"We can't talk about anti-Semitism when Jews are getting beaten up in the streets here in the United States. "
He is right that we can't talk about it. But it would seem he can't talk about the reason we can't talk about it. Thankfully the Wall Street Journal was willing to talk about it.
>>Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor from 2014-21, was hardly unique in speaking of the threat to Jews only from white supremacists. Yet the majority of anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York are committed by other minorities—blacks especially, but also Hispanics and Muslims. “These are inconvenient anti-Semites,” Mr. Bitton says. Liberals would rather stick to their story: Minorities are always victims of racism, never racists themselves.
>>Meanwhile, surveys since the 1960s have shown that Jew-hatred in America is most prevalent among blacks. As traditional prejudices fused with radical separatist ideologies, anti-Semitism became part of the rhetoric of black politics and protest, the language not only of the street but of preachers and politicians, artists and intellectuals, imbuing criminal violence against Jews with spurious political significance.
Here's a question for Mr. Greenblatt: what, exactly, do you think the people who had to be shoved aside so that "the Jews [could] have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland" were supposed to do? (Yes, had to be. The degree of shoving could have been more than it was, could have been less than it was, but anyone who thinks that Israel could have been established without at least some significant degree of injustice is kidding themselves.) Do you actually believe that they were under some moral obligation to calmly pack their bags and go "Oh well,. I guess we're just less important than the Jews"? Because listening to Zionists, I swear that's what it sounds like.
The ethnic cleansing and , yes, genocide of Indigenous Americans by America’s colonists and citizens was orders of magnitude greater and equally brutal to the expulsion and relocation of Arabs from the U.N. Created state of Israel following 1948. That separation of people continued long after the state of Israel enlarged itself by winning the wars begun by the Arab states 1948, 1967, 1973. Do you suppose those Ingigenous Americans (Indians) “were just less important than the American European immigrants that displaced them?
Are you sure you want to go there? Because if Americans have no right to complain about anyone else's ethnic cleansing (always hated that term, but I guess we're stuck with it) given our history, that very same reasoning would mean that Jews are no one to talk about genocide. Do the words "Thou shalt utterly destroy them" ring a bell?
To match scripture for scripture, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” Matthew 7.5 More to the point, your quote in the Hebrew Bible G*d commands the ancient Israelites to utterly destroy them, begins in Deuteronomy 7.1, “When the Lord, your God, brings you into the land to which you are coming to possess it [as G*ds gift] , He will cast away many nations from before you: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivvites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and powerful than you.
In other words these lands are iG*ds creation story to the biblical Jews for maintaining the covenant. To suppose it grants permission, three thousand years later, for the modern Jews of Israel to commit the human rights violation of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from an expanded state conquered in modern wars is absurd. In modern Just War Theory, such action is both a war crime and in the absence of war , it is a Human Rights violation.
In the beginning in America, Jews found freedom and enfranchisement in places like colonial South Carolina and Georgia because of England's newly found toleration of religious dissenters. It's hard to see toleration of dissent from the orthodoxies of the left or the right in America.
Zionism is a dual factor in the discussions and attitudes surrounding antisemitism in the United States.
People can in good faith question whether any group is entitled to a political cause that implies territorial ambitions.
At the same time, people can in bad faith use this politically debatable concept as a means of laundering antisemitism for introduction into polite discussion. This is a move that we see particularly on the left side of the political spectrum. Old-fashioned right-wing antisemites are more likely to come straight to the point. Progressives want to have it both ways: being on the side of the angels as regards bigotry generally while adopting a form of bigotry that serves some proximate purpose.
When I was growing up, I naively believed that antisemitism was (1) strictly a troglodytic thing and (2) fading away, at least in American society; but then I'm a Gentile.
"We can't talk about anti-Semitism when Jews are getting beaten up in the streets here in the United States. "
He is right that we can't talk about it. But it would seem he can't talk about the reason we can't talk about it. Thankfully the Wall Street Journal was willing to talk about it.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/inconvenient-anti-semites-new-york-hate-crime-kanye-jewish-black-hasidic-brooklyn-11671200214
From the article:
>>Bill de Blasio, New York’s mayor from 2014-21, was hardly unique in speaking of the threat to Jews only from white supremacists. Yet the majority of anti-Jewish hate crimes in New York are committed by other minorities—blacks especially, but also Hispanics and Muslims. “These are inconvenient anti-Semites,” Mr. Bitton says. Liberals would rather stick to their story: Minorities are always victims of racism, never racists themselves.
>>Meanwhile, surveys since the 1960s have shown that Jew-hatred in America is most prevalent among blacks. As traditional prejudices fused with radical separatist ideologies, anti-Semitism became part of the rhetoric of black politics and protest, the language not only of the street but of preachers and politicians, artists and intellectuals, imbuing criminal violence against Jews with spurious political significance.
Here's a question for Mr. Greenblatt: what, exactly, do you think the people who had to be shoved aside so that "the Jews [could] have the right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland" were supposed to do? (Yes, had to be. The degree of shoving could have been more than it was, could have been less than it was, but anyone who thinks that Israel could have been established without at least some significant degree of injustice is kidding themselves.) Do you actually believe that they were under some moral obligation to calmly pack their bags and go "Oh well,. I guess we're just less important than the Jews"? Because listening to Zionists, I swear that's what it sounds like.
Mr. Karol,
The ethnic cleansing and , yes, genocide of Indigenous Americans by America’s colonists and citizens was orders of magnitude greater and equally brutal to the expulsion and relocation of Arabs from the U.N. Created state of Israel following 1948. That separation of people continued long after the state of Israel enlarged itself by winning the wars begun by the Arab states 1948, 1967, 1973. Do you suppose those Ingigenous Americans (Indians) “were just less important than the American European immigrants that displaced them?
Are you sure you want to go there? Because if Americans have no right to complain about anyone else's ethnic cleansing (always hated that term, but I guess we're stuck with it) given our history, that very same reasoning would mean that Jews are no one to talk about genocide. Do the words "Thou shalt utterly destroy them" ring a bell?
To match scripture for scripture, “Thou hypocrite, first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye.” Matthew 7.5 More to the point, your quote in the Hebrew Bible G*d commands the ancient Israelites to utterly destroy them, begins in Deuteronomy 7.1, “When the Lord, your God, brings you into the land to which you are coming to possess it [as G*ds gift] , He will cast away many nations from before you: the Hittites, the Girgashites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivvites, and the Jebusites, seven nations more numerous and powerful than you.
In other words these lands are iG*ds creation story to the biblical Jews for maintaining the covenant. To suppose it grants permission, three thousand years later, for the modern Jews of Israel to commit the human rights violation of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from an expanded state conquered in modern wars is absurd. In modern Just War Theory, such action is both a war crime and in the absence of war , it is a Human Rights violation.
In the beginning in America, Jews found freedom and enfranchisement in places like colonial South Carolina and Georgia because of England's newly found toleration of religious dissenters. It's hard to see toleration of dissent from the orthodoxies of the left or the right in America.
Zionism is a dual factor in the discussions and attitudes surrounding antisemitism in the United States.
People can in good faith question whether any group is entitled to a political cause that implies territorial ambitions.
At the same time, people can in bad faith use this politically debatable concept as a means of laundering antisemitism for introduction into polite discussion. This is a move that we see particularly on the left side of the political spectrum. Old-fashioned right-wing antisemites are more likely to come straight to the point. Progressives want to have it both ways: being on the side of the angels as regards bigotry generally while adopting a form of bigotry that serves some proximate purpose.
When I was growing up, I naively believed that antisemitism was (1) strictly a troglodytic thing and (2) fading away, at least in American society; but then I'm a Gentile.
http://thefamilyproperty.blogspot.com/2022/11/never-draws-near.html