mekka okereke :verified:
I'm seeing reports of pro-Israel marches featuring far-right, anti-semitic celebrities and I...
I feel like this is a good time to remind everyone of what some of those fashy folks said was their plan:
1) Drive a wedge between Black voters and Jewish voters to enable a far-right US takeover
2) Drive Jewish people out of the US through violent anti-semitism (and presumably to Israel)
3) End US military support for Israel (knowing what this will lead to)
mekka okereke :verified:
We have to fight anti-semitism and islamophobia here, in the US. And we can't let them drive a wedge between Black voters, Arab and Muslim voters, and Jewish voters.
Because if we lose here, we will eventually lose everywhere.
Years ago I told my Ukrainian friends that whether or not there is a free Ukraine in 2025 depends almost entirely on how many Black folk are blocked from voting in Cleveland in 2024. They didn't understand me at the time. Now they do.
mekka okereke :verified:
Everyone seems to have forgotten that a big driver of the anti-semitism and violence experienced by Jewish people living in the United States, is their advocacy for civil rights for Black folk.♥️👍🏿
That's a big part of why US white supremacists hate Jewish people so much. It's featured heavily in some of the most vile stuff that you can read online.
You can still find this stuff online and read it. No, I'm not linking to it. No, don't add it to this thread.
Don Ray
I was familiar with Jews that actively participated in the Civil Rights Movement, but this article also explores another angle:
“If Southern Jews believed that a low profile would permit them to continue living peacefully, they were wrong. Klan groups exploited the integration crisis to launch acts of anti-Semitic violence.”
https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/jews-in-the-civil-rights-movement/
mekka okereke :verified:
“as many as 90 percent of the civil rights lawyers in Mississippi were Jewish.”
I don't think people today can fully appreciate the level of bravery it takes to be a Jewish person living in Mississippi or Alabama, seeing the worst klan violence go unpunished, and choosing to very publicly ally yourself with Black folk, because it is the right thing to do.
(🤔Actually, the way things are going, people *are* starting to get a crystal clear picture again of what that bravery was like...)
Paul Cantrell
I share these concerns. ADL really goes off the rails sometimes. (Ilhan Omar is my rep, so that example hits close to home!)
It's really worth looking at the actual study. As @raf said, they're clear about what they asked, and why. They're not quite asking the questions you posit. And despite using ADL resources in formulating some of the questions they did ask, their methodology answers a whole lot of the concerns you & I share.
Excerpts in screenshots:
jake lazaroff
@raf and to be clear, i know that anti-semitic discrimination and violence obviously does happen and we can see it and measure it. maybe sentiment is a leading indicator of that, idk. but the concepts often feel weirdly decoupled in our discourse.
jake lazaroff
@raf that's fair, but there are many other examples. ilhan omar gets accused of anti-semitism for accurately saying that AIPAC lobbies US politicians. people accused greta thunberg of anti-semitism for… having a plush octopus toy.
tbh the practice of measuring anti-semitism in terms of tropes has always felt fundamentally weird to me. with other groups, we can see actual discrimination (e.g. lower appraisals of black homes). why with jews is the foucs always on sentiment?
jake lazaroff
@raf i tend to be skeptical of studies like this — even jewish people can't agree on what anti-semitism is! i think it's anti-semitic when someone expects me to support israel just because i'm jewish, but plenty of other jews think it's anti-semitic for me to *not* support israel.
re: that last link, ADL is currently advocating that *jewish student organizations* opposed to the ongoing genocide be investigated by the IRS and FBI. so you can see where i'm coming from here
raf 🟣
All these studies are fairly clear about the questions they ask and split out questions related to Israel. Your concern is very reasonable and common. That's why modern surveys account for it.
You can dislike the ADL, but this survey has basically been unchanged for 50 years.
raf 🟣
Yep! People generally say they are against antisemitism
https://www.ajc.org/AntisemitismReport2022/GeneralPublic
But, surveys do suggest across ages 15-20% of people in the US have bigoted views against Jews. Conservative people are much more likely to be expressing them, but it's still hovering around 10% for overt antisemitism for even very liberal people.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10659129221111081
https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-topline-findings
Like you said, vast majority for liberals and leftist and even majority for conservatives. It's better than it could be, but that's still a lot of bigots
Jon
@mekkaokereke@hachyderm.io 💯. Although, sad to say, the effort to portray criticism of the current Israeli government as anti-Semitic doesn't only come from right-wing anti-Semites, the Israeli government and many of its supporters (including some Jewish organizations in the US) have been pushing it for years. It's certainly true that some criticisms of the Israeli government are blatantly anti-Semitic, and some are cloaked anti-Semitism ... but I've said for years that the short-sighted attempt to define it as inherently anti-Semitic (or put such narrow definitions in place that in practice any criticism is anti-Semitic) would come back to bite us, and now it is. Sigh.
As you say though I think that the majority of liberal and leftist people are against anti-Semitism ... and for that matter so are a fair number of conservative people.
Dr. Flowers
@paul_ipv6 Which is why it’s so frustrating that so few stand with us now. @mekkaokereke @donray
mekka okereke :verified:
@AlliFlowers @paul_ipv6 @donray
The good news is that I don't think that it is so few?
I think that there is an intentional effort by right-wing anti-semites to portray any criticism of current Israeli government policy as broad anti-semitism against Jews everywhere.
There is vile, dangerous, rising anti-semitism everywhere right now. A lot of masks are coming off. But I think the vast majority of liberal and leftist people are against anti-semitism, and stand with Jewish people on this.
Paul_IPv6
jews have always understood that if anyone is persecuted, they'll be in line at some point; that if anyone is persecuted, everyone is in danger. that doesn't diminish the bravery. many folks see things they know are wrong and unjust, yet do nothing.
Paul Cantrell
There’s much more in the paper. It seems to me they're quite scrupulous about treating anti-Israeli-policy, anti-Israel, and antisemitic as three distinct things. In fact, part of the point of the research is to suss out just how distinct those things are.
And having made that careful distinction, their findings are •fascinating•.
Paul Cantrell
The link was somewhere upthread, but easy to get lost in all that! Here it is: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/10659129221111081
jake lazaroff
@inthehands oh, that is interesting. would you mind linking to the PDF? i read through the topline findings link but i didn't realize that was a summary of a larger paper.
jake lazaroff
@inthehands oh i see — i didn't realize the two links @raf posted were related! thank you for clarifying
Paul Cantrell
@jakelazaroff
It takes a village to read the news! (For real — it's one of the primary purposes of social media for me. I can't possibly have all the perspective and click on all the links all by my lonesome.)
Paul Cantrell
@alessandro
I am a broken record: read the paper.
Alessandro Corazza
@inthehands @jakelazaroff @raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke That's a bit of a straw man. Discourse I've seen on the left is generally along the lines of "from the river to the sea" and other suggestions of Israel being illegitimate, rather than directly attacking Jewish people.
raf 🟣
I haven't been shy about sharing my criticisms of the ADL. Probably best captured in articles like this one:
https://newrepublic.com/article/175013/anti-defamation-league-where-stand-today
I also hope we can agree that antisemitism is alive and well at least in stochastic terrorist events like the Jewish school that was shot up twice in one week in Montreal.
Or with workplace discrimination with more than 50% of Jews and 62% of Muslims have said they experienced it.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/23780231211070920
How we should measure that is always going to feel dissatisfying since there will always be some disagreement.
jake lazaroff
@raf i know, i have family members who experienced that. it was indefensible. but i can’t help but notice that we’re now talking about the past rather than the present. of course, one affects the other — university quotas live on through legacy admissions.
i’ll admit this isn’t a fully formed opinion. i’m not an expert on measuring these things. i don’t know what the ADL should do instead. the way prominent organizations tend to discuss anti-semitism just feels off to me.
raf 🟣
Jewish quotas in university and being banned from social clubs is still in living memory. I don't know why these specific questions were chosen, but I don't think a survey is the worst way to try to measure antisemitism.
Also if you are interested in how prevalent bigoted beliefs are within in a population, I'm not sure anything other than a properly conducted survey will work
Paul Cantrell
What this line of research shows to my eye is that this specific line of thought you are describing is •not• as widespread a pattern on the left as it seems.
It exists. We experience it. Yet it’s not as widespread as it feels. What does this mean?
The obvious explanation is that we’re experiencing this blowback from a loud minority. That’s important info. Who are they? Why are they so loud? If they’re outliers on the left, what's their agenda?
jake lazaroff
@JimmyB overt anti-semitism on the left often centers around the jewish diaspora's relationship to israel. what exactly that looks like depends on whom you ask. i think anti-semitism is when people expect us to support israel and deplatform jewish groups who don’t. the zionist left (who tend to be more center; "liberal" rather than "progressive”) think anti-semitism is BDS and calling israel an apartheid state. but we can all broadly agree that it exists.
JimmyB (he/him)
That makes complete sense to me. I'm not saying it doesn't exist but personally I have never met overt anti-semitism on the left. ie Hard anti-Jew rhetoric or holocost denial. Plenty of anti-semitic tropes where folks should know better - but I have also seen plenty who, when told they had gone there, backed right off and apologised.
The right on the other hand...
I'm a Brit by the way - but it all applies here.
Paul Cantrell
@jakelazaroff
And as I answer those questions, I think early and often of what Mekka has been posting about the fash constantly striving to drive wedges between marginalized groups.
Eyes on the ball.
JimmyB (he/him)
@jakelazaroff
First up - I'm not Jewish so careful what I say: but I do get accused of being anti-semitic by centre left, centre and right wingers because I do not 'stand by Israel' for eg.
The problem with conflating fascists with those of us who aren't into colonialism, land theft & apartheid as 'anti-semitic' is that it doesn't really give you much language to describe folks who throw bricks through synagogue windows or want to open death camps again.
Paul Cantrell
@JimmyB
Discussion here and up/downthread: https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111415512812495097
Paul Cantrell
@sjuvonen @alessandro
Casually dismissing this research is certainly a mistake, but I do think it’s useful to take both the research and the experience seriously, and then look at what they say together:
https://hachyderm.io/@inthehands/111415512812495097
Sami Juvonen
@alessandro @inthehands @jakelazaroff @raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke Countering “here is a peer reviewed study with 3500 respondents” with “discourse I’ve seen on the left” is certainly a choice, but not one that reflects well on its maker.
Paul Cantrell
@alessandro @sjuvonen
unsubscribe
Alessandro Corazza
@sjuvonen @inthehands @jakelazaroff @raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke Why do you think I brought up "from the river to the sea"? Your willingness to wipe a country off the map doesn't make such an action acceptable, regardless of how much you may consider your beliefs righteous.
Sami Juvonen
@alessandro @inthehands @jakelazaroff @raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke You should have stated your belief in that toxic canard in the beginning. You’re not interested in light on the issues, only heat.
Sami Juvonen
@alessandro @inthehands @jakelazaroff @raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke The abstract gives plain language:
“Contrary to the expectation of horseshoe theory, the data show the epicenter of antisemitic attitudes is young adults on the far right.”
Alessandro Corazza
@sjuvonen @inthehands @jakelazaroff @raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke
Yes, because of the way the questions are framed. If you don't consider being anti-Israel antisemitic then of course it won't register as antisemitism.
Alessandro Corazza
@sjuvonen @inthehands @jakelazaroff @raf @jdp23 @mekkaokereke Perhaps you should read the paper rather than attempting to dunk on people.
"To the extent that liberals seek to identify with the oppressed over the oppressor and believe that Israel is an oppressor, they might hold negative attitudes toward Jews, who they associate with the oppressor."
Paul Cantrell
@mekkaokereke
Will continue to re-boost this post. This is the crux of it right here.
Not long ago, a rumour spread among Somali immigrants here in Minneapolis that (this is completely false, obvs!) teachers were handing out gender-changing hormones to kids in schools. Preposterous — but it gained traction.
Spreading trans panic among new immigrants: you •know• that’s a lie that comes with an agenda. Would love to know who seeded that one.
Paul Cantrell
@mekkaokereke
Just to be crystal clear here, since this got boosted: it’s not that the rumor actually got that far. Somali parents aren’t stupid; they’re no more credulous than any other group of concerned parents (perhaps less so, given some of the scenes we’ve seen at school board meetings around the country!).
It’s just the fact that people are even •trying• this nonsense on my neighbors that sets off every alarm bell I have.
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