"Stephen Fry issued a heartfelt #Christmas message Monday, calling out the surge in #antisemitism in the #UnitedKingdom and encouraging the country’s #Jews to take pride in their heritage — and swiftly sparked a torrent of online trolling and backlash, with many accusing the actor and writer of playing the victim instead of shining light on the plight of #Palestinians in war-torn #Gaza."
Fry is figuring out he should have kept it a secret. Sorry bud. Welcome to the thunderdome.
Israel just bombed a tent city full of #refugees who fled North #Gaza for #Rafah on the #IDF's orders.
Horrifying photos show families frantically rummaging through the carnage for the limbs of their family members. I won't reproduce them here, but they can be found on the bird site from @gazanotifications
They are murdering poor people trapped in a concentration camp, in the places they were told to flee for safety. They are killing impoverished, innocent, starving Palestinians, mostly under 30, with nowhere else to go.
This brutality is unparalleled in my lifetime. All studies show that Israel is in a class of its own, outdoing the Dresden bombings by a landslide. Saying this is not antisemitic: it is your duty, whoever you are.
I am #Jewish: spiritually, scholarly, and Litvak Ashkenazi. It's not antisemitic for me, OR ANY NON-JEW to say. In fact, its every human's duty to call for this bloodshed to cease IMMEDIATELY, and to even call for this genocidal Zionist occupation to be dismantled before there is any more blood shed. Nothing keeps my heart beating like my Arab and Muslim comrades speaking out against this barabarism every day. All while facing the harshest consequences of anyone! This ugliness would quite literally drive me to kill myself if I didn't know so many people who are so brave.
I have been doing activism in Palestine since 2012, both boots-on-the-ground defense of protestors, and teaching programming. These are not antisemites; my Palestinian friends are as close to me as any others. And I have had 6 students murdered in Gaza in 120 days. All the others are starving, fleeing from tent city to tent city, trying to survive the most hellish circumstances of drone democide any people have ever witnessed in the history of humanity. Thats a simple fact now.
If you are a goy and claim to support this in our name, WE WILL REMEMBER. The vast majority of #Jews outside of Israel who are under 40 years old are anti-Zionists today. All the fastest growing Jewish organizations of the past decade are anti-Zionist. And we will not forget those who cheered on a 21st century #Holocaust while evoking the memory of our family members killed by Nazi #Germany. Especially not the #Germans, who have been by far the worst inciters and supporters of genocide outside of #Israel.
Ellen Odette Cuffe, Countess of Desart (née Bischoffsheim) was born on 1 September 1857. She was a London-born Jewish woman who was best known as an Irish politician Gaelicist (President of the Gaelic League for a time), and philanthropist in Ireland. She has been called '"the most important Jewish woman in Irish history". 1/2
🧵 Calling for the #genocide of the #Jews is a hot topic these days. This is primarily for non-Jews.
What are we really talking about when this gets said? We generally aren't covering some fascist saying literally that they want to kill all the Jews. That speech is not wildly popular at universities or during anti-#Israel protests which is where the controversy is coming up.
So I think it's fair to say literal calling for the mass death of Jews is non-controversively frowned upon. I'm sure there's some free speech absolutist out there but that's a different issue entirely.
What we're talking about in the current political moment is #palestinian supporters using more populist expressions like "From the River to the Sea" and similar expressions.
Let me tell you why I don't oppose the use of this call or chant.
Antisemitic gaslighting is playing on infinite repeat
It is important to remember that many #Jews have dealt with #antisemitic gaslighting for years. It is isolating, traumatizing, and has pushed many of us out of friendships and activism circles. What is happening now has been going on for years, but now it has intensified and feels worse than ever.
And if a Jew tells you something is antisemitic, and your impulse is to search for some fringe Jewish source to “prove” they are wrong, don’t do it. Also don’t cite your “Jewish friends” as if that gives you authority to talk over us. Just don’t. #Antisemitism
Re: authentic & fake #Jews: the tragic #Gaza war has predictably led to bad #history going viral:. European Jews are descendants of medieval #Turkic converts--#Khazars-- thus have no #historical & #genetic connection to the land of #Israel
A myth, promoted by a combination of the cynical or stupid, sadly embraced by the naive & uninformed
Sadly relevant, as I will give a virtual talk about this at Indiana Uni this week.
I had no idea referring to the tentacles of the Jewish lobby might sound antisemitic! 😆
"The #NewSouthWales premier, Chris Minns, has warned parliamentarians about sowing division in the community after a #Greens MP apologised for referring to the “tentacles” of the “#Jewish lobby” and its influence across Australia.
The Newtown MP Jenny Leong said she did not intend to reference an antisemitic cartoon depicting #Jews as an octopus when she made the comments at the #Palestine Justice Movement forum in #Sydney in December, where the boycott movement against #Israel was being discussed."
This is tragic and unsurprising. I worry this is the path we're on now in the diaspora.
"Klarsfeld, one of #France's most prominent #Jews, has begun to gravitate towards the same party he once shunned, the far-right RN, or National Rally led by Marine Le Pen. It's a fascinating, but disturbing transformation, informed most likely by the adage that the "enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Fellow Jews, I have a request. What are QUESTIONS you have about the Jewish view on forgiveness - of others, of yourself? I’m planning to teach on this on Yom Kippur. The jewish perspective on this topic is quite different than the majority culture & is often counter intuitive. Example: are you required to forgive someone who hasn’t apologized? #forgiveness#yomkippur#Mazeldon#jews
19 August 1942 | A transport of 997 Jews deported from Drancy arrived at Auschwitz. After the selection 897 of them were immediately murdered in gas chambers.
One of them was Fanny Brauch from Paris.
She was 15 years old.
BBC Radio 4 is broadcasting an account of the archive that secretly recorded daily Jewish existence in the Warsaw Ghetto called "The Warsaw Ghetto: History as Survival". It's on at 13:45 (GMT) each day this week. Narration by Anton Lesser with Elliot Levey.
27 October 1940 | Dutch Jewish girl, Henderika Leman, was born in Zwolle.
She was deported to Auschwitz from Westerbork in November 1942 with her younger brother Meijer and her mother Annette. They were all murdered in a gas chamber after arrival selection.
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas: #Ashkenazi Jews 'are NOT Semites'
Zionist leader Arthur Ruppin: German #Jews are NOT Semites but Aryan.
Yet Abbas in an antisemite, even though this idea is not really new (research: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms3543), while Israel is naming buildings after the #Zionist leader Ruppin, who personally met with Himmler's mentor, Hans F. K. Günther.
Arthur Ruppin's Concept of Race
In: Amos Morris-Reich, Israel Studies , Fall, 2006, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Fall, 2006), pp. 1-3.
"As Jews, we have an obligation to make clear in our own communities that anti-Zionism is not anti-Semitism—and that the calls for a cease-fire shouldn’t be feared but embraced. We are already doing this at demonstrations around the world, and it marks a profound political shift."
37% of the activists arrested in #Germany on #antisemitism charges in the past 130 days have been #Jewish. #Jews make up less than 1% of the total population of Germany. Think about what that means.
Germans learned nothing beyond how to manufacture and promote a semblance of reconciliation in which Jews are a mere transference object through which Germans may be absolved of the crimes of Nazism and the #Nakba. When we no longer function as objects that Germans can transfer their responsibility for genocide onto — when we no longer serve to act as an insurance policy on their responsibility for crimes of ethnic cleansing, genocide, and the commercial war economy of the imperial core — then suddenly Germans become the victims of antisemitism visited upon the German people by the Jews.
A society where that is even fathomable has not actually repented for the #Holocaust. Which is exactly why Germany is the world's #1 champion of the genocide in #Gaza.
TIL that the term "Mizrahi" is a reclaimed term, originally a racist term and slurrish, it's since been reclaimed by those Jews as a way to self-identify, especially for those Jews who live in Israel.
I've only heard it in the context of its reclaimed use, but knowing the history is important.