the Western world.’ ‘As Jews, we have come to expect anti-Semitism in activist and LGBTQ+ spaces. I used to hide that I was Jewish, now I don’t. Is that dangerous? Yes. But it is a way to not only find the spaces that I can feel safe in, but I should not have to hide who I am. I should not have to be a closeted Jew. Being LGBTQ+ is about being proud. How can I be my whole and authentic self if I cannot be open about my ethnicity, people, culture, faith and history.’ Doing better moving forward Lipson believes that one can be anti-Israel without being anti-Semitic. He recommends this guide for how to do so. As for advice for the LGBTI community to be more inclusive of Jewish voices, Lipson says the following: ‘First and foremost, see us a human. View us as peers. We, too, are a minority. We, too, are oppressed. Ours is not just a religious culture, but an ethno-religious culture that stretches back nearly 6,000 years. Throughout that time, we have been oppressed. Our oppression did not begin, nor end with the Shoah. It still permeates today in every corner of the globe. Jews are fleeing France in droves. The last remnants of Syrian Jewry fled their homes not even 5 years ago.’ ‘If you want to be more inclusive to the Jewish LGBTQ+ community, start by listening. Like any other minority that you do not belong to, you do not get to dictate what is, or is not anti-Semitic. You do not get to tell us what our oppression is, or is not. That is for Jews, and only Jews, to decide. Your job is to stop talking, listen, learn, and act upon what you have learned to make your spaces safer for Jews. You do not get to interrogate every person with a Magen David Necklace or a Kippah. You do not get to stop listening to a Jewish person because they are a Zionist. That is not how activism works.’ ‘We do not rule the world. We do not eat babies. We do not sacrifice virgins. We do not run the media. We are real, live human beings. Treat us with respect as you would any other person.’ By: Rafaella Gunz @tikkunolamorgtfo @littlegoythings
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prolapsarian · 6 years
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After Hyde Park
The following text was written for Facebook a week after the fight between trans* activists and transmisogynist feminists in Hyde Park in September. Since these issues have come up once again - this time at the Anarchist Bookfair - and there seems to be more polemic than ever around the proprosed Gender Recognition Act, I am posting it again here.
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This week I found myself embroiled in all sorts of arguments around transphobic and transmisogynist feminisms. I find it so depressing that this stuff is still around. I'm also depressed by how discussions around the Gender Recognition Act are being used by cynically by certain feminists in these milieux, whose main politics over the last decades has been to whip up hatred against trans* people, to try to gather a crowd behind them. I know that quite a few people who are currently lining up behind the likes of Julia Long (or who at the very least refuse to recognise the deeply divisive positions and gestures that people like her are taking and making) read my wall. My hope is that some of the stuff below will make you see this differently.
1. There has been a small but vocal scene of feminists around London - people like Sheila Jeffreys, Gail Chester, Julia Long - whose politics over the last couple of decades has centred on making the argument that trans* women aren't women. A good proportion of these people's opinions go further though: they claim that gender reassignment surgery is nothing other than self-mutilation; that trans people demanding protection from oppression are "male rights activists" (that is, aligned with certain far-right movements); and that the main aim of trans* people's lives is to undermine the gains of the women's movement. But what has been peculiar to this politics - and I only know about London here, but I hear the same from other places - is that its mode of expression has been to attack trans* people themselves. Far from making theoretical interventions or arguments, far from entering into conversations, this group of feminists have gone about instituting their politics by publicly outing, doxxing, and monstering trans people. They do this in a context (and take full advantage of this context) in which transphobia predominates in the mainstream press and many other institutions of civil society. In more immediate social interactions their politics consistently and deliberately misgender all trans people they come into contact with. Ultimately their politics amounts to the idea that trans*-women, in their very being, undermine feminist movements, and they wish to undermine them in every way possible, playing opportunistically on wider social transphobias.
2. It is significant that this pattern has been known to feminism in the context of debates over sex work. On that question certain feminists have attacked women sex workers (most prominently on Reclaim the Night marches.) They do this instead of negotiating the dialectical tensions of labour, commodity, libido, possession, and exchange under patriarchal capitalism. Instead the sex worker herself becomes the scapegoat and centre of gravity of the entire system. If only she can be done away with (and with no particular care for how she came to be selling sex), the whole system will apparently simplify itself. The whole thing is slightly bizarre - akin to blaming proletarians in a munitions factory for a society founded on perpetual war, rather than blaming the society based on perpetual war for the fact that certain proletarians find themselves having to produce munitions. This isn't to say there aren't important and nuanced debates to be had about sex work, safety of workers, the consequence of sex being sold on the most anarchic open market for all women, and so on. Although there is an irony that feminists whose political movement arose from hatred of the "it can wait until after the revolution" now take precisely the same attitude to sex workers merely defending their physical safety. This is all slightly by the by. But the same brutality of attitude, which leads to certain feminists putting the blame of sexual exploitation at the feet of sex workers, which leads them to attack their very existence as scapegoat, has been transferred wholesale to how some feminists are treating trans* people. This has now been going on for very many years.
3. In the discussions that have surrounded the Gender Recognition Act, those women who have for many years been aggressively transphobic have been trying to reposition themselves to win support from other women and feminists who might not really agree with the extremity and violence of their positions. They have started to talk about defending civil society institutions, and about having debates. To many trans* people in London it is clear that these aims are not true. Indeed last week's shitshow of a "debate" mainly involved slinging insults and platforming people whose only point ever is to say that trans* women are men (indeed people who have somehow made careers out of this!) There are questions about civil society, and about womanhood, raised by the act. The trouble is that these particular feminists are not interested in them beyond a very specific, outmoded and divisive line.
4. There are genuinely some people who (mainly on the internet) take an "against nature" position in the trans* community, and who respond to anyone questioning trans* discourse - or even the primacy of discourse in trans* scenes - as an existential threat that can only be met with violence. There are certain individuals who send death threats, punch people, shout "kill all TERFs" etc. Apart from these people are the enormous majority of trans* people who are consistently in conversations, discussions, social movements, reflections with all sorts of people (and alone) about questions of sex, gender, sexuality, nature, history. The transmisogynist and transphobic feminists consistently attempt to play up the extent of this violent, silencing culture, because they know that ultimately plays out in their favour. This behaviour is analogous to Zionists who play up the anti-Semitism of small elements of the Arab population to justify the violence meted out by Israel against all Palestinians. They know that it is ultimately beneficial to their position to claim that they are being silenced and attacked, that all discussion is made impossible. Often their aim has been to provoke this situation (for example by holding meetings where the only speakers are those who routinely claim that all trans* women are men.) The events this week in London, when divisions were cynically sown in this way - people like Julia Long know that their position is ultimately stronger, that their hatred of trans* people and violence against them appears more legitimate and more reasonable when people are most divided. It is for this reason that these people have for so long practiced such a highly antagonistic politics. But none of this really helps women, trans* or otherwise. At the same time it is really a terrible shame for most trans* people that the time they need to defend themselves has collided with what can only be described as a crisis in the politics of oppression, where (turbo-charged by the internet) significant numbers of people advocate nihilist violence against their oppressors to shore up the community of the oppressed. But this trend seems thankfully to be waning. It is a strange irony too that an all-out-war has broken out only where these internet cultures have come into contact with those feminists who first tried to drag the movement into communitarianism.
5. One frequent line of argument that is common is the "gender" is all post-modern nonsense. But to think that the transformations in social relations that have taken place in the last 30 years can be done away with through the power of a demystifying gaze, which does away with the ideology of discourses only to rediscover nature, is to miss the point. We are without a doubt living through a sexual revolution - one as great as those that preceded it, that of the 20 years following the French Revolution, that of Weimar Germany (and Austria) in the wake of psychoanalysis, and that of the 1970s. And indeed it is the revolution of gender itself. Perhaps it is better to think by analogy. When I try to think about the early decades of psychoanalysis it is impossible to think about the great advances it offered people in thinking about their sexuality, about understanding the sexual lives of children, without at the same time thinking of its victims: of Dora, of the children subject to the prevalent paedophilia of Western Culture over whom psychoanalysis had thrown the darkest cloak (until Ferenczi's late interventions). But to take up the position that just refuted it as pseudoscience - the position of someone like Karl Kraus - is to sort of miss the point. The great historical movement of psychoanalysis (which remains unfinished) was already transforming people's lives, people's self-understandings and self-misunderstandings, people's relations and relationships. So too is the case with something like Butler's view of gender, which has now entered the everyday. And whether you agree with it or not is no longer the issue, because questions of humanity are not staked either for or against it but within it and through it. When I was teaching classes of 18 year old humanities students a lot of them had read Butler while at school. Most of those who hadn't were at least aware of the discourse, and were familiar with replicated or bowdlerised forms of it online. It was just part of their sexual growing up. And sometimes I think of the old arguments against the psychoanalytic revolution: that it left the continent of Europe deep in anxiety, packed full of people narcissistically introspecting, discovering uneasily, and obsessing over, their own neuroses. And perhaps if psychoanalysis left in its wake a generation of neurotics, then theories of gender leave a generation of gender disphorics. But it is unclear to me that they are any less well as a result. All of this isn't to say that something like a fiendish Krausian rejection isn't interesting, but it is nonetheless brutal, polarising, as Benjamin would say: destructive. But the Karl Krauses of today's sexual revolution have none of his style; they are experts in the brutishness of brutality alone. They refuse even to accept the divisive effects of their own polemical skepticism, and refuse to notice the bodies trodden underfoot.
6. Perhaps one of the arguments used by transphobic feminists that I find myself most sympathetic to is the idea that we need to return to a conversation of nature. The claim stands against the idea that questions of gender and sexual identity are entirely matters of society and consciousness, in a world that has apparently (at least in these spheres) overcome the forces of natural necessity, the expressions of nature, and natural divisions. But where I absolutely disagree is with the sort of nature that is invoked by these people: it is nature viewed with the taxonomic gaze of Linnaeus. The point of this thinking is to show, just as Linnaeus tried to do with animal species, that sexual divisions are eternal and unchangeable, and thus can be given names. It is to invoke precisely those figures like Goethe's "eternal feminine" that feminism initially set out to undermine. Absolutely no regard is given to questions of sexual development, transformations in sexuality in childhood, puberty, maturity or old age. No discussion of how socialisation and historical catastrophe might affect this. Instead all of this is ignored in favour of the sovereignty of the persistence of the genital, in its purely fleshly form. After the arguments I had this week I went back and read Firestone's Dialectic of Sex and Mitchell's Feminism and Psychoanalysis - two of the brightest stars in the constellations of the second wave. What I love about these books is their views of nature (and in Firestone's case, where she is most indebted to late Engels, quite polemically) as something utterly dynamic, as a world of constant change, modification, and dialectical force, utterly unrecognisable to Linnaean fixation. This thinking shows up the will to fixate nature - the brutal domination of nature - as that which bourgeois thinking has mistaken for the mastery of nature by an enlightened nature that would lead it to reconciliation. This fixated and fixating view of sexual difference ultimately disregards all questions of sexual development (and decline), and in questions of consciousness it willingly swaps out the sensitivity and nuances of developmental psychology for the stark fruitlessness of evolutionary biology.
7. Amongst responses to the Gender Recognition Act are a set of arguments that have been virally circulating on the internet about how it is set to roll back the victories of the second wave. Most of these arguments are patent nonsense, relying on convincing readers (with no evidence) that legal gender reassignment isn't already possible (the Act would just streamline these processes, and would not require the sign-off of doctors.) But more than this, these arguments often rely on a total revisionism about the gains of the feminist movement. Reading them one might quickly believe that women in the 1970s spent their time arguing for single sex toilets and women's prisons. Meanwhile these arguments have a habit of eliding the work done by many trans* people continuing the best of the struggles of the second wave, in organisations like Sisters Uncut, fighting for better domestic violence services. Similarly on questions of sexual violence these viral internet ventures seem to take a step back. Far from the perspective of the second wave that so often saw press sensationalism around street rapists and unknown attackers as often used as a mask for not dealing with the prevalence of sexual violence in the home and amongst known men, the sensationalist figures have been reinvented as the spectre of a sexually violent man who becomes trans* only to gain access to women. This is not to say that street rapists and the like are not real consequences of patriarchal society that need a feminist response. But it is to say that the rolling back of the perspective that finally after decades won out against the marital exemption for rape into a sort of tabloid sensationalism is a step backwards. And more than this, it is terrifying that this sort of sensationalism is used to justify punishing all trans* people, not least when there is absolutely no evidence that this behaviour is any more prominent in the trans* community.
8. Perhaps what has been most grotesque in the last week is the willingness of people to talk explicitly and aggressively about trans* people's bodies - about bodies they don't know in any sense other than seeing a clothed photograph, and about which they have no real right to speak. This is matched with the cruelty that wants to point to every moment when those bodies might be most uncomfortable, when they might not "pass", when they betray a difficult history or an unfulfilled wish, when they express a neurosis that they try to compensate against or disguise. I have been so upset by how friends' bodies have been spoken about - and all just to try to elicit an angry reaction from them at best and to destroy them at worst.
All of this isn't to say that no conversation should be had. Nor is it to say that that gender is some easy solution (and I challenge you to find a single trans* person who thinks it is.) The point, however, is that at their best theories of gender - in their natural-historical, dialectical elaboration - are capable of saying "well sex isn't that easy or simple either." But the point is really to give some background and hopefully some understanding about what is going on. I know lots of people feel uneasy too and want to have conversations, and that they feel silenced. The best suggestion I have - other than joining in existing discussions, forming reading groups, or getting involved in struggles together - is not to line up behind people like Julia Long, Sheila Jeffreys, Miranda Yardley, Jen Izaakson, and the rest. Strangely their politics of hate wants you to be silenced too - they want to leave the field divided so that their hatred can win out (as it did in London this week.) Similarly, quite a few people in the last week have responded to me by simply denying the violence and effects of transphobic feminisms. I would encourage everyone who says this to go and talk to some trans* people about their effects it has on their lives. Why not just ask them about it? And find out how a discussion with them can happen humanely without all of this shit. This is quite the opposite of organising meetings where the one thing the platform speakers have in common are repeated press claims that trans* women are men - never mind acting all naive afterwards when it causes shit to kick off. It will require some savviness to work out who is involved in what position and why - but what is needed now is to be savvy, and to not think that Julia Long presents the only option for "opening debate" while she in fact closes it down. It is also true that the Gender Rights Act has the potential to affect more people than just trans* people. This really ought not be responded to by publishing outright lies, provocations, and viral content, only to conclude "let's have a comradely debate," by which point the "debate" is already utterly uncomradely.
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It’s Not About the Shape – It’s About the Lie (An investigation into why flat earth hip-hop may seem merely stupid, but might actually be dangerous too: Electric Bugaloo)
Author’s Disclaimer: I’m sure that, like most people, most flat earthers are fine. Most people who rap about the shape of the place we all live on are probably fine. I acknowledge that the two dudes I profile in this investigation are probably the ISIS of your conspiracy movement. If you come across this article, and you’re a regular John or Jane Q. Flat Earther, please understand that your willfully ignorant belief has some truly disgusting expressions and intellectual underpinnings. So, with quite a bit of conscious irony, if you are a “moderate” flat earth truther, I exhort you to denounce your radically anti-Semitic fringe, particularly Eric Dubay. It may be a shitty presumption on my part, but I just assume that even you, hypothetical, humdrum Dale or Erma P. Flat Earther, are the kind of person to constantly post to FacePage that “moderate Muslims” must unceasingly denounce Al-Qaeda. And if, havin’ read through this, you’re the kind of person who’ll accuse me of being a “SJW” because I think promoting Holocaust denial is hugely problematic, eat shit; die mad with stank breath. But, if you’re a hardcore ODD TV or Dubay boy, please come at me, I’ll gladly take whatever you consider lumps. All that said, let’s listen to some real fringe fuckin’ hip-hop, shall we?
               I’ll bet most folks view people who believe the earth isn’t really round as nothing more than loons and larks. That’s how I started. Owing to a strange encounter I had with a feller at a show last winter, I had a picture of flat earth truthers as young, isolated, drunk, white dudes with dreadlocks wearing kneepads over their jeans saying gross things to pretty ginger gals. I was a little worried, but still mostly tickled, to discover that there’s a largish community of believers online. If you don’t get into the weeds of what belief in the flat earth entails, it’s easy to laugh it off as mere ignorant buffoonery, but, whoooooo boy, if you examine it closely, you’re in for one of the wildest, and surprisingly disturbing, rides of your life.
                 I stepped through the looking glass on accident, when I stumbled on this music video, “Cartoon Ball,” by ODD TV. At first, I clowned on it. Of course I did. Did you watch it? Christ. Dude’s shirt says “Never Sleep Again,” and he really looks like he ain’t slept because he’s in the early, still exciting days of a meth bender. I sent this video to friends and shared it on my timeline because I wanted to spread the chuckles. To be fair to ODD TV, I think he’s got legitimate talent. Not just on this track, but also throughout his catalogue, he’s got a catchy flow and his songs show a deft use of samples – for example, in the bluntly titled song, “Dear NASA, Why Are You Lying,” he takes the lyric “Space may be the final frontier, but it’s made in a Hollywood basement” from Red Hot Chili Pepper’s song “Californication,” and using that in a song about how the earth is actually not globe-shaped is, artistically, fairly dope. Not at all what the funky, cock-socked, SoCal, alt-rock, boys had in mind when they wrote the song, but that’s ODD TV’s genius. His video production, likewise, is slick. It’s much slicker than this other flat earther we’re gonna scrutinize in a sec, but one thing these guys share, which, I gotta say, is utterly derivative of almost every other conspiracy theorist with social media accounts, is referencing the Rowdy Roddy Piper flick, They Live. Guys. Give it a moratorium, right now, y’all have made it lazy.  
              Anyway, I got my giggles and moved on, right? Obviously not. After my mirth settled down, I found myself returning to “Cartoon Ball,” and for all my above praise, I wasn’t watching this weird shit again because I was real into the music. Nah, I think it was this lyric in particular: “God created the heavens and the earth / in a verse / but we’re livin’ in a Freemasonic Galaxy.” ODD TV doesn’t get into what he means by that, exactly, in this video – although, he gets into in in his oeuvre, bet your ass on that – because he’s focused mostly on rallying the viewer against NASA.
              But, on repeat viewing, you know, I caught this brief WTF nugget – a what the fugget, if you will: “We follow rapists and murderers / liars, thieves, and sun worshipers / sayin’ we can’t see curvature / ‘cause we’re all too small.” It’s the sun worshippers part that’s the sore thumb, right? Well, get ready for that sore thumb’s equally sore counterpart when ODD TV raps that believers in a spherical planet are “Stuck in the material domain of Satan.”
              Well, little ol’ me, Alice Donkey Boy Croix, was drawn further into the flat earth hip-hop scene by YouTube’s helpful recommendation. Oh, what a twisted Wonderland that turned out to be. But store those what the fuggets away for later use, Beloved Reader, they’ll crash back into pertinence again directly. Presently, we need to turn to how things got soooooo much more goddamned bonkers. The other cat I referenced briefly earlier, his name’s Eric Dubay, and he’s just about the whole rest of the haul of our investigation. So, settle in to peep this video, “Once You Go Flat.”
                Holy. Steaming. Shit. Y’all. Good. God. Damn.
              Right?
              Sorry to spring that diarrhea spray of hippo shit at you without much warning, but I wanted you to be as utterly gob-smacked as I was when Holocaust denial enters into things…and continues to spiral out from there. And just in case THAT was somehow an aberration from his mean, I watched this one. If you watched the first one, you already know to brace yourself, but, I cannot really stress enough that he, whew, he doubles down.
   So, let’s shelve the vegetarian polemic and uh…yeah…that was the most hardcore anti-Semitic thing I’ve ever experienced in musical form. Oh, you too? Neat. Look at us, Gentle Mentals, with all this shit in common!
              So, that video left my jaw on the fuckin’ floor, and that’s when I went over to www.ericdubay.com. I can neither confirm nor deny that visiting this page puts you on any sort of NSA list, but if the NSA is keeping tabs (hello, special agent, how are ya), it maybe should focus some attention on the shit our boy Dubay’s proudly posted here. Red flag it if you ain’t already, you may thank me later. Imagine that! The federales thanking little ol’ me!  
   BTW: we’re “in country” now, so maybe get your tin-foil helmet on.
              A few sick bars and a shocking affinity for the OG Nazis ain’t the only radical thing about our boy Dubay. He moves in circles so fringe that they consider Alex Jones to be part of the “controlled opposition.” Dubay’s even a truther against other flat earth truthers. He goes hard on The Flat Earth Society for being “controlled opposition,” by pointing out the idiocy of their theory for what is really going on with “gravity” on a flat earth, which is that the earth is like a pizza crust tossed continually upwards, so…things don’t really fall, they’re just kind of suspended until the ground catches up to them. Yeah. The idea of controlled opposition is that you get a shill to be a very vocal idiot in order to discredit the more “legitimate” conspiracy investigators who have come too close to the truth. But who controls the controlled opposition? Remember when I told you to remember ODD TV’s reference to the Freemasons? The Sun Worshipers? The Satanists? Dubay says it’s them. He says that both The Flat Earth Society and NASA are chock full of Masons, Masons who are behind these lies. He claims NASA agents – whatever those are – have murdered flat earth truthers to maintain their grip on this elaborate illusion. And, in a series of infographics, he ain’t shy in explicitly linking these nefarious Masons directly to, you saw it, the Jews. He’s one of these New World Order, Jew World Order types. I realized I tossed that off kinda casually – he’s just one of those types – but let me assure you, I don’t do it dismissively. Dubay compares the way this global Jewish cabal runs the world’s affairs to the orchestrated sturm und drang of televised professional wrestling.
              So you gotta wonder why lying about the shape of the earth is so important to our crypto-kosher overlords. I sure as fuck needed to know the answer to that myself, and, like any conspiracy theorists before him, this is where Dubay stumbles somewhat. He’s got 200 proofs for the truth of the flat earth, but he’s less articulate as towards the damnable “why” of it all. As I’ve been able to understand of his position, Eric Dubay believes we’re indoctrinated with the spinning globe model of cosmology, because if the global elite of Freemasonic Zionists can brainwash everybody on such a fundamental level as the ground beneath our feet, they can deceive and control us in any other sinister way they fuck well feel like.  
              Y’all, I’m a great many things. I’m not an astrophysicist, so, to be honest, I’m not really interested in engaging with the specifics of these dudes’ arguments regarding round versus flat, because – you know the Family Guy throwaway joke where Peter’s at the Cineplex helpfully pointing out when somebody in the movie says the movie’s title – to quote Mr. Dubay himself, “It’s not about the shape; it’s about the lie.”
              Before I get deeper into this shit – yeah, you thought you were down the rabbit-hole already – I want to point out that if you want to get all this from the horse’s mouth, the last twenty or so minutes of the two-hour FAQ video on his site is my source for all this. And since getting deeper into this gets pretty heavy, I think we need a bit of a levity break, so, I present a riff on a few screen grabs from that video.
               First of all, it’s hard to tell – among the things I am is poor of vision – it looks like the letter G has been replaced by the number 6 in the phrase “Sacred Geometry. The Great Architect of the Universe. Gravity.” 666 is metal, but in this case you’re using it in a way that’s way too mental to be heaviest, fam. The Jews are Satanists too, remember? Luciferian nonsense is a thing Alex Jones dabbles in also. Second, Pythagoras was the leader of a cult that worshiped numbers. Pythagoras literally had a motherfucker 86ed because he felt that the concept of pi was blasphemous and threatening to him personally as a cult leader. The reason I’m scratching my head is that you might know pi as a pretty foundational concept in calculating the circumference of the globe. Globe. So, if he’s part of a cabal bent on convincing you the world is round, why would he be so violently opposed to that squiggly little Stonehenge-lookin’, 3.14 on to infinitum meanin’, mathematical concept that would support the whole damn thing? Anyway, here’s another.
              I think this is supposed to be an Illuminati thing, but all it proves to me is that many people have fingers, and covering one eye is an easy way to look mysterious and sexy. It’s not like they’re all holding their hands the same way either. If a person were to try to argue that Eric Dubay himself is part of the controlled opposition, I think this could be evidence of “too dumb to be serious.”
              But I wanna get serious again. Back to the investigation. I wanted to know what made this dude tick. Call yourselves Ishmael, because ol’ Dubay became my white whale, only in this version, I think we spear the shit out of Moby Dick. Truly, I believe that in the final portions of that long ass video I’ve been talking about, we see into his core – and unlike the molten core of the round earth we sheeple foolishly believe in – the heart of Eric Dubay is a frozen, Jotunheim-esque, barren fearscape.
              Eric Dubay’s animating impulse is this: a deep, incomprehensible terror that humanity has no purpose in existence. He believes that subscription to the ideas of the Big Bang and subsequent evolution of life on earth via the mechanism of natural selection is subscription to a fundamentally nihilistic outlook; if humanity has no reason – as he sees reason – to be, the crisis in his soul would be too great to bear. And, sure, I get that. But he has not coped well with that adolescent existential angst. If the universe is a vast and vastly complicated place, it’s a scary place to be at the fringe of, so, to bridge the rift of this Lovecraftian horror inside himself, he’s put himself at the center of debunking a conspiracy to shroud our planet’s central location in the universe; our planet’s non-rotating position, which is to say a position of stability. Stability. Think about how comforting a concept that is. Purpose. Stability. Simplicity. These are not abnormal desires, but our boy Dubay’s gone about attaining ‘em in an abnormally toxic fashion. And he’s certainly doing his damnedest to create the fellowship he craves though all his media outreach. Can’t blame a feller for not wanting to feel alone…but when Holocaust denial is such a big part of your identity, it’s – to put it politely – extremely fuckin’ troublesome that you want others to believe as you do.
              Dear reader, Gentle Mental, “Hypocrite Lecteur,”* if you’re wondering why the fuck any of this matters, this here’s that part of the article; buckle the fuck up. I believe that never before in human history has the battle against propaganda been more vital to the survival of the species. I’m typing this on Sunday, October 15, 2017, and the last headline I read was about Kim Jong threatening to bomb Guam if Trump don’t shut the fuck up about him on Twitter. We’ve got fucking lunatics at the trigger; we’ve got so much evidence that the Kremlin orchestrated the most effective “hearts and minds” campaign of the internet age; we’ve got tactics of division being employed by the most cynical and unhinged people of influence. So why should this flat earth shit matter? We’ve got all that more important shit I listed, right? Because flat earth’s your gateway conspiracy. Pretty soon, you’re hip-deep in the most virulent Protocols of the Elders of Zion bullshit.** Some conspiracy theorists have the…decency’s not the right word, so let’s start over. Some conspiracy theorists are crypto-anti-Semitic. OBVIOUSLY not our boy Dubay. Lemme quote from his song “Blood Rituals,” “You are blind, so fuck what you say / I’ll expose the flat earth and hail Hitler all day.” That’s so obviously dangerous, and the ideas of flat earth and anti-Semitism are so clearly linked, that we shouldn’t need to dwell, so I’ll move us along with this tossed out aside: fuck you, Richard Spencer, for ruining Tiki Torches, but thank you for being conveniently illustrative of the point that being a ringleader for Nazi sympathizers does in fact correlate to assholes in the street beating people and murdering them indiscriminately with cars.
 *Editor’s Note: Goddamnit, DB! After I chewed your ass for quoting Yeats that last time, you have the nerve to bring this Baudelaire shit to the table? I want a picture of Spider Man on my desk TOMORROW!!
 **Author’s Note: For an wonderfully illuminating examination of the history and influence of Protocols of the Elders of Zion, I highly recommend the July 27, 2017 episode of a podcast called Knowledge Fight. (http://knowledgefight.libsyn.com/size/25/?search=Protocols+of+the+elders+of+zion) Hosts Jordan and Dan do a thorough job of linking this fraudulent document DIRECTLY to Alex Jones’ framing of his favorite nemesis, the Globalist bogeymen, and even David Icke’s Reptilians. Do yourself a favor and dive into this podcast whole hog.
                Provided that even one fewer gullible cocksucker buys into the dangerous worldviews of somebody like ODD TV, Alex Jones, or Eric Dubay, I will deem all efforts to expose their nonsense worthwhile, valid, and necessary. I don’t believe I’m virtue signaling when I speak out in order to shed light on hucksters’ efforts to spread dangerous racial, religious, or national divisions. It isn’t trivial to examine how those divisions may be spread insidiously as the necessary expression of these ideas; symptoms of the cancer, boils on the ass of the corpus scientia. Alex Jones is right about at least one thing: we are fighting an info war. He’s on the wrong side of it, to be sure, but it’s the same sort of info war Mike Pence fought in when he performed his indignant pageant at the ball game. And I don’t think that in speaking against any of this nonsense I’m beating a dead horse. And I believe that speech is action. If I reiterate a point, it is at least my humble intention to bring new nuance. I believe that the one person who was teetering on the fence but saw the truth of these bonkers narratives could be the one person who might have otherwise been the next to take a gun to something like a DC pizza joint to find out if interdimensional, shape shifting, child-molesting, psychic vampires run the government. Or do something so much more tragic in the name of bringing down whatever conspiracy it is they’ve been taken in by.
              This’s the rock I reckon I’ll die on, should anybody respectfully disagree. Thank you for your time, Gentle Mentals, friends, fiends, and foes alike. It’s time to pray.
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rook-seidhr · 7 years
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I'm at the point where I can't see how focus on the Israel Palestine question re: Chicago Dyke March is anything other than derailment. I'd also like to say that perception that pro-Palestine sentiment here is being silenced *as a general trend* very much does not sit well with me because I believe the silencing to be happening the other way around, and think this is in fact a longstanding destructive feature of discourse surrounding the Palestinian cause. Also, I believe most of those engaging in defense of a pro-Palestinian liberation stance right now mean well but do not understand how much its framing decenters actual Palestinian welfare. I will elaborate on both counts. I'm agitated from all sides about this and I can't do brevity so bear with me I guess. First, the derailment. It's of particularly troubling sort because it falls into a larger pattern of whataboutism where what *should be* a case of clearcut antisemitism cannot ever be identified and unilaterally condemned by the left without also being hashed and rehashed in exculpatory ways "because Israel." This is ESPECIALLY troubling when: - There is a persistent phenomenon that's almost like a lefty inversion of the concept Israeli exceptionalism. Like a reverse- exceptionalism, whereby discussion of Israel's transgressions are held to singular standards of scrutiny to the exception of other nations/populations with comparable and/or far more deplorable histories and actions and crises. And in that I am including all the unspeakable injustice and destruction the larger MENA region has wrought to Palestinians, and how accountability seems no concern there, in part *because* of eternal return to obsessive, unilateral focus on Israel as the central Palestinian issue. - Cases of anti Muslim bigotry aren't held to the same scrutiny. The fact that people will demur about antisemitism but not anti-Muslim bigotry betrays a terrible lack of self awareness re: double standards. I mean, if you want to go 'head and make weak arguments about how religious symbols are politically wielded, I'm going to have to start wondering why you aren't referencing the much more appalling and deadly scope of human rights abuses committed under Muslim banners whenever the question of banning Muslim symbols comes up. Which would be a clearly terrible argument, but maybe it's worth reflecting why the same argument suddenly makes sense when it comes to Jewish symbols. - Casual antisemitism often manifests as (among other things) conflations between Jewish symbols or beliefs / various Zionist ones / various Israeli nationalist ones. We ALREADY know the Dyke March incident to be an iteration of this problem. Now think about how fucked up what happened next is: the ban of a Jewish symbol at a public event based on a bigoted conflation is called out as anti-Semitic. Then, as a kind of precondition for defense against or acknowledgement of such anti-Semitism, people on the left apparently see fit to hold Jewish people accountable, individually and as a group, for *the same bigoted conflations targeting them*, basically needing Jewish people to declare their politics and/or unilaterally renounce Zionism -- essentially acting as gatekeepers despite being outsiders operating from apparently rather reductive and narrow presumptions of Zionist politics, since they somehow have the arrogance of assuming they understand and can judge what any given Jewish person's Zionist adherence entails and means based on the label alone??? Who the fuck else does this? Who the fuck else has to go through this? Do we have to establish and approve of the political and ideological leanings of Muslims in order to defend them against anti-Muslim bigotry, or do we engage in whataboutism re: the scourge of political Islamism in the Middle East to determine if Muslims have the right to display their religious symbols in the west? Now the Palestine thing. And necessary conversations. And silencing and whatnot. Even points that are so reasonable and evident they may well be tautologies by now, like 'Palestinians are entitled to basic human rights', bear a different weight when made in these contexts. They don't exist in vacuum, but carry the shadow of a discourse that already has huge issues with privileging particularly anti-Zionist or anti-Israel Palestinian advocacy no matter how tangential to the conversation, and never mind what else is minimized and derailed in the process. I am not doubting the sincerity and concern of my friends who are struggling to express pro-Palestine sentiment while being confused by hostility right now, but I would urge a more thorough consideration of the relative space taken up by the respective conversations thus far, and to not confuse long overdue push-back from folks who have every reason to be frustrated and sick of derailment and semantic squabbles over definitions of Zionism every time anti-semitism comes up. If it seems like there is rejection from the left when you want to assert a pro-Palestinian stance here, it is less likely to be because people have a problem with pro-Palestinian politics as such, and more likely to be because there is a salient point regarding how cavalier antisemitism already is today and how these patterns of derailment every damn time end up gatekeeping attempts to counter an insidious kind of racism that can and must be discussed without forcing marginalized people to jump through the Israel Blame Game hoops to defend their humanity. The Israel Palestine thing needs to stop hijacking conversations about antisemitism. Palestinian welfare does not suffer if people refuse to derail conversations about anti-semitism, but conversations about anti-semitism certainly suffer when what-about-Palestine pops up. And that's all besides the fact that no matter how well-meaning, this Palestine-specific whataboutism does not contribute anything appreciable to Palestinian welfare and is so oblivious in some ways it's kind of heartbreaking to try to navigate through. I firmly believe that the kneejerk way the Palestinian Cause is held up like a trump card whenever convenient and the infuriating reverse exceptionalism with which the conflict is treated has been a firm factor in prolonging the crisis and exacerbating Palestinian suffering. I'm struggling to find the words for why it troubles me so much to see all these conversations stuck on questions of whether anti Zionism is anti Semitism because don't forget Israel and what about accountability for Palestine. Please. Please. Please try to understand that an anti-Zionist pro-Palestine liberation stance is not one that needs championing in the left, that nobody fucking lets us forget Israel when we try to talk about Palestine, and nobody stops talking about Palestine when anyone mentions Israel, and it hasn't done shit for diaspora or territory Palestinians except turn us into a handy slogan. Establishing a stance of basic advocacy for the rights and welfare of the Palestinian people is not what the discourse lacks, it is what the discourse needs to *move past* already. Everybody is well-versed and comfortable with the Israel Blame Game-- it drowns out and supersedes everything else, and it's everything else that Palestinian advocacy desperately needs. This is something that frustrates me to no end because it's not reducible to something like Israeli conduct being dealt with disproportionate scrutiny in the left *as such*, but as a function of urgency and relative space. When Israel overshadows discourse about Palestinian welfare even though it is Arabs who are responsible for the most staggering and horrific ongoing Palestinian abuses, we have a problem. And it can never be talked about or addressed because only Israel's actions are viewed with agency and significance, and attributing Palestinian suffering to anything else is instantly condemned as insidious detraction. So you can see how it is frustrating to go through the whole 'is pro-palestinian anti-zionism anti-semitic' rigmarole when it is so often a distraction from more functional questions of Palestinian welfare. Fact: There are kinds of anti-Zionism that are pro-Palestinian rights and that are also anti-Semitic. Fact: There are kinds of anti-Zionism that are pro-Palestinian rights and that are not anti-Semitic. Fact: There are kinds of Zionism that are consistent with upholding the rights and freedoms of Palestinian Arabs, and, fact: there are kinds that are categorically not. Educated opinion: Not only is anti-Zionism the established and normative stance across most of the Middle East, but, if we're being honest, probably the most prevalent and established type of anti-Zionism in the discourse is that which engages in solid pro-Palestinian advocacy while also falling into both gross and casual anti-Semitism. This is definitely the case in the broader discourse on the issue in the Middle East, and what's more, there is next to no self-awareness of the anti-Semitic assumptions, myths, and bigotries, not to mention the historical revisionism, threading popular and political anti-Zionism in the MENA region and popular Palestinian and Lebanese culture as well. This is a problem, and one that will never be addressed as long as pro-Palestinianism and anti-Semitism are presumed to be wholly non-overlapping binaries by well-meaning leftists. It is both possible and necessary to acknowledge and mount critique of anti-semitic elements in pro-Palestine discourse while maintaining Palestinian advocacy. Acknowledging anti-Semitism in the discourse is not going to undermine the Palestinian cause. Again, people don't need to be perfect moral agents to justify a defense of their humanity. Educated opinion: Leftist discourse centering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is overall entrenched in rigid, binary thinking and overwhelmingly leans pro-Palestine but in unfortunately too-basic, reductive ways. It already has an ideological rigidity problem. The discourse is such that to be pro-Palestine is to be above all transcendentally righteous: the lines of oppression and blame are clear and brook no further complexity; it is the cause no reasonable person can deny or fail to center in any conversation, and Palestinian advocacy is almost synonymous with condemnation for the Israeli crimes against the Palestinian people and aught else. It is troubled with issues of allegiance and abstraction-- maintaining certain principled stances re: the Cause is treated as an almost inviolable tenet for anybody who can claim to care about Palestine, despite the fact that the central narrative of the Cause pits the immediate welfare and prosperity of generations of living, breathing Palestinians against the memory of a Palestine that has not existed for decades and an abstract future promise of a right to return to a place that never again will be. The narrative may have once been in service of the people, but it has not been so in a long time. And it is only the narrative that is treated with sanctity by the most vocal champions of Palestine, and if it comes at the expense of Palestinian lives like in Yarmouk, so be it. Palestinian advocacy is more about condemning Israel than it is about supporting Palestine, and that is the problem. It's beginning to feel like despair, seeing how pro-Palestinian discourse is framed in terms of the questions of Zionism and anti-Zionism over and again, constantly centering and recentering the question of Palestinian welfare as a foil to Israeli aggression in broad nationalistic and/or existentialist terms, assuming unilateral causes, ascribing agency very selectively to regional actors, brooking no interrogation of Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim agency in the conflict, and obsessively resistant to moving past the past. It's been decades and Palestinians continue to suffer large-scale crises in basic resources, public health, trauma, and disenfranchisement, and they have largely been allowed to persist in the name *of* Palestine, at the hands of Arab regimes that shrug off all accountability in Israel's direction, though for fifty years diaspora Palestinians in the larger Levant have been purely at the mercy of the Arab states housing them. We do not need to hear tired pro-liberation stances when it is those very stances that are used to justify keeping us holed up in Lebanese and Syrian refugee camps, stateless, in suspended animation, without civil rights or wealth or upwards mobility, dying slowly of poverty and deplorable living conditions and isolation if we're lucky, and if we're unlucky, until a guy like Assad comes along and murders, maims, starves, and makes refugees out of a whole city of us-- and yet it is in the name of liberating Palestine that Assadist discourse proliferates, being anti-Israel, and Palestine's catastrophe is only and ever subsumed into the crimes of Israel and not of those of Syria or Lebanon or Assad or Hamas or the PA or Fatah or the GCC states or anybody else. When I want to talk about Palestinian advocacy, I want to talk about Assad and the nearly 200,000 Palestinians in Yarmouk camp that are now dead or gone or starving under siege and I want to talk about how the Lebanese state has made pariahs and a lost people out of *generations* of diaspora Palestinians practically quarantined in refugee camps because of petty sectarian concerns and I want to talk about the Palestinian political elite grievously frittering away resources and opportunities that could have prevented significant Palestinian suffering and death because of political feuds and a reckless privileging of a jihadi cause over popular welfare-- but I cannot, because the justifications, distractions, conspiracy theories loop incessantly back to Israel. Which cements *my* concern that these conversations are not really *about* Palestinian welfare at all.
Hiba Bint Zeinab, a Palestinian-Lebanese woman living in the US (reposted by permission)
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lesbeet · 7 years
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Hey! so i know that you are pro-palestine, but i also know that you have a lot of experience around people who aren't, so i was wondering why they think that anti-israel people are anti-semitist? because i'm palestinian, thus my land was taken away, and i'm not even allowed inside of israel myself (and if i can't go to a country idk why i should support it). But, I was wondering what a good argument to combat accusations of anti semitism would be? Thanks dude
the reason that a lot of (mainstream, liberal, usually western) jewish people believe that anti-israel sentiments are inherently antisemitic is because of a combination of real antisemitism and of brainwashing done by israel and the jewish community at large
a lot of mainstream jewish kids, especially in the us, for example, grow up learning that israel is the jewish homeland and that we all should strive to make aliyah (relocate to israel). they use examples of real worldwide antisemitism as well as pro-israel, anti-arab/anti-palestinian propaganda to convince jews that israel is really the only safe place for us. we’re taught to support and love israel, even though many of us have never even been there.
we’re also taught that anti-israel sentiments are antisemitic! that people saying unsavory things about israel are lying and spreading propaganda because everyone hates jews. so there are jews who genuinely believe that being anti-israel is antisemitic. i’m not trying to defend them or justify that mindset because of course it’s wrong and so harmful, but to answer your question, a lot of jewish people think that because that’s what we’re taught.
another issue is that sometimes (not nearly as often as people claim, but it does happen enough) people DO use the cover of anti-zionism in order to push antisemitic rhetoric, whether knowingly or not. some anti-zionist rhetoric is antisemitic in nature, and jews who call that out are right in doing so. but a lot of the time, most of the time, it’s just that jews are taught/brainwashed to take anti-israel rhetoric and beliefs as personal attacks on jewish people as a whole.
as far as combating accusations of antisemitism, it really depends on the situation. if you’re just seeing a jewish person say as a blanket statement that anti-zionism is antisemitism, then if you feel comfortable doing so you should absolutely explain to them the realities of your life as a palestinian, and the hardships that you and other palestinian people face directly at the hands of the israeli state.
but if a jewish person is saying “hey, this specific thing you said is antisemitic for such and such reason” then i would take a second to try and take in and understand what they’re saying. if it’s something that insinuates that all jews are somehow responsible for israel’s human rights violations, for example, that’s antisemitic. equating all jews worldwide with israel in general is antisemitic. 
but yeah i think honestly like...you don’t owe zionists anything. you absolutely don’t. but in my honest opinion the best way to handle a situation like this is with at least some small degree of understanding. most of the jews you encounter who are pro-israel have been fed lies and propaganda their entire lives. so to approach the situation with the intent to educate, as you seem to show in your question, is the best way to move forward.
i don’t know if this answered your question or if this made sense, let me know if you need clarification on anything
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savedbyreason · 7 years
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Contending with Dan Arel
I’d like to return from my long departure by contending with Dan Arel’s arguments for justifying punching nazis. As a former neo-nazi myself (who now identifies as a classical liberal and a secular humanist) I feel like I have a better understanding of how nazis think and about their ideology than most people talking about this subject right now, so I feel it is appropriate for me to throw my two cents into the marketplace of ideas.
On January 20th of this year the founder of the Alt. Right movement Richard Spencer was punched in the face by an ANTIFA (anti-fascist) member while giving an interview with an Australian broadcasting crew during Donald Trumps presidential inauguration. This assault sparked a debate about whether or not it was ethical to punch Nazis. Dan Arel, a liberal author and blogger, championed the movement that was justifying punching Nazis, and he contended with my colleagues and friends like Peter Boghossian and Lalo Dagach on Twitter who defended reason and secular American values.
Now, I will be contending with Dan’s arguments found in his blog “Danthropology” titled: “Should we be okay with punching Nazi’s?” and that he argued for vocally in his interview with Lalo Dagach on the Lalo Dagach Podcast on YouTube. Before you read this article, please listen to the Lalo Dagach podcast episode with Dan and read Dan’s aforementioned blog article for more context. I have provided the links to each below:
Dan’s blog: http://www.patheos.com/blogs/danthropology/2017/01/okay-punching-nazis/
Lalo Dagach Podcast: http://youtu.be/MQHP3FYSBl8
Allow me to begin to unpack this mess by listing Dan’s five main arguments and then by contending with each one individually.
1. Nazis advocate for genocide.
2. Anyone that’s not a nazi but also advocates for genocide should also be punched.
3. The victim should be a person with a significant amount of power and influence.
4. Punching stops people who advocate for genocide from the pursuit of extending their power and influence because it strikes fear into them.
5. Slippery slope arguments fail because punching people who are advocating genocide is self defense or acting in the defense of others.
After contending with Dan’s first point, I could wrap this whole thing up and call it a night. Because Dan’s entire argument fails when you take into account that most modern American Neo-Nazis do not advocate for genocide. This may be shocking to most readers, but it’s the truth none-the-less. When I was a skinhead I didn’t believe in racial genocide of any kind. And most of my comrades at the time didn’t either. In fact, the most common belief among modern racist skinheads or any individuals that identify as neo-Nazi's or national socialists/white nationalists believe the white race and it's culture is under threat of extinction and though violence may be necessary to defend their race and culture, the use of genocide is not. They believe the reason people believe they advocate for genocide is because they are just zionist lies told to make Hitler and national socialism look bad.
To Dan’s credit, he admitted that there’s a disconnect and that he could be misusing the word nazi as someone who advocates for the genocide of minorities. While it’s true that there are nazis who do advocate for ethnic genocide, they are on what I refer to as “the fringe within a fringe”. They are usually uneducated, unorganized independent skinheads that pose no real threat to society because they spend most of their lives either in prison or in poverty. They have no power or influence in the world.
But, this is not the mainstream Alt. Right “nazism” of people like Richard Spencer we are seeing today. (Some in the Alt. Right movement lean more towards the cultural libertarian side than they do the white nationalist side of the Alt. Right spectrum, as described in greater depth below, like Milo Yiannopoulos for example). I think to better understand how nazism is different today than it was in Germany back in the 1930’s and 40’s we need to examine what made nazism nazism then, and then examine how nazism in America has evolved into what we see today and examine the similarities and differences from it’s foreign predecessor.
When Hitler joined the very small German Workers Party back in the 1920’s, he added the term “National Socialist” to the party name so that it became the “National Socialist German Workers Party”, the NSDAP, or “Nazis” for short. The party was anti-democratic and deeply fascist, they were German nationalists, white supremacist and white socialists, (“White socialism” is a system where only whites benefited from the fascist-socialist state that owned all wealth and property that in Hitler’s Germany was private in name only). Neo-Nazis today will also deny that there even was a holocaust at all. That the “Final Solution” was simply Hitlers plan to expel all the Jews and all enemies of the reich from all Nazi occupied lands. That the pictures we see of thousands of frail twisted bodies frozen in horror were simply prisoners the Nazis could no longer afford to feed or treat for disease. That the holocaust is a conspiracy that the U.S. and Zionist leaders manufactured to establish a piece of land in Palestine as the state of Israel once again. Why would someone advocating genocide as a Nazi waste so much time and energy trying to deny the very genocide the Nazis are known for committing in the 1940’s? Unless, they believed genocide was wrong and that someone was trying to make Hitler and the Nazis out to be worse than they really were.
Ever since George Lincoln Rockwell started the American Nazi Party in the 1960’s, nazism in the U.S. has been evolving into something that can inter-grade with American politics better than the fascist post imperialist German Nazism of Hitler and his NSDAP. Dropping “Sieg Heil” and replacing it with “White Power” and limiting public display of the swastika were the early American Neo-Nazis first attempts at recasting the group’s image as a legitimate political party in the U.S. They were white nationalists like the original Nazis, but they denied the holocaust, did not advocate genocide, they promoted democracy over fascism and white capitalism over white socialism. David Duke of the KKK was a former American Nazi party member, as was William Pierce who founded the National Alliance and who wrote the Turner Diaries.
Now, in today’s political atmosphere, libertarian conservatism and American Neo-Nazism have clashed, evolving to inter-grate ever more into today’s political spectrum, into the hybrid known currently as the “Alt. Right” or as I call them, “Nazi Lite”. It’s the economic ideals of social libertarianism and a democracy with limited government, (which is the polar opposite of Hitlers economy), paired with white nationalism. As we are starting to see, the word “Nazi” defines a wide range of ideologies that are often conflicting ones. So, as Dan alluded to, his choice of the word Nazi as one that represents a person who advocates genocide was a poor one.
Richard Spencer, founder of the “Alt. Right” himself has never publicly advocated for genocide. As Dan said in the podcast with Lalo, Richard’s website hosted an article written by someone who was musing about whether it was justifiable to commit genocide against minorities, the very minorities that were trying to “commit genocide against whites”, in self defense. But, this is hardly enough to prove Richard Spencer is advocating for, or even believes in, genocide.
Now, while Spencer is a white nationalist, anti-Semitic and opposes gay marriage, he rejects white supremacy and slavery and believes that whites are under threat of extinction and that a “peaceful ethnic cleansing” will save it. In comparison, the original Nazis believed the white race was better than all others and that it needed a strong leader with all the political and economic power to run the white state. Today, the “Alt. Right” or the “Nazi Lite” movement believe the white race isn’t better, but never-the-less is under threat of extinction and must separate from other races to survive and be run by a limited democracy with a free market economy.
Before I move onto the rest of Dan’s points, as I said before, I could end this article now and still have successfully refuted Dan’s main argument. But I will continue as I feel this kind of faulty reasoning needs to be fully addressed and taken down intellectually so we can stifle the bad ideas coming from both the far left and the far right and replace them with good ones.
Moving onto Dan’s next point: “Anyone that’s not a nazi but also advocates for genocide should also be punched.” Dan took this position during the Lalo Dagach podcast and it is obviously Dan’s attempt at rationalizing his position and being fair. But, I missed his blog “Should we be okay with punching Jihadists”. So, his sentiment, to be fair, is lost on me.
Dan’s third point: “The victim should be a person with a significant amount of power and influence.” Dan also made this point on the Lalo Dagach podcast. And all I can say is that the people that have high positions of power and influence in the Alt. Right and Neo-Nazi movements are these movements intellectuals. These people aren’t the unorganized and uneducated “fringe within a fringe” crazies that yell “kill the Jews” while assaulting minorities and homosexuals in rural America. Many are highly educated, and they are expecting to be assaulted by some SHARP (Skinhead Against Racial Prejudice) or ANTIFA gang member and they know just how to make an assault on them work in their favor. In fact, they are hoping to be punched by a far leftist, so they can fuel their “white genocide” and “white victim” narratives by uploading videos of themselves and fellow Nazi’s being assaulted onto YouTube.
The next point Dan made was: “Punching stops people who advocate for genocide from the pursuit of extending their power and influence because it strikes fear into them.” To address this point, I guess I would refer back to my contention with Dan’s last point that punching them empowers their self-victimization. Even if it weren’t true, and that punching people that advocate genocide in fact did scare them enough to stop them from sharing their ideas, that is not the world I want to live in. Nor does any other rationally sane person that doesn’t want to live in a fascist state that confronts bad ideas with fear and violence. Isn’t that the world liberals like Dan Arel are fighting against? Dan celebrates Spencer’s assault in his blog, writing that Spencer even hired bodyguards because he feels uncomfortable in public now. But, should we be celebrating the fact that we scared someone in the marketplace of ideas out of an unreasonable position, no matter how unreasonable their ideas are? Shouldn’t the marketplace of ideas be a place where we combat bad ideas with good ones?
Dan’s final point: “Slippery slope arguments fail because punching people who are advocating genocide is self defense or acting in defense of others.” Do we justify our active behaviors that we find contemptuous in others simply because we are acting in self defense? Wouldn’t that make us hypocrites? In his blog, Dan wrote this about slippery slope arguments:
“Nazism is an ideology based on white supremacy and the eradication, through genocide, of nonwhites (and many others). A Christian, for example, can believe an atheist is evil for not believing in their god and punch them. Their action, however, is unfounded. They punched an atheist based on an appeal to their emotions.
We know Nazism is evil. We know their goals, we know where their ideology leads. If you punch a Nazi, especially if you’re one of those marginalized and threatened by their ideology, you’re acting in self-defense. Even if you’re a white person punching a Nazi, you’re acting in the defense of others.
So the slippery slope analogy fails immediately here.”
According to Dan, punching a Nazi isn’t an appeal to one’s emotions, but because we know what Nazis believe and we have seen what they’ve done in history, we have all the justification we need to punch them. Following this logic, because Christians used to slaughter pagans and non-believers, and their holy texts still can be used to justify such acts of religious terror, we should go around punching highly influential Christians too. And are we really defending ourselves from someone if they aren’t acting on their belief and therefore actually threatening us in any real way? Wouldn’t that be defending ourselves from “pre-crime”? I don’t know about Dan, but I don’t want to live in a dystopian world where Tom Cruise is crashing through my window and arresting me for something I may do in the future. I believe in the American value of free speech and the freedom to believe or advocate for whatever you want. And, when and if you cross the line from belief into action, well, we have policemen and judges to deal with crimes that have actually been committed.
Before I wrap this up, there were a few other things Dan said that I would also like to address here. In his interview with Lalo, Dan had a glass half full optimism that these assaults on people who advocate genocide with a significant amount of power and influence will be carried out perfectly, meeting the exact criteria Dan spoke about during the podcast or that we as a society collectively deemed the correct criteria for assaulting these people, that is just starry eyed optimism. I instead, and regretfully, see things unfolding much differently. I think you’d see a huge spike in homicides, hate crimes, innocent bystanders such as “formers” like me who may still have an old racist or Nazi tattoo they haven’t removed or covered yet like a swastika being assaulted, behavior that Dan himself justified when he said:
“Having a Nazi symbol like a swastika on your shoulder means you identify with Nazism and therefore a person with that tattoo should be punched.”
I think you’d see a rise in overzealous teens start down a road of recidivism in our corrections system. You’d see all kinds of negative effects on society I think Dan is ignoring to make his points.
Lastly, Dan brought up the 80’s punk scene on the Lalo Dagach podcast and talked about white supremacists and skinheads showing up to punk shows causing trouble for the punk kids who grew up opposing Nazis because of this infamy during the 80’s punk scene. I’m assuming he brought up this personal anecdote to show us how disruptive Nazis can be on a society and on a culture, but I wasn’t sure why or how that strengthened his position? As a fan of punk and someone who lived in East Los Angeles during the 80’s punk scene, I know quite well about the disturbance skins created during this time in punk rock history. This is when the anti-racist and anti-fascist SHARP gangs were born. Gangs that were and still are just as violent and disruptive. Those are not times or ways we want to adopt for how we behave in the marketplace of ideas.
Dan wrote in his blog:
“I want to make this simple. A fist to the head is still the moral high ground when you’re punching someone advocating for genocide.
If you’re not a Nazi, you have the moral high ground.”
This sounds, to me, like virtue signaling. He does not give any evidence or arguments to support that statement. He just says we need to make them afraid to share their ideas. And as I said before, fear and violence should not be welcome in the marketplace of ideas. We need to combat bad ideas with better ones. With good ones.
To Dan’s credit, he admits peaceful rational discourse is still needed and that 9.9 times out of 10 he is non-violent. But I hope, if he reads this, he will see that not only is he wrong in assuming all Nazis advocate for ethnic genocide, but that we also need to give people their right to believe and promote whatever they want to in America without assaulting them. And I hope he will see that once you don’t, and you assault someone for their ideas, you become the authoritarian fascist monster you are against.
Be Fearless. Be Free.
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newsnigeria · 5 years
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Check out New Post published on Ọmọ Oòduà
New Post has been published on http://ooduarere.com/news-from-nigeria/world-news/boris-johnson-brexit-deep-state/
Boris Johnson, Brexit and the Deep State
by Nick Griffin for Ooduarere viaThe Saker Blog
Nick Griffin, a life-long opponent of the European Union and former Member of the European Parliament, explains why – after three years of believing that the rulers of Britain would block Brexit, he now believes it is more likely than not to be delivered.
Are the British people really going to get Brexit? For years, the answer given by well-informed realists has had to be ‘No!’ The UK’s ruling elite was so thoroughly Europhile that they would do whatever it took to block the will of the British people, and Brussels would go along with this deceit, just as they did when the French, the Dutch and the Irish were sold out to the EU by their own masters.
But today I’m going to tell you that it is now more likely than not that Brexit WILL happen. Indeed, assuming the new Boris Johnson regime manages to cling on to power, or is forced into a general election in which Johnson reaches some sort of deal with Nigel Farage, it is now virtually guaranteed.
Of course, there is a faint possibility that the whole Johnson business is a giant game of three-dimensional chess, and that he’s running an elaborate scam with no intention of getting Britain out. But, realistically, if that was the plan, there would be absolutely no purpose in delaying such a betrayal, still less in raising so many expectations.
To encourage and then dash such hopes would be ludicrously self-defeating, so we have to assume that Johnson and Co are serious and that – barring a series of events outside of their control, they WILL deliver Brexit.
So what has changed? Has the Europhile British elite suddenly had a change of heart and decided to do the decent thing by the people who pay their inflated salaries?
Of course not. Leopards don’t change their spots. But, in the case of the UK elite, it was always divided into two leopards, with very different spots. One of them, for years now the stronger animal, was blue with yellow, spots – a thoroughly European beast.
The colours of the, until recently, smaller animal are harder to discern. At first glance, they could be seen to resemble the American flag although, of course, that’s just part of the camouflage. Look closer and the thing’s coat actually looks more like a mass of intertwined dollar signs and Israeli flags!
Even within the USA, opinion has been divided on Britain’s membership of the European Union. Obama, for example, more or less ordered the Brits to vote to Remain – a factor in the decision of quite a few of them to vote to Leave! The neo-cons, by contrast, have become much more hostile to Brussels – particularly since the EU started to display alarming degrees of sympathy for the Palestinians.
It wasn’t always like that. During the Cold War, the US elite was more or less unanimously in favour of British membership of the EU, which right from the start was consistently promoted by the CIA as a block to balance the Soviet Union.
When the Communist regime collapsed in 1989, the US power elite gradually shifted its position on the EU. It moved from fervent support to a sort of agnostic, nothing to do with us boredom. But then it gradually became clear that the European Union was steadily becoming the pawn of the German industrial complex.
Even worse, the Germans were beginning to cosy up to Russia. Within just a few years, the combination of German manufacturing, the European market and Russia’s raw materials were clearly presenting a future threat to the global hegemony of Wall Street, the Federal Reserve and the American military-industrial complex.
On top of this, the in-built liberal-socialist majority within the EU was making it an increasingly large stumbling block to the globalist privatisation free-for-all favoured by the ultra-capitalist ideology promoted by the extremely influential followers of Ayn Rand.
Franco-German moves to create a European Army were seen as a challenge to NATO and to its Stateside leadership, and only served to strengthen the arguments of the anti-EU faction within the US elite.
All this led a significant section of the US Deep state to move towards hostility to the European Union, and to put in place measures to undermine it. From about 2008, this included the relentless media promotion (and, no doubt, funding) of dissident, Euro-sceptic political movements, particularly UKIP in Britain and the Five Star Movement in Italy.
Extremely well-funded globalist and neo-con think tanks, particularly the Henry Jackson Society and the London-based Policy Exchange, began to organise. Their mission – to lay the theoretical groundwork for a globalist, economically liberal, Atlanticist faction within British politics to challenge the pro-EU majority.
To cut a long story short, that faction has just grabbed control of the British ship of state! The Europhile elite have not changed their minds, the highly honed survival instinct of the British Conservative party, which has made it the oldest political party in the world, has simply handed the reins of power to a different bunch of politicians, in hock to a different foreign power. The UK just lurched even further out of the orbit of the Brussels bureaucrats and even closer to the Anglo-Zionist Empire.
Johnson and his gang really do appear committed to delivering Brexit, but before those who voted for it in the first place get too excited, it has to be said that, in delivering the letter of what the people voted for, this bunch will go on to drive a coach and horses through the spirit of that vote.
Because the British people voted Brexit fundamentally in a collective cry of anger and pain over being turned into marginalised outsiders in their own country. Brussels rule was conflated not just with losing our traditional weights and measures, but with the destruction of the old industries – fishing, coal, steel, ship-building – and the devastation of the working class communities that relied on them.
And, of course, with mass immigration, including that from former British colonies in the Third World, an influx which if anything was slowed down by the more recent arrival of generally far more assimilable East Europeans, courtesy of the EU.
On top of that was all the unease of millions of normal people over the political elite’s Gaderene rush to embrace social ultra-liberalism, in particular dripping wet law and order policies and a mania for LGBTQ+ triumphalism. Relentless newspaper headlines about crackpot rulings by the European Court of Justice led to ‘Europe’ getting the blame for a breakdown in law and order and in traditional justice.
Finally, with the majority of the political class urging people to vote to Remain, voting to Leave became a way of punishing the political elite, not just in Brussels, but in Westminster as well.
And yet, looking at the new Boris Johnson cabinet, and listening to his first few speeches as new Prime Minister, it is already all too clear that, while we are going to get Brexit, it certainly will not be the Brexit that the majority of Brits thought they were voting for!
To illustrate this, let’s take a brief, non-exhaustive look at some of the key players in the Johnson regime.
Let’s start with the man himself, noting the speed with which he spoke out about his pride in his partial Turkish Muslim and east European Jewish ancestry and the way in which, if ‘Islamophobia’ or ‘anti-Semitism’ rear their heads, he automatically finds himself thinking in terms of those ancestral loyalties, rather than what is good for Britain – as the British people are surely entitled to insist on in their Prime Minister.
Then, in one of his final campaign speeches, Johnson told the LGBT+ Conservatives (the tautology neatly sums up the state of the party and, more generally, Britain’s ruling political and media classes) that he has their back:
“I will continue to champion LGBT+ equality, get tough on hate crime and ensure that we break down barriers to a fairer society,” Johnson said, according to the group.
“We must do more to ensure that trans rights are protected and those who identify as trans or intersex are able to live their lives with dignity,” he continued, noting that he was one of the first senior party leaders to support same-sex marriage.
Following his meeting with the queen to officially accept the premiership, Johnson specifically mentioned the LGBTQ+ community in his speech outside No. 10 Downing Street.
“[The U.K.’s] brand and political personality is admired and even loved around the world for our inventiveness, for our humour, for our universities, our scientists, our armed forces, our diplomacy for the equalities on which we insist — whether race or gender or LGBT …….. and for the values we stand for around the world,” he said
Once upon a time, British political leaders justified going to war by speaking of making the world safe for democracy. Boris Johnson started his premiership by committing Britain to a global struggle to make the world safe for buggery!
Nor is this fixation with LGBTQ+ new. Although the never-satisfied ‘gay’ lobby is whining about a couple of throwaway ‘homophobic comments’ he made decades ago, Johnson voted in 2003 to repeal Section 28 of the Local Government Act of 1988, by which Margaret Thatcher prohibited local authorities from “promoting homosexuality” or “pretended family relationships.”
This vote opened the door to the indoctrination of school-children with homosexual propaganda. Johnson also voted for civil partnerships for homosexuals and attacked the institution of marriage as ‘bourgeois convention’.
Johnson has also wasted no time reiterating his support for an amnesty for huge numbers of illegal immigrants and boasting of sharing the views of pro-immigration Labour party MPs. Ominously, he has also refused to pledge even to attempt to stick to the upper limits on immigration promised – but of course not delivered – by his predecessor Theresa May.
With Brexit making it harder for Poles and Hungarians to come to Britain, it is already clear from Johnson’s waffle about making the UK ‘open’ and ‘welcoming immigrants’, that, far from stopping immigration as millions of voters expected, Johnson’s Brexit will merely swap Polish immigrants for more Pakistanis, Bulgarians for Botswanans.
Johnson probably will set Britain free from Brussels, but he is also openly committed to speeding up the process by which the duly ‘liberated’ Brits are replaced in their own country by a further flood of immigrants. And the social liberals posing as Johnson’s fake conservatives will urge the stupid Brits to suck it up and celebrate their added diversity.
We’ve already seen the start of this process in Johnson creating what he refers to as a “cabinet for modern Britain” – wording that The Guardian’s Kehinde Andrews rightly described as a “euphemism for non-white”.
Leading Johnson’s Great Replacement charge will be Home Secretary Priti Patel, who has spoken gushingly of how the new government will “ continue to push for a dynamic, global Britain that is outward looking ……Our vision is for a truly global country – one where we welcome the brightest and best, where we are more outward facing, and where we decide who comes here based on what they have to offer.”
The Brits can’t say they weren’t warned. Because capitalism demands not just cheap labour, but also an endless supply of new consumers. Even the worse educated and least assimilable featherless biped on the planet thus has plenty to offer big business. The door is going to open wide to them all.
Patel was forced to resign two years ago after holding secret meetings with Israeli ministers. The meetings included a visit to an Israeli army field hospital in the occupied Golan Heights, where wounded Al Qaeda and ISIS fighters were patched up and sent back to continue fighting against the pro-Christian government in Syria. Patel asked officials within her department to look into whether British aid money could be funneled into this medical centre.
The same dangerous obsequiousness to Israel has also been shown by Johnson’s new Chancellor, Sajid Javid. Two years after becoming MP, Javid told the Conservative Friends of Israel annual lunch that as a British born Muslim if he had to go and live in the Middle East, he would not go to a Muslim majority country: “There is only one place I could possibly go. Israel. The only nation in the Middle East that shares the same democratic values as Britain”.
He is talking, let us remind ourselves, about the last openly racist state on the planet, whose supporters around the world insist on the right of Jews to have their own exclusive homeland, at the very same time as denouncing any attempt by any white nation to restrict immigration or preserve traditional ethnic identities as ‘neo-Nazi’. And the state which has done more than any other –except Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Barak Obama’s White House – to fund, arm and aid the Islamist head-cutters at war in Syria.
In her resignation letter Patel admitted she “fell below the high standards that are expected of a Secretary of State.” Not for the first time! In the past she has been criticised for taking trips to Bahrain funded by that country’s repression Salafist regime, and attending a conference in Washington paid for by the Henry Jackson society.
As already noted, the Henry Jackson operation is one of the best-funded and most dangerous of all the trans-Atlantic neo-con think tanks. It constantly agitates for hostility to Russia, Iraq-war style meddling in the Middle East on behalf of Eretz Israel and Big Oil, and for a poisonous mixture of ultra-right-wing economics and social liberalism – including the privatisation of national assets and the promotion of LGBTQ+ agendas at the expense of traditional values.
The same sort of poison is promoted in Britain by the closely connected Policy Exchange think-tank. This was founded by Michael Gove, who Johnson just appointed as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, in many ways his political Chief of Staff in parliament.
Gove’s counterpart within the government itself is Munira Mirza, who Johnson just appointed Director of the Number 10 Policy Unit. She was previously Development Director at Policy Exchange and also worked on a range of its publications, including Living Apart Together: British Muslims and the paradox of multiculturalism.
As with all the other material coming out of the Johnson camp about multi-culturalism, this argued that the chief problem with Islam is that it hinders ‘integration’ – i.e. the process by which traditional British cultural and ethnic identity is replaced by the ultimate corporate dream of an atomised mass of rootless, identical consumers. And by which the traditional values once upheld by Christians and now defended mainly by Muslims are to be replaced by the anti-morality of the LGBTQ+ brigade and corporations greedy for pink pounds and rainbow dollars.
As with so many neo-cons on both sides of the Pond, Mirza started off as a Trotskyite. She was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. When it was dissolved in 1987 she followed other key comrades into the Living Marxism operation and then Spiked magazine, which has very successfully operated a policy of entryism into what passes for politica thought in Britain. Her Wiki entry quotes an article in the London Review of Books which noted that “Many of Munira’s ex party members have become influential in Conservative or Eurosceptic circles since the dissolution of their party, whilst remaining closely associated with each other’s endeavours.”
This includes the former party leader Frank Furedi, whose wife Ann is one of Britain’s most powerful abortionists. Strange ‘conservatives’ indeed! But, there again, one reading of these ‘ex’-Trotskyites’ new-found fondness for ultra-right-wing economics and privatisation is that the resulting exploitation and public anger will lead to the revolutionary crisis that eluded them when they were all wearing Che T-shirts in the late sixties! Or perhaps, it just pays better!
Coming back closer to Johnson, his campaign chief was Gavin Williamson. When Defence Secretary, Williamson was a notorious hawk against Russia and China, and for greater UK involvement in the Middle East. He also spoke out vigorously against Britain’s continued participation in Galileo, the global navigation satellite system created by the European Union. He is one of those pushing for a new UK system, compatible with the American GPS, and fully integrated with Five Eyes, the intelligence alliance between Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United States and the UK. As with all such manoeuvres, it is hard to see where money gives way to ideology and power-politics and, of course, they are hopelessly entangled.
It is Williamson who has given one of the clearest glimpses into the Atlanticist obsession of the new regime: “Tthe cornerstone of European security is not the European Union, it is Nato. Let’s be absolutely clear. Our involvement in Nato is going to be there, long, enduring and for many, many defence secretaries after me.”
Another part of the Anglo-American elite can also be seen when you turn over another stone in the Johnson camp.
.Andrew Griffith, the new chief business adviser to Number 10 is a former Rothschild investment banker who joined Rupert Murdoch’s Sky in 1999, and became finance chief for the group in 2008.
Johnson has been spending up to 13 hours a day at Griffith’s lavish £9.5m townhouse,
A Johnson campaign source said Griffith had kindly opened up his home to let members of the transition team meet there. If paying the piper leads to the donor calling the tune, how much more power accrues to the Rothschild/Murdoch man providing the dancers with a 9.5 million pound house?
Finally, we just have time to consider Johnson’s new Chief Whip, Mark Spencer. Taking the new regime’s enthusiasm for LGBTQ+ issues towards its logical liberal intolerant end, he has said that Christian teachers who dare to voice opposition to same-sex marriage should be subject to ‘Extremism Disruption Orders’. In other words, legislation brought in supposedly to stop Islamist hate-preachers recruiting terrorists is to be used against Christians who stand by the teachings of the Bible!
So, yes, we can now expect Brexit from Johnson. But Britain is also going to get more mass immigration. And ruthless demonization of anyone who dares oppose it. More LGBTQ+ propaganda for children – and ruthless repression of anyone who dares oppose it.
More pressure for British participation in neo-con, Zionist and Salafist wars in Syria, Iran and Yemen. More insane and dangerous sabre-rattling against traditionalist and Christian Russia.
And more looting of what remains of Britain’s common wealth by the privatisation vultures. Finishing off the monetisation of the NHS is sure to surface as a great ambition for this corporate puppet regime sooner rather than later. Almost certainly a couple of months before Johnson delivers Brexit and obliterates Jeremy Corbyn in a snap general election.
It remains to be seen whether the globalist kleptomaniacs behind the new regime will also find a way to turn the removal of EU subsidies into an opportunity to arrange a massive transfer of farmland in Britain from farmers, workers’ pension funds and the old landed aristocracy and into the hands of global corporations. If that’s on the agenda too, remember where you heard it first!
All the above presupposes, of course, that the juvenile and utterly irresponsible anti-Russian, anti-Iranian and anti-Chinese sabre-rattling – of which the Johnson regime is as guilty as its predecessors – doesn’t actually start World War Three. Because, if it does, there’ll be nothing left to privatise and loot except the last tin of beans in the irradiated rubble.
Don’t get me wrong: This is not to condemn Brexit. The British people voted for it, and its delivery will be a Good Thing (not least because it has added, and will continue to add, to the instability in the EU which has disrupted the efforts of its bureaucratic rulers to maintain a firmly anti-Russian line, and because, however imperfect, Brexit is a blow for national sovereignty against a particularly nasty little imperial project.
All of us who, one way or another, helped set in motion or advance the process which defeated the pro-EU whores who had sold Britain to Brussels can be rightly proud of having done their bit to break the claws of the largest leopard in the London-based elite.
But you can also be sure that the British majority are going to be mightily disappointed with the new Johnson regime leopard and how Brexit turns out. They voted to restore the old Britain, particularly the Old England. What they will get instead is an even faster dissolution than we saw under EU rule.
They voted against ‘political correctness gone mad’ and in a bid to cling on to traditional values. What they will get is a quasi-Trotskyite cultural Marxist regime – all the more destructive for having the label ‘conservative’ – which grinds their faces – and especially the faces of their children and grandchildren – in LGBTQ+ filth.
They voted Brexit hoping to stop immigration. Instead, the next ten years will see an absolutely swamping change in Britain’s demographics, as the dying early Baby Boomers are replaced with Johnson’s ‘New Britons’ from all corners of the world.
They voted to kick out a Brussels Occupation Government. What they will get instead is a New York Occupation Government. Which is a polite way of putting it, for there is in fact really nothing American about America’s neocons.
“Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss”, is how the Who put it. But it was all summed up even better by the great English visionary William Morris, in A Dream of John Ball, his revolutionary classic about the very first English Peasants’ Revolt against an alien elite:
“I pondered all these things, and how men fight and lose the battle, and the thing that they fought for comes about in spite of their defeat, and when it comes turns out not to be what they meant, and other men have to fight for what they meant under another name.”
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clubofinfo · 6 years
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Expert: The ‘anti-Semitism’ rumpus engulfing Jeremy Corbyn and tearing the Labour Party apart comes at the very moment when the country needs an alert and dynamic Opposition to Theresa May’s shambolic administration.  The campaign, so obviously orchestrated by powerful pro-Israel interest groups to bring down Corbyn, threatens to derail all prospect of worthwhile change at the next election, which could be called anytime given the chaos over Brexit. This would be a calamity not just for Labour but the whole country. The distraction is such a blot on the political landscape and so disruptive that Corbyn must neutralise it without giving ground. The question is how. Clarity please – who are the Semites? What is the argument about? It’s the S-word, ‘Semitism’. At least, that’s the cover-story. The real issue, as many realise, is something deeper. But let’s stick with ‘anti-Semitism’, which is the weapon. It is stupid to go to war without asking questions. So who exactly are the Semites? They may not be who they seem, or who we’re told they are. So let us first deal with the cover story, anti-Semitism, by setting up a learned panel to review the research by Shlomo Sand, Arthur Koestler, Johns Hopkins University and others, turn the S-word inside out, shake it all about, and establish (if that’s possible) who is, and who is not Semitic enough to be offended by certain remarks. For example, DNA research by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and published by the Oxford University Press in 2012 on behalf of the Society of Molecular Biology and Evolution, found that the Khazarian Hypothesis is scientifically correct, meaning that most Jews are Khazars. The Khazarians were never in ancient Israel. They converted to Talmudic Judaism in the 8th Century. Even if you believe the myth that God gave the land to the Israelites, He certainly didn’t give it to the Khazarians. Russian and East European Jews like the thug Lieberman, Israel’s defence minister, and countless others who flooded into the Holy Land intending to kick the Palestinians out, have no biblical or ancestral claim to the land. Probably no more than 2% of Jews in Israel are actually Israelites, according to the findings. So most of those living today who claim to be Jews are not descended from the ancient Israelites at all. Palestinians, who are indigenous to the Holy Land, are the real Semites. Of course, there’s no rush by Israelis or their admirers to acknowledge this. Has the Johns Hopkins study been refuted? If they and others who came to the same conclusion have got it right, the whole anti-Semitism thing becomes an upside-down nonsense – a hoax – in which the anti-Semites are actually the racist Israeli regime and its Zionist stooges who stalk the corridors of power and have been oppressing the Palestinians for decades with impunity. Until the topic is thoroughly aired and we have clarity, all anti-Semitism allegations ought to be withdrawn. And no organisation, let alone the Labour Party, should import any definition of anti-Semitism onto its rulebook without looking into the basics. In the meantime, yes, Jeremy Corbyn needs to dislodge the anti-Jew morons and racist crackpots, of which there are many in all parties. He should also disband Labour Friends of Israel, an aggressive mouthpiece for a foreign terror regime that has no place in British politics. Job done – Israel’s stooges now in control and doing the dirty work Meanwhile the concerted fear-mongering by the Zionist Inquisition and browbeating by Jewish community leaders seems to have worked. As I write, Jeremy Corbyn is touring Scotland talking about important things like his ‘Build it in Britain’ plan to regenerate Scottish industry.  But the media are gloating over a story involving a former Scottish Labour MP being suspended by his local constituency party and publicly shamed for alleged anti-Semitic remarks – on the strength of just one complaint apparently. Furthermore the local party executive, in a statement, have already found him guilty. iNews and other media outlets report Renfrewshire North and West Constituency Labour Party Executive Committee as saying: We fully condemn the anti-Semitic comments expressed by Jim Sheridan, and it is right that he is subject to a full investigation by the Labour Party…. The views expressed by Jim Sheridan in no way reflect the views of the members of the Labour Party in the Renfrewshire North and West constituency…. [His] comments are in direct conflict with the Labour Party’s values of anti-racism, equality and solidarity. That’s before he’s had a chance to defend himself. Bearing in mind that the Jewish Leadership Council and the Board of Deputies claim to represent the Jewish community in the UK and have been instrumental in the damaging anti-Semitism campaign against Labour and Corbyn, it is difficult to see anything objectionable in Cllr Sheridan’s remarks in the screenshot above. Cllr Sheridan said he was restricted from making comment at this stage but told me, as a matter of fact: I haven’t had a hearing yet or a date for that to happen. You may wish to know that I visited Auschwitz along with a group of schoolchildren and fellow MPs and saw at first hand the horrors and felt the pain and anguish the Jewish prisoners must have felt. Also, in all the years as an MP I signed the annual Holocaust remembrance book in the House of Commons. Does that sound like an ‘anti-Semite’ speaking? In Renfrewshire they seem hell-bent on destroying the Labour Party’s credibility without any further help from the Israel lobby. It is a vivid example of self-harm by brainwashed twits from within. If the press story is to be believed, somebody makes an allegation, the accused is immediately suspended, publicly shamed and possibly has his reputation damaged irreparably without being heard and before the allegation is substantiated. The accused is gagged from making public comment while the local party executive committee feels free to pass judgment and prejudice the whole matter by declaring to the world that the accused is guilty and stating that nobody else in the local party shares his views. ‘Due process’ is conspicuously absent from the proceedings and party officials in Renfrewshire seem to think it’s OK to issue a statement condemning the accused when he hasn’t been told when his side of the story will be heard and by whom. It’s medieval. And last month another Scottish Labour councillor, Mary Bain Lockhart of West Fife, was suspended voicing suspicion that Israeli spies might be plotting to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour leader after three Jewish newspapers published a joint front page warning that a Corbyn-led government would pose an “existential threat to Jewish life in this country”. She wrote on social media: If the purpose is to generate opposition to anti-semitism, it has backfired spectacularly. If it is to get rid of Jeremy Corbyn as Labour Leader, it is unlikely to succeed, and is a shameless piece of cynical opportunism. And if it is a Mossad assisted campaign to prevent the election of a Labour Government pledged to recognise Palestine as a State, it is unacceptable interference in the democracy of Britain. She added: “Israel is a racist State. And since the Palestinians are also Semites, it is an anti-Semitic State.” Those paying attention will remember, back in January 2017, revelations that a senior political officer at the Israeli embassy in London, Shai Masot, had been plotting with stooges among British MPs and others in the political woodwork to “take down” senior government figures including Boris Johnson’s deputy at the Foreign Office, Sir Alan Duncan. It should have resulted in the ambassador himself, Mark Regev, a vile propagandist, a master of disinformation and a former personal spokesman for the Zionist regime’s prime minister Netanyahu, also being kicked out. But he was let off the hook. Regev is still here exercising his shifty talents and oiling his links to Mossad. Masot’s hostile scheming was captured and revealed by an Al Jazeera undercover investigation and not, as one would have wished, by Britain’s own security services and press. “The UK has a strong relationship with Israel and we consider the matter closed,” said the British government. The Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow, who is Jewish, also declined to investigate. So Cllr Lockhart is entitled to be suspicious. Nevertheless a complaint about her remarks was lodged by former Labour MP Thomas Docherty. It was Docherty who wrote to the Culture Secretary in 2015 urging a debate to ban Hitler’s Mein Kampf, a best seller on Amazon, arguing that it was “too offensive to be made available”. And Paul Masterton, the Tory MP for East Renfrewshire, complained that, given how “offensive” Cllr Lockhart’s comments were, the Scottish Labour leader Richard Leonard had been too slow to act and should have spoken out against her behaviour immediately. Instead we have continued silence from him and a failure to prove to the Jewish community that he and his party are taking this issue seriously. It’s clear to the vast majority of people that Mary Lockhart is no longer fit to hold office, and Scottish Labour must understand that a suspension doesn’t go far enough. What the media didn’t tell us is that Mr Masterton is chairman of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Jews which is funded, supported and administered by The Board of Deputies of British Jews which, along with the Jewish Leadership Council and others is heavily implicated in picking a fight with Corbyn and trying to ram the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism, unedited, down Labour’s throat. The IHRA definition, which has been allowed to consume Labour when the Party has better things to do, seems to be having its intended effect. It is obvious that many members still haven’t read the two caveats proposed by the Home Office Select Committee and the legal criticism by Hugh Tomlinson QC and Sir Stephen Sedley. Had they done so, more would insist on it being drastically modified or rejected altogether. http://clubof.info/
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