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#anti holocaust deniers
odinsblog · 7 months
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Any journalist or media outlet that does not explicitly make clear that Elon Musk is a white nationalist, is complicit in spreading his hate speech, racism, misogyny and bigotry. I don’t care if it’s a tech outlet doing a piece on SpaceX or Tesla, the job of a responsible media outlet is to report facts and give a complete picture of what they are reporting on. Doing anything less is journalistic malpractice. It would be like reporting on how Trump owns a place called Mar-a-Lago, but somehow omitting that he was the occupant of the White House and all of the crimes he has been charged with. (more)
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tomorrowusa · 2 months
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I frequently complain that people, especially on the liberal side, don't pay enough attention to state government. I hope that our readers in North Carolina take notice of this.
North Carolina Republicans have just nominated a candidate for governor who actually makes Trump seem slightly more moderate.
The Republican standard-bearer in the most competitive governor race of the 2024 election is now officially a man who has quoted Adolf Hitler, called LGBT people “filth,” and threatened to use an AR-15 on federal officials. North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson secured the Republican nomination in the state’s governor race Tuesday night. He was projected the winner of the primary by the Associated Press less than an hour after polls closed. Robinson defeated rivals Dale Folwell and Bill Graham, who were backed by figures in the GOP establishment uneasy with Robinson’s incendiary rhetoric and far-right views. Robinson’s primary win was expected. Now, he will face Attorney General Josh Stein (D) in a general election battle that is a top priority for both parties—and one that could have broader implications because of North Carolina’s status as a presidential battleground. [ ... ] A relative newcomer in politics, Robinson has quickly won many supporters and many detractors thanks to his eagerness to embrace controversy whenever possible. From making Islamophobic jokes to dismissing the Holocaust as “hogwash” in an old Facebook post, Robinson’s record offers seemingly endless opportunities for Democrats to craft attack ads. “There’s no reason anybody anywhere in America should be telling any child about transgenderism, homosexuality, any of that filth,” Robinson said at a Baptist church in June 2023. “And yes, I called it filth. And if you don’t like it that I called it filth, come see me and I’ll explain it to you.”
The good news is that this is a winnable contest for Dems if moderate and liberal voters take it seriously.
While Democrats have not won a statewide federal race in North Carolina since 2008, their track record in statewide races for governor and attorney general has been strong. Gov. Roy Cooper (D) is term-limited after winning election in 2016 and re-election in 2020. The state has only had a GOP governor for four out of the last 30 years.
Never assume that because candidates are perceived as being too extreme that they will automatically lose. Just think back to 2016.
If we want democracy to survive we need to drive a stake through the heart of electoral slackerism. There is no such thing as an unimportant election. When we vote, we win; just look at Minnesota.
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hotniatheron · 2 years
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I don't like how Germany gets painted as this wise and knowing country that has confronted its past past etc etc because there's a lot of people who act like they shouldn't have to be known by Germany's past or feel shame and their whole upper class is composed of people whose parents and grandparents got rich off nazi gold like. Especially since a lot of your worthless grandparents never got punished for their heinous shit!!!! And to this day will sit there and go i didn't know anything.
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omgthatdress · 14 days
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Just taking a moment to remind everyone that JK Rowling is a Holocaust denier.
The looting & burning of the library of Die Institut für Sexualwissenschaft is an incredibly well-documented event that marks one of the first major events of Nazi persecution of the LGBT community.
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Guess what, Jo. This definitely happened.
She has gone further to perpetuate lies about Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld that engage with the anti-semitic conspiracy theory that Jews are encouraging LGBT identities to end the reproduction of the Aryan race and take over the world.
HEY! GOOD NEWS! IF YOU DO HISTORICAL RESEARCH, THIS IS YOUR CHANCE TO DO SOMETHING REALLY COOL!
LGBT persecution by Nazis, especially trans persecution, is an area of the Holocaust that remains under-researched and under-documented. Historians are working hard to identify trans and queer victims and to illuminate their life stories. If you are at all interested in this, it's something you can do, too. Research for all!
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notaplaceofhonour · 1 month
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it’s october 7th. you hear about the attack by seeing people you followed glorifying the terrorist attack—a massacre, a pogrom—as victory & justified resistance, glorifying a terrorist group that was founded with the explicit intent to kill your entire people
you make a post in which you make it clear you support palestinians and oppose the ways israel has wronged them, explaining that the terrorist group is still not good. you know you will probably get some flacc from the pro-Hamas side, but naively underestimate how much.
you get thousands of notifications on that one post, the majority of them hateful comments.
some of the response is positive. multiple messages thank you for the post, expressing bafflement that it’s controversial.
a few Israelis are upset at the loaded language in your post, but explain their problems with it civilly. you called Israel “apartheid”. they ask you what apartheid laws Israel has. you admit you honestly don’t know.
your inbox is flooded with anonymous hate from anti-Israel leftists.
over the course of a few weeks you have received hundreds of death threats, a dozen rape threats. people accuse you of being pro-genocide. you’re a literal Nazi. you’re racist, you thirst for the blood of Palestinians. you’re brainwashed by propaganda, a shill for The Zionist Entity. a few of the hate messages are from literal Neo-Nazis; the overwhelming majority are from leftists, many of them queer.
you are considering suicide.
you see footage of the october 7th attacks. you see footage of the bombings in gaza. you see footage of a Jewish man being murdered at an anti-Israel rally.
a popular creator you follow posts in support of an antisemitic hate group that masquerades as a Jewish organization. this organization regularly posts blood libel and other antisemitic rhetoric, works with groups that are even more explicitly antisemitic, including celebrating October 7th, holocaust inversion, blood libel, “Khazar theory” and others. more than one of the orgs they work with is pro-Putin.
your former roommate liked the post.
graffiti appears on a street you frequent that says “#freepalestine” and “end settler colonialism”
the boyfriend of the friend you spent most of the summer with makes his first post about the war. it’s a reposted comic that mocks and downplays the october 7th attack.
you doubt he’ll be receptive to criticism. he’s shared leftist memes about “monied elites” pulling all the strings and evangelicals being modern day “pharisees” in the past, and getting him to understand why that was antisemitic was like herding cats. you try anyway.
another of his Jewish friends also pushes back. he smugly dismisses her, tells her she’s falling for Zionist propaganda and uses several antisemitic tropes. you go off on him. he just deletes your comment.
you give up. you’re done. you block him.
you see anti-Israel posters and billboards around town
you mention what happened with the guy you went off on to his girlfriend—the friend you’ve grown very close to, who you’ve been listening to as she unburdens her fears for the future and complains about her bf’s BS over the last year. she doesn’t respond to you.
a friend of a friend shares posts tokenizing fringe groups that spread blood libel and have collaborated with holocaust deniers. you know they don’t know what you know, so you explain what those groups are. they seem somewhat receptive, apologize, and take it down
the next day they share several more posts that dip into antisemitic tropes. you mention this to your mutual friend, that you’re worried about them being radicalized. you’re not sure how receptive they’ll be to continued criticism
you have a confrontation with the foaf. in the meantime they’ve shared even more antisemitic posts. they say they didn’t mean to cause you distress but instead of stopping they effectively block you.
the “end settler colonialism” vandalism has been counter-vandalized with the words “commie propaganda” in place of “settler colonialism”. you don’t know if this is an improvement.
a month passes. the friend whose bf you went off on still hasn’t spoken to you. you see she shared a post defending an SJP chapter that posted Nazi cartoon caricatures of Jews repurposed in “Anti-Zionist” memes. you unfriend her on all social media platforms but you can’t bring yourself to block her number.
you see a friend of someone whose couch you surfed when you were homeless harassing Jewish celebrities with “Free Palestine” comments. you block them.
you’ve lost count of how many people you’ve unfollowed or blocked, or who’ve blocked you. friends, content creators.
when a friend takes an unusually long time to respond you worry if it’s because of your posts about antisemitism.
most of the podcasts, youtube channels, and other content creators you regularly engaged with no longer feel safe. you wonder who will be next
a couple friends wish you a happy hanukkah. you don’t celebrate much aside from lighting the hanukkiah and making some latkes.
you see posts about a destroyed chabad menorah, antisemitic comments on Jewish celebrities’ Hanukkah posts.
your neighborhood is covered in pro-Palestine & anti-Israel posters. some are seemingly innocuous, some are JVP “not in our name” posters. some call for intifada. “globalize the intifada” “Zionists fuck off!” “solidarity means attack!”
a man kills himself shouting “free palestine”. you learn about his suicide by seeing posts from several popular accounts you followed glorifying it.
you follow a bunch of jewish accounts on social media and commiserate with them about everything happening
your jewish friends post screenshots of the dead man’s antisemitic, pro-Hamas views. you look at his reddit and find even more horrific shit: anti-Ukraine posts. mocking Zelensky. “elites” are “lizard people”; the only named individual he calls a lizard person is Jewish. you start to notice a pattern: a lot of the people he dislikes just so happen to be jews.
several people you know share a post glorifying this man’s suicide. most are acquaintances, one is someone incredibly important to you.
you wonder how they would respond to your suicide.
you tell the close friend that shared this post how it scares you. you show them the receipts of the man’s antisemitism. their response is a single sentence. they didn’t know about the antisemitism.
they don’t apologize.
you notice none of your irl friends, even your closest ones, interact with your posts about antisemitism. you are able to vent to a couple friends, but no one has reach out to you
you try not to read into it. you try not to take it personally.
you haven’t slept well in months. you’ve always been an insomniac but not like this. you’re not sleeping until 4am, 6am, even 9am. even when you get to bed at a decent hour and get a full night’s rest it takes you hours to get out of bed.
a few weeks go by. the friend with the single sentence response shares a post saying they’re excited and proud to join a group to help palestinians. you’re excited and proud for them.
a couple days later, they share a post about a fundraiser to help a palestinian family get out of gaza. you note to yourself this is a much more effective & less concerning form of activism than the pro-suicidal antisemite post.
your friend shares another post about the fundraiser. it’s a joint post between their group and another group.
you open the other group’s page
the page is just a wall of signs from rallies. you swipe through one after another: “from the river to the sea”, “by any means necessary”, justifying/denying the atrocities of october 7th, calling for violent revolution. anything done in the name of resistance can’t be terrorism, all Israelis are terrorists. Jews aren’t indigenous; they’re white colonizers. holocaust inversion. other vile, thinly veiled violent rhetoric
you feel sick to your stomach imagining talking to your friend about it.
you already feel like you’re burdening the few friends you can talk to about this. you already feel like you think about it too much, talk about it too much. but you can’t not think about it; it affects every aspect of your life.
you’ve filtered out relevant keywords on more than one social media site to avoid the worst of it. some still manages to leak through.
there isn’t a single friend you regularly interact with that you don’t fear the moment when they will switch from listening to your concerns to seeing you as the evil zionist or indoctrinated hasbaranik they’ve been warned about.
it’s not an irrational fear. it keeps happening. you knew it would then, and you were powerless to do anything about it before, and you continue to be as it happens again and again.
you don’t know what to do about any of it.
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thejewishlink · 2 years
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Worldwide Condemnation Of Abbas’s “Disgusting’ Accusation That Israel Committed ’50 Holocausts’
Worldwide Condemnation Of Abbas’s “Disgusting’ Accusation That Israel Committed ’50 Holocausts’
JERUSALEM (VINnews) — Prime Minister Yair Lapid, himself the son of a Holocaust survivor, and others in Israel, Germany and the US expressed shock and outrage Tuesday night, after Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas accused Israel of committing “ fifty holocausts” against Palestinians over the years during a meeting with German Chancellor Olaf Scholz in Berlin. Abbas’s accusation, made…
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mlmxreader · 2 months
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idk how the fuck people are surprised abt JK Rowling's latest anti-trans bullshit when we've known for YEARS that she happily sides w Nazis; all her public bullshit aside, did you lot suddenly forget the fact that she used antisemitic portrayals of Jews as part of her "fantasy" world where they were all working in banks w long hooked noses and long fingers and beady eyes and pointed ears? her being a Holocaust denier is NOT surprising, and nor is it anything NEW, either.
at this point, yall just need to stfu and listen to the people who are SAYING and have been saying for YEARS that any public and private support of Harry Potter IS allowing her to have this platform; she AND her terrible writing need to fate into the obsolete and have been needing to for YEARS.
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sad-cinnamongirl · 6 months
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so this is something that's been bothering me so much and i just need to vent. i'm not anti trans but it makes me want to scream anytime someone talks about “trans genocide”. what trans people are going through IS NOT GENOCIDE. it is so disrespectful to use that term when minorities are actually actively being genocided this very moment. the lack of knowledge and entitlement is disgusting and disgraceful
i understand what you mean. im jewish and i know people in my family who have lived though the holocaust. it is so offensive to say that some people who are getting some online harassment, and no real laws pushed to outlaw them are comparing that to jews being murdered, put in concentration camps, etc. honestly it makes me so mad that i would kind of loop some of these people in with holocaust deniers. like they are minimizing what jews (and others), had to go through during that time.
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ms-hells-bells · 2 months
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genderists and faux leftists are disgusting.
Someone falsely claiming that the book burnings in the holocaust burnt most/all pro trans literature, and that trans people were among the first targets, jk Rowling said "that is not true, they didn't specifically target trans literature, and trans people were not the first victims of the holocaust".
They are widely claiming that she is a holocaust denier. They know what that term means, they know what it represents, and now they are trying to slander her as what most people would hear and assume means extreme anti semitism.
I fucking hope she threatens them with a lawsuit like she did previously. Imagine exploiting the fucking holocaust. Because a children's author thinks sex is real and matters.
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There is no war between Israel and Gaza, its a straight up genocide happening towards the latter. The rape allegations attributed to Hamas on October 7th are a fabrication and the person behind that, Anat Shwartz. She has since been let go and even the nytimes themselves have been arguing about the validity of their claims. There is no both sides here. Israel must be stopped and put to trial for their crimes. No that doesn't mean fuck all Jewish people nor does it mean yes anti-semitism. Do not equate the the Jewish faith and the Jewish people with the state of Israel. Even now I still hear and see people act like any and all people calling out Israel for their crimes is part of a psy op or propaganda, and to that all I have to say is... Are you a holocaust denier too?? Because there is literally a holocaust going on right in front of our eyes and for you to dig your headinto the sand pretend that everything you see around you is propaganda just because its election year in the U.S is... its more than just foolish its down right cruel. This racist empire is crumbling and it will be remembered in the aiding and abetting in the destruction of Gaza and the Palestinian people. They will curse our names for generations to come and they will have every right to do so. Please just give a fuck for once in your life.
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tomorrowusa · 2 years
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^^^ What Putin’s army is reading when it’s not murdering civilians or hastily retreating. From @nexta_tv
The title page reads...
ПОЧЕМУ ПОГИБНЕТ АМЕРИКА ТАЙНОЕ МИРОВОЕ ПРАВИТЕЛЬСТВО СЛОВАРЬ МИРОВОЙ ЗАКУЛИСЫ
WHY AMERICA WILL DIE THE SECRET WORLD GOVERNMENT A LEXICON OF THE WORLD BEHIND THE CURTAINS
The author is Oleg Anatolyevich Platonov. Platonov is an ultranationalist, anti-Semite, and Holocaust denier.
The edition of the book in the photo above was published in 2006 by an extremist group which favors Putin within the Orthodox Church in Ukraine. They may be banned there now. The mainstream Ukrainian Orthodox Church formally severed all ties to Moscow a few years ago.
To give you some idea of what this book is about, take a look at the cover of a 1999 edition which depicts a Jewish man pointing the way for then President Bill Clinton. Anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories are seldom absent from the utterings of Russian ultranationalists.
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Ultranationalist thinking has become mainstream in Russia. It’s why three-quarters of Russia’s population supports Putin’s “special operation” which has gone on about 197 days longer than the Kremlin expected.
In the United States, white nationalists are increasingly attracted to ROCOR (Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia). They apparently like the way Putin is being deified by some segments within ROCOR.
Orthodox Christian churches are drawing in far-right American converts
It’s interesting that Oleg Platonov’s book is currently being sold by the online bookstore for a ROCOR monastery in a rural area of New York State.
In any case, Russian ultranationalist anti-Semites like Platonov should spend less time in deranged speculation about America dying and instead pay more attention to how many Russians currently are really dying because of a fascist Kremlin war of aggression.
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maxellminidisc · 7 months
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Hey as much as I think most of us want to spread support for Palestine, and the community behind it, can yall not post or reblog pics of the NK? The NK or Neturei Karta is an ultra-Orthodox group thats pretty notorious for allying themselves with Holocaust deniers and white supremacists and have even said that the Holocaust was a punishment from god upon the Jewish people. They are absolutely not looked fondly upon even by other anti-Zionist Jewish organizations.
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woman-respecter · 4 months
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everyone block and report @/neutronsoup44 they are being an extreme antisemite and holocaust denier in my comments. they don’t post much of this kind of shit on their own blog and are probably trying to lay low or use “anti-zionism” as a cover but whatever your opinion on zionism this kind of rhetoric is unacceptable.
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hadesoftheladies · 1 month
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alright, some misogynist and ableist goons on this site keep bothering me about my jkr post because they cannot fathom the fact that calling out bias doesn't necessarily equal endorsing. so i'm going to be super nice about it and put all the facts here for the fact-enjoyers.
let's go over the claims made against jkr by testerical twitterheads, because everything to do with trans politics regarding jkr is just extremist white liberals reaching.
Claim: JK Rowling is friends with Matt Walsh. False!
Claim: JK Rowling is friends with Kellie-Jay Keen. Ambiguous! (She has agreed with Kellie-Jay Keen on several issues and advocated for her based on false allegations about nazism concerning Kellie-Jay Keen. Men-rights activists made shit up about her endorsing nazi salutes at her women's campaign. also, JK Rowling has agreed with many people whose politics she does not wholly endorse, like matt walsh. agreeing with someone on an opinion or fact, does not mean you agree with their politics.)
Claim: JK Rowling denies the Holocaust. False! (For proof, see this thread. JK Rowling does not DENY that the Holocaust happened, but that trans people were specifically targeted by the Nazis. Some argue that this makes her a Holocaust denier based on some German article, but I find the term muddies the water. It can be an offense, a grievous one, to deny the Nazis did something when they did, but calling JKR a Holocaust denier makes people think she doesn't believe the Holocaust happened when she absolutely does.
Additionally, the topic as to whether trans people were explicitly targeted by Nazis has had a fair share of scholarly debate. They may have faced some measure of harassment, but being specifically targeted is also a reach considering how little historical evidence we have of transvestites being outrightly persecuted, at least, to anywhere near the same degree homosexual, black or Jewish people were. Cross-dressing certificates were legal in Nazi Germany, for example, and I have found no record of a transvestite suffering things like forced sterilization. This article briefly mentions a German author who thought that the Nazis would finally take care of "the transvestite problem" because now they could be sent to concentration camps and castrated there, but there is still no record of any transvestite having undergone such a thing. Furthermore, of the examples of transvestites that were taken to concentration camps, both of them were homosexual, so it would be more accurate to say they were targeted for being homosexual, especially when you look at why they were arrested. On the other hand, some transvestites ended up in concentration camps, but it was likely due to the fact that they were Jewish rather than trans.
It is also very significant that in the German Republic, transvestites had permits while homosexuals did not!
JKR might be denying that they burned trans books. Unfortunately for her, she is wrong. Transvestite research WAS targeted by the Nazis. Again, not much is known about transvestites during this time and I have found no solid numbers. It most definitely didn't happen on the same scale as what gay, lesbian, Jewish or Roma people were suffering through--and why would it, transvestites weren't a large population, also i have found no record of transvestites being forced to wear pink triangles, like homosexual men were--, though gay men and transvestites seemed to get more leniency if they were "Aryan." )
Claim: JK Rowling directly funds government suppression. (Which government? Source? I'll make an assumption and guess that you're referring to her 1 million pound donation to the Better Together anti-Scottish independence campaign? Yes, she has. But she respects the opinions of those who disagree with her on the subject. She's also donated to the Labour Party, which is more centre-left politically.)
Claim: JK Rowling has financially supported groups that repress Scotland's right to independence. True! (She also voted "No!" on Scottish independence).
Claim: JK Rowling is gunning to be a Neo-Nazi. False! (She has not expressed any explicit Nazi views! Please tap the source to see what Nazi views actually are! JK Rowling has been explicitly leftist in her politics and anti-racist.)
Claim: JK Rowling is a fascist. False! (She does not identify as fascist and does not have any explicit fascist views. Unlike the people burning and trying to ban her books, which contain very little of her politics.)
i don't worship JKR, i don't even agree with a good chunk of her politics. especially when it comes to her sympathy for israel. she's a millionaire white woman, and i am a born and raised african middle-class person. we won't have many politics in common. but unlike you lot, i don't need to be misogynistic or ableist in order to disagree with a woman. resorting to misogyny, ableism, racism or homophobia just because you hate someone is still misogyny, ableism, racism and homophobia. i wouldn't call a transperson the "t-word" even though i don't profess their gender faith. because i recognize that using the "t-word" on a trans-identified person that's done or said disgusting things like, idk, andrea long chu or hunter schaffer (are these your leaders? seriously?), saying that word will still hurt trans-identified people who didn't do or say those horrible things unnecessarily.
see what i did there? i read things up for myself, added sources from people i disagreed with politically, discussed the valid history of people who i disagree with without resorting to dehumanizing language, and called out the celebrity you lot think are "my hero" without being a hypocrite!
class dismissed.
now fuck off you rancid misogynists and go back to snivelling about how righteous you are to your echo chamber.
also, radblr girlies feel free to reblog or link this for all the anti-jkr posts that make any of these claims or keep trying to bait you with this braindead discourse to save yourselves the effort. love you and muah! :)
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mariacallous · 5 months
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Out of 8 billion people on the planet, there are only 16 million Jews—but far, far more anti-Semites. I sometimes joke that if I had fewer scruples, I wouldn’t report on anti-Jewish prejudice; I’d contract myself out to the more numerous and better-resourced bigots, and help them get away with it. Because in more than a decade covering anti-Semitism, I have become a reluctant expert in all the ways that anti-Jewish activists obfuscate their hate.
People must learn to recognize and reject these tactics, because too many communities have developed ways to excuse or otherwise ignore anti-Semitism. Today, such prejudice is growing in high and low places because powerful people around the world are running the same playbook to launder their hate into the public sphere.
Here’s how they do it:
1. They become too big to fail. Over the past six months, Elon Musk has publicly affirmed the deadliest anti-Semitic conspiracy theory in recent American history, claimed that Jews and Jewish organizations cause anti-Semitism, and echoed extremist conspiracy theories about the Jewish financier George Soros. As a result, the billionaire has lost a few advertisers on his social-media platform, and even got rapped by the White House. But as The New York Times reported, even as the U.S. government criticized Musk, it continued to buy things from him.
In fact, in recent months, Musk has raked in Pentagon cash, including more than $1 billion in exchange for launching spy satellites and other intelligence assets into orbit through his lucrative space-exploration venture, SpaceX. In September, days after Musk attacked the Anti-Defamation League and suggested that Jews cause anti-Semitism, he met with a bipartisan group of senators to discuss artificial intelligence. The magnate subsequently signed a deal worth up to $70 million to provide the U.S. government with a secure satellite communications system. “Rarely has the U.S. government so depended on the technology provided by a single technologist,” the Times wrote. Meanwhile, diverse actors ranging from the ADL to Representative Ilhan Omar keep advertising on Musk’s social-media site, his rich friends continue to defend him, and, last week, he was featured at a Times event.
Musk has similarly been wooed by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government, who—like Ukraine’s leadership—want to stay on the entrepreneur’s good side so that he doesn’t use technology like his Starlink satellite internet to harm their war efforts. Precisely because Musk plays a leading role in so many industries that are essential to humanity’s future—electric vehicles, artificial intelligence, space technology—no country can quit him, not even one as powerful as the United States or as Jewish as Israel. Likewise, no matter how many dinners Donald Trump has with anti-Semites such as Ye (formerly Kanye West) and Holocaust deniers such as Nick Fuentes, he will not be penalized for it by Republicans, because he is too essential to their party to be discarded.
This characteristic is what separates the big-league bigots who get away with it from those who don’t. Ye’s mistake was that he invested his talents in producing music and sneakers rather than something more indispensable to human flourishing, such as precision-guided ballistic missiles.
2. They don’t say the quiet part out loud. Those who want to fulminate about the Jews but lack the singular clout of Elon Musk still have plenty of options. They just need to be slightly more subtle about their prejudice. Take Tucker Carlson, once the most-watched man on cable news, who used his show to popularize a sanitized version of the same “Great Replacement” theory that Musk recently endorsed, which posits that Jewish elites are plotting to supplant the white race through the mass immigration of brown people. This white-supremacist fantasy motivated the 2018 massacre of worshippers at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, among other recent attacks. How did Carlson get such an unhinged idea on television? He repeated the anti-Semitic conspiracy theory—“They’re trying to change the population of the United States, and they hate it when you say that because it’s true, but that’s exactly what they’re doing”—but left out the word Jews and let the audience fill in the blank.
This time-honored technique provides even the most pointed prejudice with plausible deniability. In particular, whenever you see politicians or celebrities darkly ruminating about an amorphous “they” covertly controlling events, chances are good that you are seeing this strategy in action. Consider Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who has led Turkey, a member of NATO, since 2003. In 2014, he began darkly referring to a “mastermind” behind the country’s ills:
Don’t be misled. Don’t think that these operations are against my persona, our government, our party. Friends, these operations are rather directed against Turkey itself—its unity, its peace, its economy, its independence. And as I have said before, behind all these steps there is a mastermind. People ask me, “Who is this mastermind?” Well, you have to figure that out. And actually, you know what it is.
Erdoğan was not talking about the Amish. His allies subsequently produced a movie titled The Mastermind, which aired on pro-government TV stations and helpfully opened with an image of a Star of David. “At every stage,” the Turkish commentator Mustafa Akyol wrote at the time, “the film reminds us how the Judaic ‘mastermind’ has oppressed humanity for thousands of years.” As Erdoğan has consolidated his essentially unchecked power, he has become more forthright in his anti-Semitism, and faced no international consequences.
3. They replace Jew with Zionist. In 1934, Representative Louis McFadden of Pennsylvania took to the floor of Congress to complain about Jewish control of the American financial system. “Is it not true,” he bemoaned, “that, in the United States today, the gentiles have the slips of paper while the Jews have the gold?” Today, this sort of rhetoric is frowned upon in polite society, but aspiring anti-Semites have a work-around: substituting each instance of Jews with Zionists or Israelis. Then: The Jews control the world. Now: The Zionists control the world.
With this simple switch, prejudice magically becomes mere criticism of Israel. Social-media companies won’t moderate it, and many activists will defend it. People can even make their anti-Semitic argument live on CNN, as Pakistan’s foreign minister did in 2021, when he claimed that Israel controls the media. In this manner, an ancient conspiracy theory is updated to appeal to partisans in the 21st century, many of whom will insist that they don’t have an anti-Semitic bone in their body. Of course, Zionism warrants critique like any other political ideology, but conspiracism is not criticism. This is what Martin Luther King Jr. was referring to when he said, “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You’re talking anti-Semitism.”
One person who has mastered this maneuver is the supreme leader of Iran, Ali Khamenei, the man responsible for the most anti-Jewish violence in the world today. In 2021, he posted on social media: “The Zionists have always been a plague, even before establishing the fraudulent Zionist regime. Even then, Zionist capitalists were a plague for the whole world. Now they’re a plague especially for the world of Islam.”
In case the references to rapacious capitalists and comparisons of people to disease didn’t give it away, Khamenei was also not talking about the Amish. He was taking garden-variety anti-Semitism, replacing the word Jews with Zionists, and relying on his audience being too dense or partisan to care. Similarly, when the Republican politician Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia posted a video on her Facebook page declaring that “Zionist supremacists” were “breeding us out of existence in our own homelands,” she was drawing from the same poisoned well. Coded language has always served to smuggle bigotry into the public discourse, and anti-Semitism is no exception.
4. They say they were just “supporting Palestine.” Earlier this month, the actor Susan Sarandon was dropped by her talent agency. It was a mostly symbolic gesture, because the celebrated performer continues to get work and others will be happy to represent her. But almost immediately, viral posts on social media viewed more than 50 million times claimed that she had been punished for her pro-Palestinian advocacy. This popular narrative had only one small flaw: It was false.
As Deadline reported, the words that got Sarandon in trouble were not about Palestinians or Israelis. At a rally in New York, home to the largest Jewish population outside Israel, the actor referred to rising anti-Semitism in America and declared, “There are a lot of people that are afraid, afraid of being Jewish at this time, and are getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.” In reality, since the FBI began tracking hate crimes, Jews have been subjected to more anti-religious attacks than all other groups combined, despite constituting just 2 percent of the American population. This includes the massacre at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, multiple synagogue shootings in California, and a Texas congregation being taken hostage in 2022. Erasing anti-Semitism and attempting to pit American Jews and Muslims against each other in some sort of debased oppression Olympics is not “support for Palestine.” It’s ignorance at best and malice at worst, which is why Deadline accurately headlined its story “UTA Drops Susan Sarandon as Client Following Recent Antisemitic Remarks She Made at a Rally in New York.”
On social media, none of this mattered. Sarandon was misleadingly cast as a martyr for the Palestinian cause and celebrated by a diverse array of notables, including the journalist Glenn Greenwald, the presidential candidate Cornel West, several prominent progressive activists, and even the head of a human-rights group. None of these people linked to or acknowledged the actual substance of Sarandon’s remarks, even when confronted by commenters who raised them. None has corrected their claims.
Sarandon apologized on Friday, two weeks after her original statement. But the sleight of hand others used to defend her—in which apologetics for anti-Jewish violence are disingenuously recast as Palestinian advocacy—is endemic to our current discourse. Last month, an activist told a public-radio journalist that he’d been receiving “50 hate calls an hour” over a pro-Palestinian speech he delivered at an October 8 rally. But what he actually did was explicitly cheer the murder of civilians and declare, “I salute Hamas—a job well done.” This fact appeared nowhere in the published story, which said only that he “spoke in support of Palestine.”
Pro-Palestinian activism is not the same as anti-Semitism, which is why it’s important that when people say bigoted things about Jews or support violence against them, their words should not be conflated with Palestinian advocacy. But unfortunately, too many anti-Semites wrap themselves in the Palestinian cause, and too many partisans are happy to let them do so. This does not help any Palestinians, as it tends to tar their cause with prejudice, but it does insulate a fair number of anti-Semites from the consequences of their words or actions. That’s why in recent weeks, many bigots have attempted to use the Palestinian plight as their alibi, vandalizing Jewish institutions around the world, including synagogues and kosher restaurants, with “Free Palestine” and related slogans.
Every community has biases—toward the rich and powerful, toward ideological allies—that lead it to excuse bad behavior it would otherwise repudiate. But such excuses for prejudice work only because we allow them to. Covert anti-Semitism tends to turn into overt anti-Semitism. Until we start seriously confronting the former, we can expect more of the latter.
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liberalsarecool · 1 year
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No matter how many disgusting anti-semites and Holocaust deniers run out their 15-minutes of Republican fame, the new Nazi-lover is always welcome.
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