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A Trend

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Clarissa

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Anti-Semitism has been exploding in Western Europe since around 2005. There’s been one violent attack after another, with things getting markedly worse in the past 5 years. It seems quite myopic to analyze the Pittsburgh attack outside of this larger trajectory and instead use it to repeat, for the bisillionth time, that Trump sucks.

P.S. And I just found an article on Spiked saying the same thing but better: “It looks very much as though your concern is less with the slaughter of Jews than with the question of who is slaughtering them, and whether or not the murderer’s identity lends itself to the propagation of your own narrow party-political worldview. In this case, that Trump is a bad person. The wickedness of an anti-Semitic act is judged according to the act’s political usefulness: how awful that is.”

12 responses to “A Trend”

  1. el Avatar
    el

    Do you have any explanation for this trend on both sides of the Atlantic? One would think that with Muslim mass immigration into Europe, they would stop thinking about baring existent in Europe Jews. Is it just fear of what you call “fluidity” – large changes of modernity – which calls forth old hatreds? Do you have deeper analysis?

    I thought American Jews were safer than in Israel, but even in the second promised land there are some dangers.

    You kept talking how Europe was safer for Jews than Israel, but are all those currently immigrating from France Jews fools or what? They were not immigrating before, only in the last around 5 years, so it is not a work of “evil Sochnut” or anything. Also, being firebombed is not the only danger. Were I religious and even not religious, hearing the following is disgusting, frightening and enraging:

    [24 April 2018] The leader of Germany’s Jewish community has advised Jews to avoid wearing traditional skullcaps (kippahs) following anti-Semitic attacks.
    https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-43884075

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    1. el Avatar
      el

      Barely existent, not “baring existent.”

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  2. el Avatar
    el

    \ You see it in Guardian cartoons showing Israeli leaders puppeteering Western politicians. You hear it in leftish panic about an all-powerful Israel Lobby.

    Btw, this is something I have witnessed on this very blog.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is unfair. I have spent years arguing that “Israel lobby” is a myth.

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      1. el Avatar
        el

        \ This is unfair. I have spent years arguing that “Israel lobby” is a myth.

        I talked about some readers of your blog, not you, of course.

        Sorry for the misunderstanding.

        Why this wave now though?

        Judging by some European comments on Internet, people there are so evolved in comparison to Israeli Jews, for instance, who still are nationalistic. I truly sometimes sadly felt only we among other Western societies are stuck in the early 20th century.

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        1. Clarissa Avatar
          Clarissa

          Ukraine is also right there in the times when the nation-state was everything.

          Why now? I think it’s simply that the memory of the Holocaust is fading, as it was bound to do. I don’t believe it’s a coincidence that is happening at the point where the survivors are coming to the end of their lives. Historical memory loses its emotional power once there are no people who personally experienced it.

          Another example of this phenomenon is Russia. It is witnessing a deluge of things like bumper stickers “we can repeat WWII.” This is something that the generation which actually fought in the war would never say. My grandfather who fought in the war – and every person who did that I knew or heard about – felt no celebratory emotions about the war and hated to talk about it. The survivors saw it as nothing but a terrible tragedy. He’d be devastated if he saw how the war is being celebrated today.

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          1. el Avatar
            el

            \ Why now? I think it’s simply that the memory of the Holocaust is fading, as it was bound to do.

            I partly agree, but the gentiles were not the ones who experienced the Holocaust in the first place. It is not exactly like in Russia’s case.

            Memory is fading, so it is OK to start murdering the remaining Holocaust survivors as has already happened while the mainstream does its best to ignore it?

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            1. Clarissa Avatar
              Clarissa

              When the victims aren’t around, the sense of shame fades. And that’s the only thing that motivated the reduction in open Anti-Semitism in the post-war period.

              Studies show that people who personally know a gay person are a lot less likely to make homophobic statements than those who don’t or think they don’t.

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  3. Demotrash Avatar
    Demotrash

    That quote is amazing, I will have to give the whole article a read. I hate when people use a tragedy as an excuse to grandstand and push their own political agenda; this wasn’t always common, was it? I noticed this during Orlando too. I know as a gay man I was disappointed that people were only talking about guns, or that they only cared about how this would affect Muslims (it’s fine to say that the shooter did not reflect on all Muslims, I did that plenty myself, but some people prioritized that over caring about the people who died.) Someone I know used it as an excuse to complain about Hillary Clinton, somehow. Here people do seem to be focused more on anti-semitism than guns, which I appreciate, but for many liberals this seems to be another excuse to complain about the evil orange man. Meanwhile some conservatives are using it to complain about their own pet issues.

    It is important to realize that twitter does not reflect real life. I’ve seen idiocy among people I know, but the focus seems to be more on the victims than on bloviating about Trump. Here I think I’ve seen more focus on the Kentucky Kroger shooting. That was only an hour and a half away, and the victims have family up here.


    https://polldaddy.com/js/rating/rating.js

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  4. el Avatar
    el

    FBI: Jews Subject to 54% of Religiously Motivated Hate Crimes in 2016, Despite Being Just 2% of U.S. Population
    Muslims come in second, at 24.5 percent—a 19 percent increase since 2015

    https://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/249434/fbi-jews-subject-to-54-percent-of-religiously-motivated-hate-crimes-in-2016-despite-being-just-two-percent-of-u-s-population

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  5. Tal Hartsfeld Avatar
    Tal Hartsfeld

    Fascism is as old as the universe itself.
    It’s not just racism or anti-semitism. Think about the Inquisition, or Salem Massachusetts, any attack on or conspiracy against any kind of heresy.

    Today it’s a “war” on the homeless, the “sex offenders”, the mentally ill.
    Anyone who’s any kind of “social leper” GETS IT!!! That’s actually always been a normal fact of life and still pretty much is. That basic underlying attitude has never gone away.
    And as for anti-semitism—it’s always been present, just under the radar, in “cold war” mode. It’s not so much “making a comeback” as it is more “going full-frontal”.

    People just enjoy being prejudice. You can be white and male and STILL suffer discrimination simply for being odd or eccentric, or just “too independent-minded”. Bigotry is in the DNA of humanity, that’s all.

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  6. el Avatar
    el

    PM, chief rabbi at odds over Pittsburgh synagogue
    While Israel’s chief rabbi refuses to recognize non-Orthodox denominations, Netanyahu takes a veiled jab at the country’s ultra-Orthodox rabbi by insisting that the victims of Pittsburgh shooting attack were killed in a ‘synagogue’; the exchange exposes recent strains between Israel and more liberal Jewish Diaspora, in the wake of the deadliest anti-Semitic attack against American Jews in US history.

    https://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-5384167,00.html

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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