Tag Archives: anti-Semitism
International Holocaust Remembrance Day
Please read my “Series of Unpleasant Experiences.”
Inconvenient Murders
This is from Bari Weiss at the New York Times, so those of you who (understandably) despair of the paper might glean some hope from this column.
The theme is that Jew-hatred is surging and yet Jewish victimhood does not command attention or inspire popular outrage. That unless Jews are murdered by neo-Nazis, the one group everyone of conscience recognizes as evil, Jews’ inconvenient murders, their beatings, their discrimination, the singling out of their state for demonization will be explained away.
It is, as I’ve often said, amusing (in a dark, sad way) to listen to leftists pretend they care about Jews. Of course, as Weiss points out, this happens only when Jews are attacked by those on the right. It is somewhat akin to the pretend concern for the Kurds of so many on the left. They never cared about them in 2003, during the invasion of Iraq, but now that Trump has abandoned them, they matter (at least for a few minutes).
Real Courage
Here’s some real courage (as opposed to the faux courage of, say, a Greta Thunberg): a former Miss Iraq telling some truths to those who don’t want to hear it. She is likely to lose her Iraqi citizenship (this already may have happened), and possibly her life, over these kinds of comments. She has also engaged in a fruitless attempt to get famed Jew-hater Ilhan Omar to listen to facts.
Auden’s “Refugee Blues”
A powerful poem, written in 1939, about the plight of European Jews.
REFUGEE BLUES
Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.Once we had a country and we thought it fair,
Look in the atlas and you’ll find it there:
We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now.In the village churchyard there grows an old yew,
Every spring it blossoms anew:
Old passports can’t do that, my dear, old passports can’t do that.The consul banged the table and said,
“If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me.Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;
It was Hitler over Europe, saying, “They must die”:
O we were in his mind, my dear, O we were in his mind.Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,
Saw a door opened and a cat let in:
But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.
Primo Levi
Vel D’Hiv
Today marks the 77th anniversary of the Rafle du Vel d’Hiv in Paris. It took the French over 50 years to admit their very proactive role in this tragedy, and Jacques Chirac was the one to finally tell the truth. For this reason, I will always have respect for him, in spite of his being — in my view – politically objectionable on other matters. There was absolutely nothing for him to gain from this in terms of votes. It was simply the right thing to do.
AOC: Ignorant or anti-Semitic?
Or both? As I have written before, I have at least one relative who is anti-Semitic, possibly more, and several who constantly act as apologists for anti-Semitism. One of them even said to me, after the Charlie Hebdo massacre, that there were “shades of grey” in the story. Dear Lord. The moral bankruptcy.
Very sad.
This is why I am not surprised at the public indifference to AOC’s most recent stupid, bigoted comment. (She makes so many it is hard to keep track.) I am, sadly, accustomed to ahistorical, anti-Western, Chomskybot “thinking,” as I am exposed to it at every family event I attend.
As Daniella Greenbaum-Davis writes:
Ocasio-Cortez is either willfully ignorant, or purposefully anti-Semitic. Ignorant because if her convictions are genuine, she is entirely uneducated about a crucial part of world history, or educated only to the point of knowing the phrase ’Never Again’ without knowing who said it and why. Anti-Semitic because her inability in this, and only this situation, to utter the words ‘I’m sorry’ is highly unusual.
What’s curious — and deeply troubling — is that if a minority expressed discomfort about something, it’s typical progressive etiquette that the politician that caused that discomfort would quickly apologize and embark on a ‘learning journey’, to correct the ignorance that had led them astray. Instead, AOC is doubling and tripling down. She has chosen this as a hill to die on. This compounds historical ignorance with political vanity, and it compounds the insult too.
Why Did we Reject This Guy?
Blair on Corbyn
This is very astute, and, I think, correct.
Asked if he believed Corbyn himself was anti-Semitic, Blair said yes.
“Some of the remarks are not explicable in any other way, I’m afraid, and that is sad,” said Blair. “Does he think he is? No, he doesn’t think he is at all.”
This is quite a common thing with bigots, in general, but specifically with anti-Semites. They convince themselves they are “anti-Zionists” or “critics of Israel” and so on. I have a sibling like this (possibly two) and there is no question this person is an anti-Semite. But they will say till the cows come home that they are not. Alan, my late brother, had this person’s number years ago – but then, Alan was always the smartest in our family.
While I find the anti-Semitism of certain of my family members appalling, what is even more appalling is the number of apologists they have among our relatives. Same could be said for Corbyn’s apologists, as well as those of Ilhan Omar and her ilk. Alan used to point out to me that both the anti-Semite(s) in our family and their apologists totally lacked self-awareness. Is this a trait of all bigots? Does Ilhan Omar not know she is an anti-Semite? Or is she well-aware of her bigotry but deeply cynical? Do white supremacists not know they hate black people (and so many others)? One wonders.