The slanderous and libelous epithet "self-hating Jew" is the equivalent of "anti-semite" within the Jewish community, and as someone trained in sociological methods I consider the term a slur (and a rather pernicious one at that). It's a way of policing the limit of acceptable discourse, as far as I can discern it. I'm still looking into it as a phenomenon, so I will reserve some of my comments, but several academics have examined the practice. Antony Lerman is one such Jewish academic who has himself been labeled a self-hating Jew. He writes about it in "Jewish Self-Hatred: Myth or Reality?" (Jewish Quarterly, 2006): https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1080/0449010X.2008.10707006
It's a good read.
For the anti-Zionist Jewish activists in the United States, it must be stifling to be so marginalized. If someone is branded as self-hating, then there's ostensibly a psychological issue going on with that person, and so he or she can be safely ignored. In this way, the pro-Zionist movement isolates itself from all criticism, both from outside the Jewish community ("anti-semites") and within ("self-hating Jews"). Thus the Zionist movement can never be touched by criticism. This is a bad system, as it never self-corrects.
I agree that it's a bad system, but I think a lot of Jewish people aren't falling for it.
Every Jewish person I know and follow on social media is appalled at the genocide Israel is committing against Gaza, and is doing everything possible to stop it.
This is exactly what I suspected accounted for the alleged rapid rise of antisemitism. The term is nonsensical to begin with since Palestinians and others are also semitic, and many European Jews have little to no semitic DNA.
There really almost certainly is a rise in antisemitism at the moment. Apparently (though I don't have them at hand at the moment), statistics bear it out that antisemitism rises when Israel engages in military offensives. As I understand it, the correlation occurs invariably (though the incidence will obviously vary).
So, since the beginning of the Gaza offensive, there have been real and notable instances of antisemitism, particularly (though I admit I did not delve into this news story) people at a Russian airport seeking Jewish people who might have been disembarking. That seemed, at least from outward appearances, to be a real antisemitic incident. However, the types of incidents that are padding the ADL's stats include students on college campuses saying that Israel has an apartheid-like domestic policy. That's not antisemitic! So, it's impossible to parse this out when all of these are lumped together and presented as a 340% increase in antisemitism.
(I haven't looked into the DNA issue, mainly because it's rather immaterial, in my view. Race is a social construct and has nothing to do with DNA. Ethnicity is a cultural construct. And Jewishness is so varied that any one of several characteristics can "count" toward having that as one's background. I think the DNA angle is a red herring. Also, "semitic" originally referred to a language type, so it doesn't map onto physiological aspects very well at all.)
I have looked a bit into the Liberty incident, yes. There's a lot we don't know; but what we do know makes it difficult to understand why the U.S. reacted (or, rather, didn't react) the way that it did. I'm sure that there will be papers declassified in about forty years that may shed some light on the issue -- really sensitive issues are generally classified for a century. We'll see the JFK files before we know definitively about the Liberty, I would guess.
This must be so frustrating for all the Jewish people who are protesting Israel's genocide of Gaza.
It must! I agree.
The slanderous and libelous epithet "self-hating Jew" is the equivalent of "anti-semite" within the Jewish community, and as someone trained in sociological methods I consider the term a slur (and a rather pernicious one at that). It's a way of policing the limit of acceptable discourse, as far as I can discern it. I'm still looking into it as a phenomenon, so I will reserve some of my comments, but several academics have examined the practice. Antony Lerman is one such Jewish academic who has himself been labeled a self-hating Jew. He writes about it in "Jewish Self-Hatred: Myth or Reality?" (Jewish Quarterly, 2006): https://sci-hub.hkvisa.net/10.1080/0449010X.2008.10707006
It's a good read.
For the anti-Zionist Jewish activists in the United States, it must be stifling to be so marginalized. If someone is branded as self-hating, then there's ostensibly a psychological issue going on with that person, and so he or she can be safely ignored. In this way, the pro-Zionist movement isolates itself from all criticism, both from outside the Jewish community ("anti-semites") and within ("self-hating Jews"). Thus the Zionist movement can never be touched by criticism. This is a bad system, as it never self-corrects.
I agree that it's a bad system, but I think a lot of Jewish people aren't falling for it.
Every Jewish person I know and follow on social media is appalled at the genocide Israel is committing against Gaza, and is doing everything possible to stop it.
IMO, this phrase is making Israel irrelevant.
This is exactly what I suspected accounted for the alleged rapid rise of antisemitism. The term is nonsensical to begin with since Palestinians and others are also semitic, and many European Jews have little to no semitic DNA.
There really almost certainly is a rise in antisemitism at the moment. Apparently (though I don't have them at hand at the moment), statistics bear it out that antisemitism rises when Israel engages in military offensives. As I understand it, the correlation occurs invariably (though the incidence will obviously vary).
So, since the beginning of the Gaza offensive, there have been real and notable instances of antisemitism, particularly (though I admit I did not delve into this news story) people at a Russian airport seeking Jewish people who might have been disembarking. That seemed, at least from outward appearances, to be a real antisemitic incident. However, the types of incidents that are padding the ADL's stats include students on college campuses saying that Israel has an apartheid-like domestic policy. That's not antisemitic! So, it's impossible to parse this out when all of these are lumped together and presented as a 340% increase in antisemitism.
(I haven't looked into the DNA issue, mainly because it's rather immaterial, in my view. Race is a social construct and has nothing to do with DNA. Ethnicity is a cultural construct. And Jewishness is so varied that any one of several characteristics can "count" toward having that as one's background. I think the DNA angle is a red herring. Also, "semitic" originally referred to a language type, so it doesn't map onto physiological aspects very well at all.)
There have been some recent false flag operations where Jews have painted swastikas on their own temples. And there's this: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavon_Affair
Have those temple defacements been proven to be false flags? I'd be interested in any articles you might be able to reference.
And thanks for the link! It's always good to get a better handle on history.
I can't find source now. I don't think they account for very many of these reports.
Here's another historic incident: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Liberty_incident
I have looked a bit into the Liberty incident, yes. There's a lot we don't know; but what we do know makes it difficult to understand why the U.S. reacted (or, rather, didn't react) the way that it did. I'm sure that there will be papers declassified in about forty years that may shed some light on the issue -- really sensitive issues are generally classified for a century. We'll see the JFK files before we know definitively about the Liberty, I would guess.