Great piece and thanks for writing it. I never imagined that I might wake up in an America and Europe in which jew hunts are excusable based on sports rivalry and pogroms are considered as political resistance. But here we are. We are producing educated elites and recent university graduates who are so drunk on racial politics and oppressor-oppressed narrative that they are associating with the most atavistic form of jew hatred in all of human history--and they apparently have no idea what they are doing.
Your point about the double standard for Jews is a reasonable one. It is too bad that, probably in order to confirm your liberal bonafides, you needed to assert in your article that Israel is behaving badly in Gaza. You know, I am certain, that that is a debatable point. So, why was it included in your piece?
I'm not saying that. I'm saying you could make the argument that Israel is disproportionately and collectively punishing Gazans. And if you do make that argument, then you have condemn what the pro-Palestinian activists did to Jews in Amsterdam.
That's true, but your argument, as phrased ("You could even argue that the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza..."), assumes that Israel *is* collectively punishing Gazans.
Yes, but please don't excuse the Israelis. What I have in mind is the Israeli attitude toward the rest of the world. Too often, it is hostile. Just an anecdote: A few years ago, my wife and I visited Budapest, from where my grandparents had emigrated to the U.S. over a hundred years ago. We found the city interesting and the Great Synagogue quite fascinating, both in its architecture and its iconography. But the process of entering the synagogue was quite distasteful. It was guarded by several young Israeli men who, despite the fact that I am obviously Jewish, were unpleasant and churlish to us (maybe that is redundant, but they were awful) . They almost ruined our visit.
Anecdotes are dangerous, but they are the way people learn about he world.
Are you saying that the specific people who were attacked participated in Israeli actions? If they did not, then Israel has nothing to do with it. We decided several decades ago that collective punishment for the actions of others is not justified, regardless of who is doing it. No excuses for anyone or anything else needed or relevant.
True, you started your comment with "Yes...", but how can one interpret the rest? When you say "please don't excuse the Israelis", if you're not claiming that the Israelis are somehow responsible for these attacks, for what do they need to be excused? Ruining your vacation? How is that relevant to this conversation?
Here's a piece I'm working on for my Substack site.
It’s so awful that there is something it is like to be one many-many-many-hundred-headed biryon monster that can spend a moment set aside in a packed Amsterdam soccer stadium for silently recognizing the victims of floods in Spain belting out an appallingly much-rehearsed song that ends on this punchline: “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left.”
It’s the same monster that a year earlier took the 4,500-mile trip to the same city and gathered in a public place to flawlessly belt out this song for the locals’ edification: “We will fuck you/And then we will drink your blood/In the town square we will hang you/Every communist who comes here/We will take your girls/When we rape them we will shout/Today is death, Hapoel.”
Of course there was also something it was like to be the many-many-many-headed antisemitic monster that spent one year after another in the first half of the last century making Amsterdam a living and death-dealing hell for the ancestors of these idiot biryons and of course there is something awful it is like to be a different mob of soccer chavs and a different gang of soccer yobs and hoons and neds and cougans and bovver boys and girls who alone know what it’s like to be them as they ply their hive mind in finding their own twists to put on this human routine of shitting on true human accomplishments like introducing what should simply be a good thing called “The Beautiful Game”.
Thank god that as Nagel made plain I have no way to really know what it is like to be a thing that in the aftermath of horrific floods that kill its human brothers and sisters and in the middle of its country’s plan to keep adding more and more little corpses to the pile of 15,000 other massacred children can live it up on a long-distance sing-songing holiday taken to the world stage they turned Amsterdam into for making those of us who aren’t them or their likewise hive-minded supporters wonder what ungodly long-term regimen of dehumanization must have gone into getting the monstrous thing in question to a place where its swarm intelligence inspired it to fill the already-mentioned moment of solemnizing silence with a boisterous ode to the killing of Arab children…
Fair enough, but it's worth pointing out that records of some WhatsApp groups show that the perpetrators planned these attacks in the days *before* the game, refuting any claim about them being a reaction to Maccabee-fan behavior.
It's also worth pointing out that No, Israel has done nothing objectionable. I suppose it's possible that these attacks were responses to fictional crimes, but then that's a story in itself.
I have been extremely worried for some time. Could it be that the definition of the State of Israel as the state of the Jews has something to do with this kind of anti-Semitism that is now flaring up everywhere? Since the definition of ‘Judaism’ is obviously not exclusively a religious attribution, I must fear that at its core it is a völkisch-racist definition. Could it be that this identitarian doctrine not only shapes their own self-understanding, but also determines the general perception of what ‘Judaism’ is based on? And doesn't the claim of the State of Israel to be the state of all ‘Jews’ - not only morally but also legally - mean that Jewish people are increasingly perceived as potential citizens of that state? Are Jewish religious institutions outside Israel not protected by Israeli security officers as if they were extraterritorial? In view of this, is it not obvious that Jewish life is regarded as something that is necessarily connected with the State of Israel? (The German Bundestag recently passed a resolution to this effect by a large majority).
Given that Israel, in response to the atrocities of 7 October, is waging a military campaign of revenge, initially in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank and now also in Lebanon, and is using hunger and deprivation as a weapon in these areas, deliberately violating applicable legal norms, it is not surprising that Jewish people are being held jointly responsible for them. After all, the concept of collective guilt is deeply rooted in people's minds.
People are only responsible for actions that they themselves have committed, enabled or facilitated. They should never be held responsible for the actions of others that they have neither approved nor justified. The violent excesses provoked by Israeli hooligans in Amsterdam are truly terrible. But they are, I fear, the answer to the collective punishment of the Palestinian and Arab people and ultimately the result of a nationalist ideology that, although established with the end of Nazism, has not been superseded. It clings like a leech to all varieties of nationalism.
Given that Israel is not, in fact, "waging a military campaign of revenge", and that it was not occupying Gaza, there's not much point in reviewing the logical and moral problems with your comment.
Great piece and thanks for writing it. I never imagined that I might wake up in an America and Europe in which jew hunts are excusable based on sports rivalry and pogroms are considered as political resistance. But here we are. We are producing educated elites and recent university graduates who are so drunk on racial politics and oppressor-oppressed narrative that they are associating with the most atavistic form of jew hatred in all of human history--and they apparently have no idea what they are doing.
Your point about the double standard for Jews is a reasonable one. It is too bad that, probably in order to confirm your liberal bonafides, you needed to assert in your article that Israel is behaving badly in Gaza. You know, I am certain, that that is a debatable point. So, why was it included in your piece?
I'm not saying that. I'm saying you could make the argument that Israel is disproportionately and collectively punishing Gazans. And if you do make that argument, then you have condemn what the pro-Palestinian activists did to Jews in Amsterdam.
That's true, but your argument, as phrased ("You could even argue that the Israeli government’s actions in Gaza..."), assumes that Israel *is* collectively punishing Gazans.
Yes, but please don't excuse the Israelis. What I have in mind is the Israeli attitude toward the rest of the world. Too often, it is hostile. Just an anecdote: A few years ago, my wife and I visited Budapest, from where my grandparents had emigrated to the U.S. over a hundred years ago. We found the city interesting and the Great Synagogue quite fascinating, both in its architecture and its iconography. But the process of entering the synagogue was quite distasteful. It was guarded by several young Israeli men who, despite the fact that I am obviously Jewish, were unpleasant and churlish to us (maybe that is redundant, but they were awful) . They almost ruined our visit.
Anecdotes are dangerous, but they are the way people learn about he world.
Are you saying that the specific people who were attacked participated in Israeli actions? If they did not, then Israel has nothing to do with it. We decided several decades ago that collective punishment for the actions of others is not justified, regardless of who is doing it. No excuses for anyone or anything else needed or relevant.
That is pernicious nonsense. By that reasoning it should unsafe for a Frenchman to be seen in public anywhere in the world.
You are misinterpreting what I said. I began by agreeing with the post.
True, you started your comment with "Yes...", but how can one interpret the rest? When you say "please don't excuse the Israelis", if you're not claiming that the Israelis are somehow responsible for these attacks, for what do they need to be excused? Ruining your vacation? How is that relevant to this conversation?
Here's a piece I'm working on for my Substack site.
It’s so awful that there is something it is like to be one many-many-many-hundred-headed biryon monster that can spend a moment set aside in a packed Amsterdam soccer stadium for silently recognizing the victims of floods in Spain belting out an appallingly much-rehearsed song that ends on this punchline: “There are no schools in Gaza because there are no children left.”
It’s the same monster that a year earlier took the 4,500-mile trip to the same city and gathered in a public place to flawlessly belt out this song for the locals’ edification: “We will fuck you/And then we will drink your blood/In the town square we will hang you/Every communist who comes here/We will take your girls/When we rape them we will shout/Today is death, Hapoel.”
Of course there was also something it was like to be the many-many-many-headed antisemitic monster that spent one year after another in the first half of the last century making Amsterdam a living and death-dealing hell for the ancestors of these idiot biryons and of course there is something awful it is like to be a different mob of soccer chavs and a different gang of soccer yobs and hoons and neds and cougans and bovver boys and girls who alone know what it’s like to be them as they ply their hive mind in finding their own twists to put on this human routine of shitting on true human accomplishments like introducing what should simply be a good thing called “The Beautiful Game”.
Thank god that as Nagel made plain I have no way to really know what it is like to be a thing that in the aftermath of horrific floods that kill its human brothers and sisters and in the middle of its country’s plan to keep adding more and more little corpses to the pile of 15,000 other massacred children can live it up on a long-distance sing-songing holiday taken to the world stage they turned Amsterdam into for making those of us who aren’t them or their likewise hive-minded supporters wonder what ungodly long-term regimen of dehumanization must have gone into getting the monstrous thing in question to a place where its swarm intelligence inspired it to fill the already-mentioned moment of solemnizing silence with a boisterous ode to the killing of Arab children…
Fair enough, but it's worth pointing out that records of some WhatsApp groups show that the perpetrators planned these attacks in the days *before* the game, refuting any claim about them being a reaction to Maccabee-fan behavior.
It's also worth pointing out that No, Israel has done nothing objectionable. I suppose it's possible that these attacks were responses to fictional crimes, but then that's a story in itself.
I have been extremely worried for some time. Could it be that the definition of the State of Israel as the state of the Jews has something to do with this kind of anti-Semitism that is now flaring up everywhere? Since the definition of ‘Judaism’ is obviously not exclusively a religious attribution, I must fear that at its core it is a völkisch-racist definition. Could it be that this identitarian doctrine not only shapes their own self-understanding, but also determines the general perception of what ‘Judaism’ is based on? And doesn't the claim of the State of Israel to be the state of all ‘Jews’ - not only morally but also legally - mean that Jewish people are increasingly perceived as potential citizens of that state? Are Jewish religious institutions outside Israel not protected by Israeli security officers as if they were extraterritorial? In view of this, is it not obvious that Jewish life is regarded as something that is necessarily connected with the State of Israel? (The German Bundestag recently passed a resolution to this effect by a large majority).
Given that Israel, in response to the atrocities of 7 October, is waging a military campaign of revenge, initially in the occupied territories of Gaza and the West Bank and now also in Lebanon, and is using hunger and deprivation as a weapon in these areas, deliberately violating applicable legal norms, it is not surprising that Jewish people are being held jointly responsible for them. After all, the concept of collective guilt is deeply rooted in people's minds.
People are only responsible for actions that they themselves have committed, enabled or facilitated. They should never be held responsible for the actions of others that they have neither approved nor justified. The violent excesses provoked by Israeli hooligans in Amsterdam are truly terrible. But they are, I fear, the answer to the collective punishment of the Palestinian and Arab people and ultimately the result of a nationalist ideology that, although established with the end of Nazism, has not been superseded. It clings like a leech to all varieties of nationalism.
Given that Israel is not, in fact, "waging a military campaign of revenge", and that it was not occupying Gaza, there's not much point in reviewing the logical and moral problems with your comment.