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Cromwellforever's avatar

Me and my dad used to run a barely functioning small business, think Sanford and Son level of competence. I was once told by a college communist that I was a petit-bourgeois kulak and come the revolution I'd be put into a gulag or killed for being an enemy of the proletariat. Rather than clutch my pearls and scream about how I was being threatened I laughed at him and told him to keep dreaming. I suggest you do the same to anyone who ludicrously thinks we're going to start building Holocaust ovens in America.

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Telegram Sam's avatar

Ok I guess unless Anti-Semitism rises to the level of a Final Solution I should laugh it off.

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Ellen's avatar

More Anti-Semitism on the left than the right, these days, unless the Semites in question are Muslim.

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Telegram Sam's avatar

Do you have any kind of stats on that? Because criticizing the Israeli occupation isn't anti-Semitism, so it doesn't count. Plenty of Israelis and diaspora Jews do it all the time.

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Bryan Benaway's avatar

Do you have any evidence that the Proud Boys are racist, Nazi, homophobic fascists that want to exterminate the Jews? Outside of a rogue sect and perhaps some loose ties to groups that have expressed a few off-color opinions Gavin McGinnis didn't set it up that way and straight from their POC president Tarrio, “I denounce anti-Semitism. I denounce racism. I denounce fascism, I denounce communism and any other -ism that is prejudiced toward people because of their race, religion, culture, tone of skin.”

I know if you do a Google search you'll come up with a bunch of baseless claims made by various "reporters" who are not just increasingly confused, but have apparently become COMPLETELY confused as to the difference between reporting a story and mouthing a mess of unsubstantiated opinions. Spent too much time on the frisbee-chucking side of campus IMO.

Speaking of Nazis. i believe it's the left who are completely running roughshod over the Nuremberg Code as we type.

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Telegram Sam's avatar

Founder McGinnis has a history of racist and anti-semitic statements. Tarrio became their leader post-Charlottesville, when they re-branded. I'm honestly not sure what they stand for at this moment.

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NYM Substack 1's avatar

...then those should be easy to cite, yes?

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Telegram Sam's avatar

Yeah, pretty easy. On white people: “We brought roads and infrastructure to India and they are still using them as toilets. Our criminals built nice roads in Australia but Aboriginals keep using them as a bed.”

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Richard's avatar

Criticizing the world's only Jewish state as an "occupation" might not be necessarily anti-Semitic, but I would say it's presumptively anti-Semitic until shown otherwise.

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Oregoncharles's avatar

@ Richard - Thanks for getting us up to date onthe hasbara line.

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Telegram Sam's avatar

I meant the post-1967 War occupation. This is common usage, though I guess one can never be specific enough.

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Ellen's avatar

If you've ever lived in a neighborhood in which you were considered an enemy by your neighbors, who shoot out your vehicle windows, vandalize your property on a regular basis, and attack you without provocation (I have), this is analogous to being Israel.

Israel is surrounded by countries who deny their right to exist as a state or to remain alive as individuals. It is demanded by many that they appease, appease, appease.

I'd recommend Israel not negotiate with any country or organization which does not publicly announce support for Israel's right to existence and Jews' rights to live.

Israel can then say, "If you are brave enough to take that position, we'll be brave enough to believe you."

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Oregoncharles's avatar

You just described exactly what the Israeli settlers do to their Palestinian neighbors.

Incidentally, putting "settler" - colonists - on occupied land, which is the legal status of the West Bank, is highly illegal under international law.

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Koshmarov's avatar

It's funny who has to obey "international law" and who doesn't. Good forcing function there, UN.

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Telegram Sam's avatar

No argument. I've had many spirited conversations with people on the left trying to explain this.

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Thom Foolery's avatar

'Because criticizing the Israeli occupation isn't anti-Semitism, so it doesn't count."

That's a standard response, but not the only one. I get different takes on that depending on which of my Jewish friends I talk to. Quite a few feel that anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are unrelated, others that they are more or less synonyms.

So I'm not sure stats would help without contextualizing those stats, and that is far from being agreed on, almost begging the question.

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Gnomon Pillar's avatar

I think it's safe to say that some anti-zionists are also anti-semites, while some anti-zionists are not anti-semites. It's even safer to say that many are neither anti-zionist nor anti-semitic, but merely object to Israel's Occupation of the West Bank particularly and the policies of the Israeli government vis-a--vis the Palestinians generally.

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Telegram Sam's avatar

I've had enough conversations with everyone from gentile leftists to Jewish rightists to know that both flavors exist. It seems the European Left is quick to mix actual anti-Semitism in with their anti-Zionism (go figure) but the American version is more nuanced. But the blanket statement "there's more anti-Semitism on the left"...? Not sure I buy that.

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Cromwellforever's avatar

Yes because antisemitism in America is more akin to spree shootings than they are to pogroms in 19th and early 20th century Europe. They're awful, but very rare and not going to become routine. I lived in post 9/11 America, the fear of jihadist terrorism was greatly overblown and did far more damage than the actual attacks and saying that doesn't minimize the deaths on 9/11 or Pulse Night Club or the like.

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Lily's avatar

Just because we don't have pogroms doesn't mean that state level violence isn't possible and fast. Japanese Internment went from unpopular to official policy within 2 months after Pearl Harbor.

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Cromwellforever's avatar

We can check back after America and Israel start a hot war

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Lily's avatar

In the immediate aftermath of Pearl Harbor, people actually didn't assign blame to domestic Japanese people. It got whipped up by the media, so you don't need a hot war to do that. Case in point about media manipulation of narratives: the coverage of the Afghanistan withdrawal.

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Cromwellforever's avatar

I have a hard time believing the media is going to start whipping up antisemitism anytime soon. I'm also skeptical that Americans in the 40s didn't blame Japanese Americans for Pearl Harbor.

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Stxbuck's avatar

Love the user name……

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Stxbuck's avatar

Something like 15% of the Japanese population on the West Coast subscribed to Japanese nationalist propaganda/societies. I’m not trying to justify the camps, but there was FAR more pro-Japanese government sentiment in the West Coast Japanese population than Nazi sentiment amongst German Americans.

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Diogenes's avatar

Areslent

just now

Just to add some context, it was US policy at this time to exclude all Asians, to include the Japanese from US citizenship, unlike the Germans who were white so could become Americans.

https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Ozawa%20v.%20United%20States/

"The Supreme Court ruling came on November 13, 1922. Justice George Sutherland who presided over the case upheld the lower court ruling and declared Ozawa racially "ineligible for citizenship." While acknowledging that "the color test alone would result in an overlapping of races and a gradual merging of one into the other, without any practical line of separation," it declared that the word "white" was synonymous with "what is popularly known as the Caucasian race." The court concluded that the Japanese could not be white, since they were "clearly of a race which is not Caucasian." [8] It also denied Takuji Yamashita's naturalization case on the same day. The rulings not only cemented the citizenship status of the Issei, but also gave anti-Japanese advocates the justification for their exclusionist cause, culminating in the Immigration Act of 1924. [9]"

Funny how when you treat an entire group of people as less than human and exclude them from citizenship based on the color of their skin, about 15% of them don't feel very loyal to you.

Funny how that works.

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Stxbuck's avatar

The chickens come home to roost, but they also then proceed to shit under said home perch.

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Diogenes's avatar

You got that right!

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Conservative Contrarian's avatar

Do you think human nature is static?

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Cromwellforever's avatar

It's pretty consistent imo.

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Conservative Contrarian's avatar

At the end of the day, human nature is driven by the ability to supply a need. If I need a beer, that’s one thing; if I need food to feed my family, that’s another thing.

As long as economic conditions are relatively stable there is minimal volatility, but when an economy tanks, it’s a brand new ball game. Wait and see.

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Adam's avatar

You know that there is, maybe, just maybe, some middle ground between those two extremes.

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Ellen's avatar

You mean that vast swath of ground where most people live? Yes, absolutely.

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Telegram Sam's avatar

Yes there is. Let me know where in that spectrum I should stop laughing it off and become concerned.

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Adam's avatar

No, the point is that YOU need to have an answer for that, not me. You tell me where it is.

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