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   ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:14:16 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

   Excellent interview and discussion:

   https://maiseh-review.ghost.io/how-to-overthrow-zog/

   • AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:14:22 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > But when the Palestine movement actually allows real antisemitism to stand, they end up lending credence to the allegations. What pro-Israel voices want more than anything is to point to consensus examples of antisemitism and connect them to the students chanting “free Palestine” so they can prove the latter is actually just a reconstitution of the former. By allowing ZOG rhetoric to be normalized, what it ends up doing is not embedding a critique of Israel further into public discourse.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:14:28 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > Now, people will literally think that discussions of AIPAC must be expressions of ZOG discourse, and it will be hard to turn back the dial on this. We already had a similar debate close to 20 years ago when the term “Israel lobby” became common, a term which sometimes flattens how we see power and influence and can lend itself to antisemitic conspiracism, but certainly not always.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:14:31 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > In this case, people talked hard about how to explain the influence of a pro-Israel lobby group like AIPAC without diving into a more conspiratorial “Israel lobby” paradigm that sees all Jewish groups as part of a supposedly homogenous transnational network of Zionist agents. But with people resorting to the ZOG analogy, there is a willful rejection of nuance, analysis, and precision.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:14:43 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > And when rage guides our politics, it can almost feel empowering to be transgressive, to say something fucked up because the situation is itself so fucked up. Why not accuse Benjamin Netanyahu of blood libel? Certainly he’s doing something so bad we might as well get mythological with our condemnations. But this is always the problem with letting reactionary ideas into a social movement, they don’t just hurt your enemies, they hurt the rest of us.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:14:49 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > I was doing a wage theft campaign at an immigrant-owned business once that had taken advantage of two undocumented woman workers, both of whom only spoke Spanish. We were on a picket line, and those workers started a chant in Spanish, which I couldn’t parse out and didn’t pay much attention to until someone ran up to me and asked if I knew what they were saying.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:03 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > “They’re chanting ‘Go back to China’ in Spanish,” she said, and I immediately noticed that news cameras were now pointing at the chanters. When we talked about this later, I was horrified when some people simply didn’t care: those bosses had it coming. But it’s not them we were hurting; it was other immigrant communities that have no role in this, and it’s not the boss’s ethnic ancestry that’s the issue; it’s wage theft.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:08 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > I don’t see this question as fundamentally different. I think people are resorting to ZOG rhetoric partially because of bad analysis and partially because they want to be offensive because the hurt is real and pervasive. But we will get nowhere that we want to be if we don’t have a universally liberatory vision, and I am watching as some Jews in the Palestine movement actually start backing away because of this.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:11 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > This doesn’t help, especially since this should be an all-hands-on-deck moment to stop the genocide.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:20 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > I think that an understandable type of cynicism has started to creep in. Allegations of antisemitism are so persistent that it is hard for many to take them seriously when they are invoked around Israel and Zionism. I have been accused of antisemitism several times myself despite being a Jew who wears a kippah, prays in the direction of Jerusalem three times a day, and literally wrote a book about antisemitism.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:25 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > So, I definitely understand people’s hesitancy, but the reality is that by every available metric, antisemitism has risen. I recently did a project re-analyzing the entire ADL antisemitism data for 2023. As you would expect, there were a ton of incidents they count that, when you look at them, are either overblown or simply not antisemitic, and they don’t include a lot of types of antisemitism that they probably should if you want a clear picture.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:28 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > But what you also find is that there have been more antisemitic white nationalist incidents that year than nearly every year since Trump took office. There were 1,000 bomb threats at synagogues and Jewish institutions and an unprecedented number of reports of street attacks and harassment, many of which have perpetrators literally yelling about ZOG.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:41 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > This is explainable both by the recent returning rise of the far-right, particularly open neo-Nazis, and also just Israel’s violence, which always leads to peaking moments of antisemitism because it often inflames existing antisemitic attitudes.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:45 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > All of this begs us to build a different model of fighting antisemitism that doesn’t take the bait when Zionists claim that criticism of Israel is antisemitism, nor does it ignore the pressing reality of growing antisemitism. That is why Ben Lorber and I wrote our recent book Safety Through Solidarity: A Radical Guide to Fighting Antisemitism because there was a growing gap in how the left handles the question of antisemitism.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:48 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > When the left refuses to grapple with this question, it cedes that ground to the right and makes the establishment narrative, which is built on right-leaning political centrism and Zionism, appear correct to people who may otherwise want to engage in a more collective and universal struggle for liberation.

     AnthonyJK-Admin repeated this.
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     ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him) (chiraag@mastodon.online)'s status on Monday, 26-Aug-2024 11:15:50 JST ಚಿರಾಗ್ 🌹✊🏾Ⓥ🌱🇵🇸 (he/him)

     in reply to

     > If Palestine is being colonized by a global empire, the same empire that is further sliding us into chaos and annihilation, then we have no choice but to become internationalists who collaborate with those resisting oppression. We also have to address reactionary ideas, even when they appear at a demonstration, cast as the language of liberation.