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girlactionfigure · 2 years

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THE MODERN BULLIES OF ANNE FRANK

Don't conflate Jews with a white civilisation that tried to EXTERMINATE them

I see twitter’s righteous ones are bullying Anne Frank again, a 15 year old Jewish girl exterminated in a concentration camp. She’s being bullied once again because she had “white privilege.” That lucky bitch. Did she take a moment to acknowledge what a lucky white bitch she was whilst hiding in a cupboard? Of course she didn’t. These stupid white girls are so full of themselves they can’t see beyond their entitlement: stupid Karen.

Of course the notion that Anne Frank had “white privilege” is anti-intellectual filth.

It is mind filth from morons whose historical illiteracy is equalled by their utter ignorance regarding Jewish identity.

Of course having one’s murdered body tipped into an unmarked pit is the antithesis of privilege - but let’s break down the whole story for the idiots out there.

I’m a Jew. Like the Franks, members of my family were murdered because they weren’t white. They were Jews. My history isn’t white history. My history is the history of Jews. My ancestors were told where to live, what to do. They were persecuted by white Europeans. Because they weren’t white. They were Jews. A civilisation of their own.

Let’s finally dispense with the “Jews are white” bullshit - whether from pure antisemites or those handful of Jews who run round like headless chickens to be accepted - seduced by non-Jewish peer pressure and disconnected from the reality of our history as a scattered and abused Levantine People.

Don’t conflate Jews with a white civilisation that has tried to exterminate them specifically because they weren’t seen as white European.

Jews in Canada and America - you’re not there because you’re white. You’re there because you’re a Jew. Your family most likely had to flee some place to finally end up there because Jews weren’t safe in Europe. Because they weren’t white. They were Jews.

I’m obliged to make the point that most Jews on planet earth don’t even have white pigmentation. From Ethiopian Jews, to Yemenite Jews, to Ashkenasi Jews - we have diverse levels of melanin.

I’m obliged to make this point as a way to neutralise the general thrust of this skin deep bullshit - but I do it with the heavy caveat that skin colour is not a metric through which the Jewish People have ever defined themselves.

We should reject non-Jewish attempts to dominate reality and coercively frame Jews according to the traditions and standards of the non-Jewish world. Jewish civilisation evolved long before modern Europe. During this time Jews formed an anthropological system for understanding themselves and the universe that simply does not scan with Western modes of categorising ethnic groups according to the uncertain metric of skin tone.

A Jew is a Jew. Membership of the tribe is not contigent upon colour. Though most are born Jewish, and though most can trace their genetic ancestry back to the Levant, Jews are also a tribe in which it’s possible for non-members to join regardless of genes or melanin level. Circumcision doesn’t ask the colour of your schmeckle. Epidermis is not what connects one Jew with another. We are connected through shared history, customs, culture and the mental fabric of an intellectual, spiritual and secular inner world shaped by Jewish ideas and philosophy. The fact that the individuals sharing this ontological universe have various complexions isn’t a story of ethnic differences, but a tale of tribal unity. It points to one People forcibly scattered around the globe but with origins stemming from one geographical region. Not white Europe. Not white America. But Middle-Eastern Israel.

So why are we seeing an attempt to assert Jews are white when previously Jews were attacked for NOT being white? Well firstly, lets acknowledge that neo-Nazis and kitchen table racists still don’t regard Jews as true members of white society. Nothing has changed there.

The reverse notion - that Jews ARE white - is being pushed by progressives, the left, social justice warriors, self-declared anti-racists, the woke and Israel haters of all creeds.

Why?

Because in the era of identity politics, whiteness has become synonymous in these circles with toxicity, privilege and power. These circles have simply absorbed and exhaled antisemitic cliches of Jewish power - in spite of Jews being the number one victims of racial and religious hate crimes.

By incorrectly placing Jews at the apex of societal power and lumping us in with white people, those who would define themselves as anti-racist are regurgitating antisemitic tropes of Jews as an obstacle to be confronted if a better world is to be created.

The contradiction between Jews being simultaneously toxic to Nazis because they AREN'T white, and toxic to the woke because they ARE white is easily resolved. They both see Jews as possessing unfair power and they are both seeking to deprive Jews of fraternal kinship based upon the codes of their particular world view. The whooping, hallooing, feral attacks on the murdered Jewish child Anne Frank shows just how detached from reality these fundamentalists have become.

Israel of course figures in the bid to label Jews white. I’m afraid to say that once again the left, (and Israel haters of all creeds and ethnicities), are holding hands and dancing with Nazis in a waltz that treads on Jews.

Jews were once told to go back to Israel because we WEREN'T white. Now that we've returned home we're told to leave Israel because we ARE white.

It's the confused dance of a world that simply doesn't want us anywhere.

If haters can depict Jews as white Europeans, then with the wave of a magic wand, we are transformed into colonial invaders who don't belong in a non-white Middle East.

The premise is absurd.

When white Europeans went to the Americas and Africa they didn't find ancient manuscripts of William Shakespeare - because they were colonisers.

But Jews in Israel find ancient manuscripts written in Hebrew, the same language they speak today, describing the same rituals - because they are a People indigenous to the middle east.

When white Europeans went to the Americas and Africa they didn't find churches - because they were colonisers.

In Israel you can't move for Jewish artefacts, archeology and ancient synagogues found everywhere. Yet we are still harassed with misplaced taunts of being white, European colonialists.

Read More: Here

H/T @gaiagalit

Lee Kern

#Ann Frank #white priveledge #Judaism #Jews

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thesickpanda · 2 years

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The Ableds are At it Again

Story time!

Years ago, when I was running a feminist non-profit and getting increasingly immersed in leftwing spaces and rhetoric, I came across what I then thought of as a peculiar phenomenon. I’d entered feminist activism *totally* naive, and had no clue about the different approaches, ideologies and sects within it (it was a harsh and steep learning curve). The phenomenon I observed was how certain minority groups stuck to themselves. For example, most of the feminist groups I found myself attending were blindingly white, and I knew my city to be very multicultural, so I dumbly thought, “where are all the women of colour?” My little white noggin’ still had the rainbows and unicorns notion that “We Are All Women Who Share the Same Struggle! Therefore We Should Stick Together!”, completely ignorant of the history of feminism, particularly white feminism, in doing the exact opposite of that (a trend that persists to this day). I had the audacity to feel miffed that black women made their own feminist groups and often termed them by other names. How could we Win the Fight Against Patriarchy if we stood divided, I thought?

Ha. Ha ha. Haaaaaa.

It took me quite a while to understand why minority groups did this. It’s because dealing with privilege, particularly white and abled privilege, is unbelievably exhausting, annoying and frustrating. It also gets in the way of any progress you might actually make in your activism. The people who spearhead such groups are tone-deaf to criticism and don’t make time or space for issues that don't directly affect them and them alone. They’ll pay flimsy lip service to black, indigenous, disabled and transwomen from time to time, but that is about it. For the record, I was never part of any TERF groups, just groups that oozed middle class white privilege. In time, I started joining groups that were more diverse, and I was *always* welcomed into spaces run by people of colour (which, when I look back on it, was an honour and not an entitlement). I learned a lot from the multicultural women’s groups I joined and how different their struggle actually looked. (I am myself a migrant from a developing country). I listened a lot, spoke little and realized how small the scope of most white feminist led organisations were. And I decided to make my own group a different sort of space. Years later, I feel I mostly achieved that, but I did so by platforming more than just white women, and collaborating with diverse groups on issues that were important to them. I made strong ties with those groups and made sure to check in. I absolutely still had my blind spots and I got it wrong a lot, but I was determined to try.

The point is, I understand why minority groups stick together, because dealing with privileged groups is painful, difficult and annoying as fuck.

I am disabled and my number one complaint (and the chief reason I quit activism after a near decade) is how relentlessly ableist I found activist spaces. Venues were often inaccessible, and few if any accommodations were made to people who were blind, deaf or used a wheelchair. I had real difficulty getting to some of the locations of events and meetings, almost all of which were city based (as in the CBD) and never out in the “poorer” parts of the wider city (where I lived). The distance of a venue to public transport was almost never factored in. Abled bodied volunteers would ghost me after committing to projects or events, leaving me, the chronically ill person, to pick up the slack over and over again, pushing myself into crash after crash (their excuses for not turning up ranged from, “I felt tired” to “I forgot” to no reason at all.) Hosting events in the city was often prohibitively expensive, and there were no grants to help small community groups pay for such expenses as venues and AUSLAN interpreters. Chairs in public venues were hideously uncomfortable and I was always in agony. If there was food, intolerances and allergies were rarely catered for. People used to ditch me at train stations where they said they’d pick me up and help me with my bags, so I was in a flare by the time I reached the location of the event. It was, frankly, hellish. Whenever I dared to call out ableism in my so-called allies, they took enormous offense and either demanded I apologize to them, or they quit on me. (I am trauma-trained to be polite and conflict-averse, so it took courage for me to say anything at all). Such experiences eventually wore me down until I left activism with a great deal of bitterness.

After that, I spent more time in spaces for the chronically ill and disabled and my goodness, what a difference that made. I went to local groups and found a welcoming, understanding space where I didn't need to JADE (justify, argue, defend and explain) my position all the time; where accommodations were made for my disability without fuss; where people just *got* it. I really enjoyed being in those support groups. I started befriending other people with chronic illnesses and just found myself a great deal more at ease in their company. I enjoyed this for such a brief time, because then Covid hit and made going to those places in person impossible for me. Thankfully, I have my wonderful Tumblr mutuals, my international friends, and my local support group still does meetings via Zoom, and I have managed to keep up with some of my chronically ill and disabled friends, both locally and in the city. I am glad I had the opportunity to meet them all before things went pandemic shaped.

Now for rub:

I write all this, because I am in the midst of what feels like yet another fall out with able-bodied friends. These friends promised me they cared for me and I could tell them anything; that they’d be open to hearing my views and learning more about my disability. They took no initiative to do this in their own time, mind you, and at the time they met me (just as I was leaving feminist activism behind) I was in no mood to be their tutor. I just wanted local buds to hang out with, play games, go for walks etc. I wanted to feel, and be treated like, a human being. I’d been an activist educator for 9 years and I was tired of it. I just wanted to live my life at that point. I also got a vibe that they were saying those things without actually understanding what honesty might look like from a disabled person. I don’t think they actually expected me to ever call out ableist behaviour. I got the impression that if I ever did, it would not go over well. So I bit my tongue on a number of things, and made a whole heap of allowances for less-than-ideal statements and behaviours. I was in the midst of cutting ties with my abusive family, and desperately in need of a tribe nearby me, so I swallowed down my discomfort and chose to focus on their good sides and the nice things they had to offer.

This worked fairly well up until recently, when we started going into discussions around class, race, human rights and so on. They are white vegans with, let me just say, a very White Vegan headspace (ya’ll know what I am referring to here) and so have a nihilist and reductionist “anti-human” view. Now, to be fair to them, when they met me, I kinda had the same view (albeit from a totally different angle and from different experiences). I was over Humans et large, due to the appalling treatment my disabled ass received for years in leftwing spaces. If the very people who were supposed to care about issues pertaining to disability weren’t even bothering to do that, then what the hell was the point of doing anything, I thought? I was thoroughly jaded and let down by people, so it was easy to fall into step with their negative views on people in general. Theirs was a “humans are terrible because they kill animals and torture each other and pollute” mindset and mine was a “people are lazy, selfish, narrow-minded and ego-driven and I am DONE” mindset.

Then I got therapy.

Therapy changed everything.

Therapy helped me find myself. I identified the problems in my own behavior and the causes of those maladaptive copes (losing myself in activism as a substitute for grieving my dead activist father being one of them). Through EMDR I probed my dark depths, reckoned with the chronic and terrible emotional abuse I had endured growing up, grieved the family I deserved but never had, reconciled with my work addiction and, most importantly, rediscovered my inner child and her beautiful propensity towards hope. I was so broken when I met my psych, having given up my career in activism (which destroyed what was left of my fragile health) and in the midst of breaking up with my family. I was in a very dark place and suicidal. But bit by bit, she has been restoring the light within me, and helping me to love myself and make peace with my past and its mistakes.

I am changing.

So when my friends started on one of their nihilist anti-human rants a few weeks ago (see this post), I started to counter it with nuance, hope and optimism. And….

They didn't like that. Not one bit.

I tried to address it with them in a follow up meeting. I explained that my mental health was fragile but that I was trying to recover it, and that hope in the world, hope in the process, was important for me to get through this phase in my life. Initially they said they understood and would respect that, and then not 10 minutes later I was dealing with an absurd defence of why mass omnicide was the only way to fix the universe’s evil ways (i.e. “blow up the universe to end all suffering”). It was preachy, it was ignorant, it was genocidal language (which for disabled people, along with most other minority groups, is really offensive) and then the more I probed it the more they doubled down. The two of them bullied me in their defense of an indefensible (and philosophically lazy) world view, which is that suffering negates all other aspects of life, and as long as suffering exists, life shouldn’t.

We ended that meeting with quiet hurt and the next day I got a text from my white abled bodied friend accusing me of hurting her feeling by calling out some of the things she said as racist (they were - viewing the survival of brown babies thanks to improved healthcare in Sierra Leone as a net negative for the world because “more humans” is outrageously racist) and ableist (devaluing life because of any form of suffering is massively devaluing the lives of people with chronic pain and illness, or other forms of disability). I called these things out gently, but no matter how much padding you give a call-out, The Ableds Get Weird.

I had invited those friends over because I was having a difficult few weeks for a variety of reasons, and I needed to be cheered up. I made that need clear at the beginning.. I had also hoped I could explain to them why I needed them to uplift and support me with positivity at the moment, as doing the trauma therapy was hard work and draining, and I needed wind put into my sails, not taken out of it. So to come away from that gathering feeling disrespected, stressed out and deeply hurt, did a real number on my health. As they had always told me I could be vulnerable with them, this hurt twice as badly, because when (after years) I finally tested that theory and *was* vulnerable enough to say “Hey, I don’t appreciate it when you say that problematic thing”, I got a faceful of white fragility, outrage and defensiveness.

Oh, the precious little ego of the self-appointed white savior.

My partner pointed out something interesting. He said, “they are left leaning in theory, but the only actions they take are in the defense of animal rights, and animals cannot talk back to them. Animals are “under their care” and have no voice. Animals are beings to be saved, playing into that savior complex. Animals cannot call out problematic behaviours or narrow-minded views. They are not used to having to support or uplift a group that can talk back.”

I thought that was quite astute.

Anyway, after the event, I went into my third flare in as many weeks, and I have been physically sick from the stress and anxiety of the situation every day since it happened. My pain has gotten worse; my nightmares (which were just starting to abate due to therapy) returned with a vengeance; I lost all the weight I’d tried so hard to regain due to chronic IBS; I cannot hold my food down and I can hardly sleep. My partner tried to talk to them, at first in person (they were in such denial about their part in this fiasco he came back crestfallen) and then again through an olive-branch email that basically said, “let’s just let it go but proceed in future with some boundaries, namely, let’s not talk about pessimist world views and politics and instead focus on the things we bond over, like board games and nature walks). He knew they weren’t up to the challenge of understanding the complexity of this situation, and so he'd tried to give everyone an easy out. Forgive and forget, move past it, avoid thorny topics in future. They sat on that for days, apparently deliberating whether or not the friendship they had framed with terms like “forever” and “found family” and “we love you” was actually worth a dime to them.

I got angry. And despite my illness, I sat down and wrote a letter explaining my past, who I was, who I am now and who I intend to become. I explained in more academic terms why their views were problematic, but also went to great pains to say that I don't write people off for having problematic views because everyone does (myself included) and told them the same story I have told you, dear reader at the beginning of this post. I hoped if I explained myself (the old JADE again) they’d understand, but deep down inside, I knew that, judging from their behavior at even the modest call out, this would likely end the friendship for good.

They completely ignored that email. As in, they acknowledge its receipt, but literally none of its content. In fact, they framed my writing it as “taking things too far”. Funny how when the injured party speaks up, it’s all getting too much for them to bear. Gotta love the further silencing of the disabled victim here. Instead they deflected, made petty comebacks and basically wanted to handwave the whole thing away without giving anything due consideration or making clear that they understood the situation at all.

My partner and I crafted another reply to them to address this. We await their response.

If at the end of all this they discard me for being my honest self, then I will discard the notion of even being friends with ableds again. I am so over them and their fragility and egotistical defenses.

People who won’t support your growth in a better direction are not worth keeping around.

I’m just gonna hang out with my fellow spoonies, and all of you beautiful peeps here in my carefully curated and wonderful Tumblr community.

Seriously. Ables ARE weird. And not the good kind.

And I am so DONE with it.

[Addendum: for the record, I am not against vegans or anything; just a very particular type of poorly reasoned and highly privileged white vegan headspace that often comes into conflict with disabled and indigenous peoples and their lives]

#white vegans #ableists #ableism #abledsareweird #the ableds are at it again #white fragility #white priveledge #abled priveledge #dealing with ignorance #mental health #oh god not this again #long post

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