Arma Virumque Cano

Instead, the radicalized American left now rejects pragmatic politics that doesn’t challenge Zionism or the legitimacy of Israel and doesn’t partake of pseudo-intellectual academic shibboleths like anti-Zionism, anti-colonialism, settler-colonialism, or “Jewish supremacy.” They reject real-world solutions in favor of the fantasies of U.S. podcasters and professors with no actual stake in the game. It’s crazy.

And as a result, Israel’s supporters have to spend most of their time and energy combatting the nihilistic and hateful politics of anti-Zionism and delegitimization rather than focusing on sensible politics, peacemaking, bridge-building, and coming up with political solutions that might actually work."

the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like. 

So you know. 

Nick went to nick something, but nicked his finger as he escaped. In the nick of time, he got nicked and ended up in the nick.

“Bad” (and its synonyms) on the other hand is/are, imo, a little more interesting. Because it *usually* means “the opposite of good, undesirable,” but if your friend said:

“I’m dating this guy Mark and on Friday nights we go to bad movies with his roommate Kevin and then go back to their place and drink terrible beer while Kevin does these awful impressions of the characters… you should come with us next time!”

Like Jesus Christ the significance of this legislation is literally first-paragraph-of-Wikipedia-level shit:

How else were Democrats supposed to “codify” effective legislation they created and signed into law? Oh, wait a moment….perhaps putting more liberals on the Supreme Court would’ve helped? Hmmmm hmmm hmmmm and whomst told everyone about the importance of the Supreme Court but subsequently got screamed at by these very same people for “scaremongering”?

The VRA was literally a law. Act means the legislative branch acted. They did a thing. They voted it into law.

I'm hearing a lot of this sort of stupidity. Sure, there's things the Democrats could have done in the past and didn't, but there's also things the Democrats built solidly and well which are now being dismantled, often in open violation of legal principles, because the US voting public let a death cult have a trifecta.

zionism is not:

-murder all Palestinians!

-conquer Gaza!

-Jewish fascism

zionism is:

-an umbrella term for a vague but inherently Jewish ideology

-intrinsic to Judaism

-a belief in the Jewish homeland in historic Judea and Samaria, now known as Israel

-a yearning to live safe and free in that homeland

Jews are naturally argumentative with each other. we debate and disagree constantly and love each other for it. there are almost as many interpretations of, and approaches to zionism as there are Jews. for most of us zionism is peacefully living alongside the Palestinian people in our shared homeland. for most of us it's just Jewish safety, freedom, and self-determination in our indigenous lands. for most of us it's just living in a place where we won't be killed just for being Jewish.

for an extreme minority of Jews (such as Benjamin Netanyahu), it's twisted into some kind of violent pseudo-fascism.

But overall, zionism is a Jewish term for a Jewish concept and when Jews tell you you're using it wrong the right thing to do is to fucking stop and correct yourself.

I'm an anarchist, I believe in freedom and self-determination for all peoples and hope for a world in which we don't need the apparatus of the state to ensure that for anyone. I also believe in Jewish freedom, safety, and self-determination in our ancestral lands alongside the Palestinians who also call the land home.

my personal philosophy is best described as anarcho-zionism (with communist/primitivist leanings but we don't need to get into that now).

but yeah. you don't get to tell Jews what our words mean so fucking stop. and if you're frothing at the mouth to misbehave at me right now because of this post then you're only proving my point.

rant over I guess.

This type of Zionism, the type that supports harm to Palestinians, is called Kahanism.

It is named after Reb Meir Kahane. Kahane was not necessarily involved in 1948 and the Nakba but he is the poster child for the racist, anti-Palestinian ideology that has made things increasingly worse since its rise to power roughly after the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. We use Kahanist to describe that element in Israeli society and outside of it.

I don't want people pulling out their screeds about how Israel is the most evil colonial force ever, doing a quick find and replace to turn "colonial" into "irredental," and thinking they're now being they're being fair and even handed.

That said, I do think these terms are very important for anyone trying to look at the world through a post-colonial lens to study and understand.

Because these are motivations that can drive and justify truly horrific things.

Phoebe Maltz nails it, discussing the creation of a late 19th century German colony established, in part, to keep good Aryans away from those meddlesome Jews:

Anti-Semites weren’t - aren’t - just people who think they’re better than Jews. They’re people who think they’re being oppressed by Jews.

This is part of the reason why anti-Semitism so easily finds footing among certain branches of the far-left. To be sure, it’s also why anti-Semitism finds footing among the far-right – the right certainly has no trouble imagining untrustworthy aliens who threaten Our Way of Life. But the left’s rhetoric of opposing “oppression” and “hierarchy” can easily incorporate anti-Semitic prejudices insofar as they buy into popular narratives of Jews and the quintessential oppressing class.

This also relates to some popular prescriptions of how Jews can end anti-Semitism (much like ending rape or ending racism, this is of course typically presented as the obligation of the victim rather than the perpetrator). Jews will cease being hated when they cease possessing power, whether it be social (control of Hollywood), political (“the Jewish lobby”), national (Israel), or what have you. See, for example, this piece of work (proof that finding yourself on a Google Book Search isn’t always a happy day).  A Jew who has the temerity to succeed (and in particular, succeed at persuading others) is a Jew who is playing to stereotype. A polity where Jews are successfully convincing non-Jews to adopt policies Jews find amenable is a polity that clearly,clearly, has been damaged or diseased in some way. How else could Jews possibly win but by dirty pool?

Specifically, a tremendous amount of the assumptions, conclusions, and general arguments made by them make much more sense if they--implicitly or explicitly--believe that:

there was a break of continuity, both in religious practice and ethnic descent, between modern Rabbinic Judaism and Second Temple Judaism.

that modern Rabbinic Judaism is a modern, post-Reformation/Enlightenment reconstruction of an extinct religious tradition composed of post-Christian converts (akin to neo-pagans)

the sole group who can claim ethnic descent from the Second Temple-era Jews are Palestinians.

None of them are billionaires. None of them own islands. None of them run sex trafficking rings. I would be shocked if any of them ever raped anyone.

The use of the label “Epstein class“ doesn’t actually decry corruption or sexual violence, it’s not a witty rejoinder against billionaires generally, or even used to describe those involved in the Epstein conspiracy specifically.

In use, it serves to only replace the perfectly serviceable and understood word oligarchy with a Jewish name.

It does so at a time when antisemitism is becoming more bold, more intentional and more dangerous, from every part of the sociopolitical spectrum.

And that’s not by accident.

which is just. so out of touch and infuriatingly shitty.

the people who don’t want to be yelled at and screamed at by strangers in public when they’re just trying to mind their own business, and don’t want to constantly be around biohazards like vomit and piss, are not the problem. these are basic standards of living everyone should be entitled to.

I guarantee you, most of the people complaining about drunk people yelling and harassing people and getting into fights on public transit are not some upper-class NIMBY oppressors who just don’t want to deal with The Poors™️. they’re on public transportation. you can reasonably assume they are also The Poors™️.

maybe you aren’t bothered by these things. cool. but you are not more virtuous for enduring intolerable conditions, and even less so if you expect others to. you may imagine yourself as compassionate and progressive for sticking up for the little guy, but that stops being compassionate or progressive when it turns into dismissing the expectations of the people in your community that they have basic standards of living.

part of living in a community is not making day-to-day life suck absolute shit for the people around you. it isn’t unreasonable for people to expect that from other people in the community.