#we already see actual antisemites using this as an excuse to attack Jewish people | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

hussyknee · 5 months

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If y'all want to feel sympathy for the Israelis, you better have it for every single genocider. Slavers and settlers that scalped Natives and Nazis and Imperial Japan and Stalinists and Serbs and the British East India company and white nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists and Hindutvas and Assad's forces and and and.

People do not become genociders because of victimhood. The majority of the worst colonial empires were people who hadn't been oppressed themselves in centuries. Groups become genocidal because they have power and want to take their trauma or paranoia out on someone weaker than they are. Even the ones who aren't gleefully enthusiastic go along with it because the benefits and risks of dissent outweigh your moral conscience. You're not forced to make those choices. That's not what indoctination is. Indoctrination helps dehumanization. It's making it easy to silence every doubt and qualm and instinct for empathy and compassion. But you still choose. You make a conscious decision to see a human being as a vermin to be eradicated. It's easy to do that when you have no incentive to see them as human and no consequences for treating them accordingly.

For fuck's sake, stop using the Holocaust as an excuse for Zionists. Half of them are converts or the children of converts who never lived the Jewish generational legacy of persecution. Most of their families migrated from places where they had a perfectly comfortable lives, and the other half was born in Israel and never knew what being a marginalized minority was like. Israelis are literally the least oppressed Jews in the known world. They victimize Palestinians because colonizers and oppressors live in mortal fear of the people they colonize and oppress, because they KNOW that they're crushing them and have to manufacture all sorts of narratives to rationalize and justify that they're actually the good guys.

Colonization and genocide is a result of power. I and a lot of other BIPOC have been traumatized by Zionists before we ever knew the word for them, because they keep taking out their paranoia of Jewish hate on Black people, Natives, immigrants, Muslims and Arabs and every kind of racial minority that have no systemic power to hurt them. They have such a foothold in the Jewish communities of Europe and its settler colonies (Australia, the Americas), because white Jews have assimilated into whiteness. However conditional their acceptance among white Christians, they have the same racial and institutional power over Black and brown colonized people. Which makes it easy for them to choose Zionism— the legitimizing of white colonial anxiety in place of fear of their oppressor. Antisemitism is their ready and convenient way to rationalize the racism and Islamphobia and racial superiority they already have.

Do you think Jews are the only people who have ever been genocided? The Holocaust was not exceptional, it was exceptionalized by the Western powers to launder their own atrocities that far outstripped Nazi Germany. Look at what they're doing with Ukraine. They're being genocided and colonized and they deserve empathy and help against Russia. But the West isn't concerned about Armenia the same way even though it's also an Eastern European country. They definitely weren't concerned about any of the other countries Russia has attacked or helped genocide (like Syria). Including Ukraine itself before all this. Putin has been attacking Donbas since 2014.

So why now? They care about who's genociding Ukraine, not about Ukrainians. Russia under Putin is very much a threat to NATO and Ukraine is bordered by NATO countries. The Western PR machine still had to make Ukrainians white, because Slavs are ethnically marginalized in Western Europe, and even North America to a lesser degree. They have white privilege over all Asians and Africans and Indigenous people because the colour system of race is based on European colonization, but they have only conditional whiteness in the imperial sphere of both the US and Russia. But because they're ethnically European, the US and Western Europe was able to launch a PR "Look They're Just Like Us!" campaign to elevate them to full whiteness, so that their own citizens would actually give a shit about this country they'd barely heard of before. That's why we're all more concerned about Ukraine than any other Eastern Europeans (we're all conditioned into white supremacy). After that, the US went around thumping its own chest for a full year and half, trying to launder its military image after the twenty year Muslim genocide that was the War on Terror (still ongoing).

This is exactly what they did with European Jews. High-ho, somebody victimized by the Enemy! Dust them off and lookie! They're European! People will give a shit that we liberated them if we make them all white! But uh, do we really want five million Jewish refugees in here? Oh I know, we'll thrown in with those crazy Jewish terrorists that were giving the Brits so much trouble, and give them a state! They're also from Europe after all, and Civilized™, unlike the savages!

And then the liberated Jews accepted doing exactly what the Nazis did to them. Not because they had to! They could have just lived in Palestine, that whole region of the Levant was pretty secular and multicultural. But they didn't see Arabs as human beings! Because Europeans are taught to see Black and brown people as servants and savages! They massacred Palestinians and took the place over because they could and then called it the War of Independence. The first people they victimized after that? Were Arab Jews. They colluded with Arab nationalists to have them ethnically cleansed entirely out of their countries and scooped them up to create a labouring underclass! Put them up in such squalid conditions that scores died!

And did those people look around and realize white Jews were their oppressors and they had far more in common with Palestinians? No. They threw in with their oppressors to help make Palestinians lives a generational nightmare. Because power and assimilation! This is the exact same reason why Zionists has been trying to cosy up to Nazis since before Hitler.

(Oh and by the way? Germans never regretted the Nazis or the Holocaust. The Americans "denazification" was a dead fail. They just used Israel to make a whole dog and pony show of how very sorry they were and how it was a Dark Moment in Their History™ (because nothing they've ever done to colonized people counts). They paid reparations because the West made them, but they never got over the massive post-war genocide the Allies subjected their people to, or the way they carved up the country like a Christmas turkey. But again, did they hold Britain, France, US and Russia responsible for it? Did they acknowledge that the most severe cases of post-war violence came from American GIs? Of course not. Obviously the biggest threat was...the Poles.)

If you really see all those TikTok videos of families dancing to their genocide songs, taunting starving and dehydrated Palestinians and teens lampooning Palestinian mothers grieving their dead children and think "they're also victims because Western imperialists exploited their fear and made them into monsters" then I don't even know what to say to you. That level of infantilization, wilful ignorance and need to turn sadism into victimhood is breathtakingly racist and paternalistic. Even if you believe #Not All Israelis, the point is there's enough Israelis. Also what is even there to feel sorry for?? Are Israelis about to be turned out and shot in the streets? Starve to death? Have their limbs amputated without anesthetic and still die of sepsis? Literally what??

Emotions are signifiers of your own internal biases and perspectives. They aren't indicative of justice or morality. We can't move through a deeply unequal world and believe that compassion is having the same responses, judgements and feelings for everyone. It's not empathy you're feeling for Israelis, it's conditioned philosemitism and casual racism against Palestinians. If you actually followed the videos and images and news coming out of Palestine, you would feel about as sympathetic towards them as Nazis. You would understand that this kind of atrocity doesn't come from trauma or having been victims. It comes from having zero consequences for doing them. It comes from unchecked, gleeful, sadistic power.

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traincat · 5 years

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can you make a post about peter parker being jewish. i’ve already seen people trying to argue that it’s just a headcanon with no basis, and they’re even trying to say that into the spider-verse wasn’t trying to portray peter as a jewish man. you’re just so good at making organized and well-informed posts, and i know that you know peter is and always has been meant to be a jewish man even if certain writers over the years didn’t think it should be canon.

I can absolutely do that, and thank you for thinking I am in any way organized instead of just from a family that knows how to argue. (A little Jewish joke courtesy of Spider-Ham’s John Mulaney to start us off right.)

So I’ve talked before about how Peter Parker is clearly Jewish even if we have yet to directly address that within the page of an actual Marvel comic – Star of David shaped confetti raining down, a neon sign blinking PETER PARKER IS JEWISH, and taped footage of his bris, since sometimes it seems like that’s what it would take to convince people, and even then you know there’d be people saying it didn’t count. I can re-address everything I’ve gone into in that post and others: Stan Lee’s own Jewish background, the fact that Peter Parker’s childhood home in set in Forest Hills, Queens, a famously Jewish neighborhood, the concept of wit as a weapon, the character’s own values and moral code. The fast talk, the Yiddish, him namedropping Jewish holidays from Hanukkah to Shavuot (or as he, like the nice Jewish boy from Queens he is, says, “Shavuos.”). We can get into Spider-Man as the embodiment of New York City, and the inherent subtext of that. I can pull up Andrew Garfield’s interview, where he states that he’s Jewish on his father’s side and recognized the Jewishness in Peter Parker and used that in his performance. I can and have and will again at some point pull specific panels and point out things, both little and big. I can pull up Brian Michael Bendis saying that every Peter Parker is Jewish.

However, let’s shove all of that aside for the moment and focus specifically on Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and how any assertion that the film didn’t specifically and purposefully portray a Jewish Peter Parker is either ignorant of Jewish custom, pedantic nitpicking that tramples representation, or spiteful anti-semitic trolling. I’m going to explain why in two points.

First, the actual movie. Spoilers from this point on, obviously, although I’m talking about a half second’s worth of footage. At about the half hour mark, as Peter B. Parker’s life story is rolling by and as he says he got married, we see his foot crush a glass wrapped in a white napkin. It’s a split-second blink and you’ll miss it scene, and it rocked my entire world. The groom breaking the glass is an important Jewish wedding custom that takes place at the end of the ceremony. This scene isn’t in there by accident (in a film as intricate and dense as Into the Spider-Verse, I’d argue that very little could be) – no one slipped this in last moment. This was a planned and very well constructed statement about this specific Peter’s identity. That it made it into the final product at all blows my mind and I am so incredibly thankful to everyone who made sure it did. I think it’s beautiful and amazing that in the movie that marked Miles Morales’ debut in cinema, Spider-Verse also took the time to make a statement about Peter Parker’s Jewish identity – neither of the main Spider-Men in the movie are white Christian men. (And Spider-Man Noir likes fighting nazis. A lot.) In a year like 2018, with a rise in antisemitic attacks, that’s incredible. It made me cry.

“Couldn’t Mary Jane be Jewish and that’s why Peter stepped on the glass?” some people might try to argue, perhaps in good faith but most likely just to be pedantic and nitpicky. And like, sure. Yeah, that could be a possibility. (It could also be a possibility that they’re both Jewish. You can have more than one.) Either way, this specific Peter Parker had a Jewish wedding, and while Mary Jane’s presence plays an important role in the film, she herself (and specifically this Peter’s her) has very limited screentime. Those intros were meant to tell us things about the characters they were introducing: Peter was the subject. He was the narrator. This was an important image of the wedding to him. Again, this scene wasn’t accidental: Spider-Verse was telling us that this specific Peter, at the very least, is Jewish. It’s a clear, direct tribute to Peter Parker, to the Jewish roots of superheroes, to Stan Lee and all the other Jewish creators who created the foundation for superhero comics as we know them, and to what a down to Earth hero born out of New York culture, who comes from Queens, might really be.

Reason the second: there is actual taped interview footage of Phil Lord saying the words “he’s a Jewish kid from Queens.” Rodney Rothman, the scene’s director, also addressed basically everything I just said up there in this interview, joking about his own insistence that Peter Parker is Jewish. And yes, of course, you could nitpick, you could come up with all the excuses why it could not count, why it could mean something else, but at the end of the day it’s clear that the intention of these creators was to get a Jewish Peter Parker onto the big screen. The intention was for you to see him step on the glass and for it to click with you, oh hey, Spider-Man’s Jewish! And for people who are bothered by that, who feel the need to nitpick, so say “well, actually,” to insist that Peter Parker isn’t Jewish because blah blah blah – why? Why not embrace this added piece of diversity to a movie that was in part a love letter to New York, and to the parts of it and the marginalized cultures Peter and Miles both represent within the film? The notion of a Jewish Peter Parker should do nothing but delight and inspire.

I don’t know the current state of what the contracts in place over portrayals of Peter Parker look like. I’m sure some of us remember Sony’s infamous contract that stated Peter Parker could never be portrayed as anything other than white, Christian, and heterosexual and have no idea if its existence could have impacted Spider-Verse in any way or if it was even possible at the current moment to be more direct about the character’s Jewishness than Spider-Verse’s stepping on a glass scene. I do know that the joy and excitement I’ve seen over Spider-Verse’s stepping on the glass scene has been overwhelming and it has made me and I’m sure many other Jewish fans of Peter Parker, who have long seen this aspect of our own identity reflected back in him, very happy. I do know that making noise about this and lifting it up and saying this is good, we want to see more of this will let people know that the concept of a Jewish Peter Parker is marketable, and that people would embrace this character with that part of his history brought into the light and made explicitly canon. It took decades for another famously Jewish Marvel superhero, Ben Grimm, to be allowed to have that aspect of his identity openly addressed on the page despite the heavy Jewish coding woven into the character’s history, and I believe Spider-Verse’s breaking the glass scene and the reactions I’ve seen towards it are a big step in doing the same for Peter Parker. Pun fully intended.

(Also as someone with a complicated relationship with the concept of the Jewish nose – I want to thank the Into the Spider-Verse artists for the schnoz. It looks good on him.)

#peter parker #spiderman #into the spiderverse #into the spiderverse spoilers #traincat talks comics #also regarding a different peter parker within the film #i gotta say that recording a christmas album #with a song titled It's Beginning to Look Like a Non-Denominational Holiday is like #a top ten jewish move #long post/#jewish peter parker

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