...that's how the light gets in

Neo-Nazis use it. Terrorist organizations use it. For the same reason White Supremacist violence usually takes the form of “Lone Wolf” attacks.

(Jewish) pride month day 2: Janis Ian

Janis Ian is an American singer-songwriter, musician, columnist, and science fiction author. Born in New Jersey in 1951, she started learning to play instruments from a very young age and became a prominent artist in the 1960s and 1970s folk scene. Her first hit single, "Society's Child", was written and recorded when she was only 14 years old. The song centered around an interracial relationship, still a taboo subject at the time. In 1975, she released the song "At Seventeen", which would become her most successful hit and would win a Grammy in 1976 for best female pop vocal performance. She had previously been outed in 1976, but in 1993 she came out as a lesbian with the release of her album, "Breaking Silence". In 2003, Janis married her partner in Toronto when gay marriage was legalized there. In the 2000s, she became involved in science fiction fandoms as she had been a longtime fan of the genre. Her sci-fi writing has been published in several anthologies. She also wrote for LGBT and music related magazines. Janis and her brother, Eric, started the Pearl Foundation, a nonprofit that funds scholarships for older adults in higher education, named after their mother who they encouraged to fulfill her dream of going to college. Her memoir, "Society's Child", has received critical acclaim, and the audiobook narration won a Grammy for spoken word. The recent documentary "Janis Ian: Breaking Silence" was based on her memoir.

Where to watch the documentary

Why don't any white "anti-colonial" American/Canadian/Australian/New Zealander/South African activists actually walk the walk and go back to Europe?

Just give the land back. Actually decolonize. Do it.

Why are no Americans/Canadians/Australians calling for their own countries to be wiped off the map? Why just Israel?

Why not also Italy and Greece? It is generally accepted that the Greco-Roman empires were the origins of Western thought and expansionism/colonialism. The OG Western Empires. Should THEY not pay the price for originating Western/European colonialism? Or, skipping forward a millennia or so, how about Spain? The Catholic country who paid that horrible man from Genoa to go "discover" the Americas? Spain who conquered and owned (and named) most of the Americas, should THEY not be wiped off the map for their colonial sins? Or perhaps Britain and France and Belgium?

Nobody is calling it the Hallucinated States of America. Nobody calls it Cantada. Or South NOT Africa(n). Denying their existence and/or right to exist. That treatment is reserved just for Israel. Why?

ScapeGOATs

Regardless of what they say, the modern Western "anti-colonialism" activist isn't trying to undo colonialism.

They're trying to feel better about it.

Instead of confronting or giving up the colonial empire they inherited, they outsource the guilt they feel about it. They make Israel their moral scapegoat.

The scapegoat is a symbol, a Jungian archetype which is fundamentally installed in the Western mind, though many don't know its origins or history.

In the biblical scapegoat ritual (Leviticus 16), the High Priest would symbolically place the sins of the people onto a goat and send it into the wilderness to die. The people's guilt was taken from them, dumped into a sacrificial animal...and pushed out of sight. The people were freed of their sins...and all it cost them was the sacrifice of a goat.

(Jesus, in Christian theology, is often described as the ultimate scapegoat. A sinless figure onto whom the sins of humanity were placed...so others could be redeemed. Like the goat in Leviticus sent into the wilderness, Jesus is cast out, humiliated, and sacrificed to cleanse others of guilt. I'd argue this is deeply embedded in Western culture, which has been primed to believe that salvation comes from sacrifice...so long as someone else pays the price.)

Throughout history, Jews have been convenient scapegoats for relieving others of their own unpleasant feelings.

In medieval Europe, Christian debtors blamed Jewish moneylenders for their financial ruin, forgetting it was Church law that barred Christians from lending money with interest in the first place.

During the Spanish Inquisition, newly unified Christian Spain projected its anxieties about impure faith and fractured Spanish identity onto Jews and conversos, purging them to cleanse the soul of the state.

In the 19th century, Eastern European peasants, angry at feudal oppression but too afraid to blame the aristocracy, attacked Jewish communities instead and used pogroms as emotional release valves.

In Nazi Germany, the shame of losing World War I and the collapse of national pride were offloaded onto Jews, who were cast as traitors and parasites undermining the Volk.

Each time, they cast their sins, conscience, or guilt onto the Jews and had the Jews pay the price for them.

Today, many Western activists project the guilt of their colonial realities onto Israel, demanding Jews pay the moral bill for sins committed by European empires.

They live on stolen land, inside settler colonial societies built by genocide and maintained by power.

But reckoning with that would be hard...so instead they find a goat.

They heap the weight of the guilt they feel for Western sins onto Israel.

In doing so, they can imagine themselves as cleansed of their western, colonial guilt. Even better, they get to feel righteous.

It doesn't matter that Jews are indigenous to Israel. It doesn't matter that the Jews were colonized by Rome, exiled, massacred by Christian and Muslim empires, and clawed their way back to sovereignty in a small portion of their indigenous homeland. It doesn't matter that Israel doesn't meet the definition of settler-colonialism, that an indigenous people cannot colonize their own land, and that Israel is the most successful decolonizing project in history.

Jews are close enough to white, successful enough to resent, and far away enough to be disposable.

Nobody is demanding that people of Spanish descent pack up from Latin America and "go back to Spain."

There are no international calls for settler Australians to return their homes to Aboriginal nations and return to England, or for Canadians to give their land back to First Nations and evacuate to Europe.

Instead, they want the Jews to again be their goat, wandering in the wilderness, carrying sins which were never theirs to begin with.

It's the same story, played out for a modern audience with better PR and worse intentions.

More:

Dr. Tomer Persico explains it briefly and well.

Also, I don’t really care what you think about Israel. This isn’t about Israel. Actually it is: it’s about Israel abandoning the individuals it purports to exist for, and spending that money on destroying hospitals in Gaza instead. So please, donate if you can: https://mashirimhotam.com/lb-eng-b1/

I have written that the Israeli government is failing us and that the settlement project is a moral and strategic disaster. I have said harder things than that in public, under my own name, more than once.

Nobody called me an antisemite for it.

I bring this up because the claim of the season is that you cannot criticize Israel. It is a serious claim, and I am a useful test of it, because criticizing Israel is a big part of what I do in public. If the accusation were really triggered by criticism, I would be its most obvious target. I am not. So something else is going on.

Let me concede the real part first. Sometimes claims of antisemitism are thrown in bad faith. People have been smeared over ordinary political speech, and Jews who oppose the occupation or the war have been called nasty names by other Jews. That is wrong every time it happens. Anyone who reaches for this word to win an argument cheapens it for the day a real antisemite walks into the room.

Then there is the part almost nobody wants to look at.

This week, Britain barred streamer Hasan Piker and his uncle, commentator Cenk Uygur, from entering the country. The Home Office said that their presence would not be “conducive to the public good.” Both men went straight to audiences of millions and said the same thing: they were being silenced for criticizing Israel. Piker said it was done at Israel’s command.

But when you look at the facts, you get a different story. Besides saying that America deserved 9/11, Piker has also said he prefers Hamas to Israel, that he loves Hezbollah’s flag, and has no issue with them. Both are banned terror organizations under British law. He has compared Zionists to Nazis, said Israelis are Nazis, and called Orthodox Jews inbred. That is not criticism of a government, if you couldn’t tell. It is contempt for a people and admiration for the men who murder them. And the UK Home Secretary who signed off, Shabana Mahmood, is a British Muslim who has publicly criticized Israeli conduct in Gaza. Calling her a servant of Netanyahu is ridiculous.

Susan Sarandon tells a version of the same story. She says Hollywood blacklisted her for calling for a ceasefire. What actually happened is that she stood at a rally and said American Jews were getting a taste of what Muslims endure. She apologized for the line herself and called it a terrible mistake. Her agency dropped her over what she said at that rally. In the telling she gives now, the offense was the ceasefire comment. The blacklist did not keep her off the stage at Coachella two months ago, where Sabrina Carpenter cast her in what became the most talked-about moment of the festival's opening night.

The pattern holds every time you check it. The criticism of Israel is the alibi. The bad conduct is the actual offense. Everyone involved knows the difference and agrees to pretend they don’t.

Take the bad conduct away, and you are left with Ms. Rachel.

She is the biggest children’s entertainer in the world. Eighteen million YouTube subscribers and a Netflix show, and the Washington Post calls her the Mister Rogers of our era. For two years, she has used that platform to talk about Gaza without pause, in front of the most brand-skittish audience there is, the parents of toddlers. She is still doing it now. She has said she would risk her whole career to keep going. The career keeps growing. Netflix signed her up in the middle of it.

Which brings me to the strangest venue for a silencing campaign in history.

At Cannes last month, a member of the jury used the opening press conference to announce that Susan Sarandon, Javier Bardem, and Mark Ruffalo had been blacklisted by Hollywood. Hannah Einbinder, fresh off a standing ovation for her new film, told a packed panel she was not afraid of being blacklisted because the cost of staying quiet was higher. Months earlier, she had closed her Emmy speech with “Free Palestine,” on live television, to applause.

I want to be fair to her. She may actually believe that she is taking a risk. But a blacklist you can describe from a stage at Cannes, to a room of journalists who will quote you admiringly, is not a blacklist. The Hollywood Ten could not publish essays about being blacklisted. That was the entire point of the thing. The test of silence is whether you can still be heard, and every name on this list is heard constantly, by millions, with a publicist setting it up.

There is an actual, organized refusal-to-work list in film right now. It is called Film Workers for Palestine, and more than five thousand people have signed it, pledging not to work with Israeli film institutions they accuse of complicity in Gaza. Javier Bardem signed it. The man named at Cannes as a victim of blacklisting helped build one. The targets are Israelis and Zionist Jews.

The people who took a real risk in that room were the ones who refused. Debra Messing and Mayim Bialik put their names to a letter calling the boycott what it is, and got called McCarthyists for objecting to McCarthyism. They are not on Hollywood’s magazine covers for it.

And then there is the kind of silence that does not come with a profile.

On a Sunday last June, a group of mostly older people walked through Boulder, Colorado, the way they did every week, carrying signs for the hostages still held in Gaza. A man threw firebombs into them while shouting, “Free Palestine!” He told police he wanted to kill every Zionist there. A dozen people were injured, the oldest in their eighties. One woman later died of her burns.

A few weeks before Boulder, two young Israeli embassy staffers were shot dead as they left a museum in Washington. The man who did it chanted the same words.

Those people were criticizing nothing. They stood in public as Jews who would not disown Israel, and that was enough. None of them will be asked by a magazine how it feels to be silenced. They already have been, in the older sense of the word.

So here is where I land. I criticize Israel constantly, and the sky stays up. The settlements and the men running the war are fair game, and saying so has never once cost me the thing these people insist it costs. Being argued with is not being silenced.

There is a harder question under all of this, and I think we keep avoiding it because the answer stings. You would believe every word of this if it were any other group. If a minority said its elderly were being burned at a weekly vigil and its kids shot leaving a museum, the response would be grief and alarm. When Jews say it, the response is a request to see our work. We are asked to prove that we are not exaggerating and that the dead were killed for the reason we name. I just spent this whole essay doing that. For any other group, the dead would have been enough.

From one of the most depressing articles I've read in a while:

To these people Joo money is always dark/dirty Qatar/Hamas bullshit for Jew haters is of course legit, so of COURSE these chucklefucks are doing what they 'think/believe' Jews do So why NOT do their own but worse because they insist Da Joos did it first