Also some pretty vile links and posts from former Facebook friends of mine which I cannot cite because I unfriended the people who posted them, but most of them had a similar theme of a shadowy Zionist conspiracy to dominate the world financial systems or some other related nonsense

I just looked it up several of them also spoke of the Rothschild family which seems to be a kind of personification of the “evils and dangers” of this Zionist conspiracy

And if you want to read some of those articles you’re going to have to look them up yourself I’m not going to dignify their crap with a link

The baron Rothschild bought lots of land on palestine and helped Jews immigrate there in early 1900s and help set them up in socialist style kibbutzes

Jews hadn't been immigrating there in great numbers before then, so he is often hated as the man who let the jews back into Palestine and they hold him personally responsible for the displacement of some Palestinians a good 40 years later

But yes ive heard all the Rothschild control money control the world conspiracy theories and laugh

From one of the links Herbie posted

Denying Jewish history

As a means of rejecting the legitimacy of Israel, some stoop to asserting that Jews have no national history there — that they are, in other words, nothing more than European colonizers. For instance, the website Middle East Monitor referred recently to the “alleged Temple” in ancient Jerusalem (the ruins are still there). Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, likewise, resurrected the old canard that today’s Jews descend from Khazar converts in a recent and much-criticized speech.

I would say that if the left are making claims of shadowy conspiracy theories about controlling the financial system or whatever, then sure that's probably pretty anti-Semitic. And in those sorts of claims, Zionist often does just serve as code for Jews, but I only ever hear that sort if thing from the right. The lefts criticisms of Zionism I hear pretty much always seem to be about things related to maintaining an ethnostate and human rights abuses against Palestinians. Like that dyke march thing doesn't seem to fit anything mentioned in the op ed that at all. The woman banned was specifically asked if she was a Zionist and said yes.

I think the problem with that op ed if that her logic is like
1. You can criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic (okay)
2. Attributing bad things done by Israel to Jews or Jewishness in general is anti-Semitic (yes)
3. Zionism can be used as code for Jews in general (only sometimes, it's also sometimes just used appropriately)
4. Criticisms of Zionism are anti-Semitic

The problem is that 4 is only true if 3 applies, which it often doesn't.

Here's a response to that op-ed by a guy she accuses of antisemitism in the article. Maybe worth a read.

https://mondoweiss.net/2018/05/accus...ans-malicious/

i'd like to think there is no one in this thread like that. i don't think there is. but if i was jewish i might feel differently.

i know a lot of people here are anti israel killing palestinians. but i think all those people mostly likes jewish people. i know i do! i'm practically jewish, so many of my community is, and always has been jewish my whole life.

i'm about as anti israel as you can get(without being racist), but i'm more anti usa than i am anti israel. much more.

Ok a couple of points here specifically and a couple of generalities

The part of the Dyke March thing that I had an issue with was that the flags were banned as “triggering” as best I can tell due to crime of displaying the Star of David, they don’t seem to have been banned because they were in any other way advocating for support for Israel or against Palestinians. This seems like a pretty important distinction

Regarding Zionism - this is where the parallels to the way the right wing in this country abets and tolerates racism become really really apparent in my mind, and why the technical defense of “sometimes it’s used correctly and that’s ok” really falls apart imo. We on the left have gotten very good at identifying racial and homophobic dog whistles on the right, and what that entails is looking for cases when someone in power or authority uses certain key words or phrases or alludes to certain more extreme viewpoints. When questioned, the defense is always that they obviously didn’t mean it “the bad way” they only meant the precise specific linguistic meaning of their actual words. The reason we object to this is because we believe they are signaling to their more extreme constituents and/or audience that they support them and their theories and beliefs but can’t actually say it because of the public nature of their positions or statements. They will also often use the exact kind of defense that was in the letter you posted - I was just making off the cuff flip comments that TOTALLY don’t have any deeper meaning and here’s why my criticisms are actually correct and oh look here’s that word again while I argue that the totally non racist/anti-Semitic case I’m making is totally reasonable and that the people trying to “silence” me in the name of political correctness are the real danger

I don’t know nearly enough personally about that guy to say what he really feels or believes, but if you had replaced the Zionism details with talk about illegal immigration and told me that Stephen Miller had written it I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

This is also kind of where I lose you in general in this defense you are writing here, because it kind of argues that as long as the things we actually mean when we decry “Zionism” are legitimate it doesn’t matter the way they often come across to other people, either Jewish people or the fringe that believe much more extreme hateful things, and I don’t think we accept that from the right and I don’t think we should accept that from the left

I don’t currently have any reason to believe anyone in the thread is anti-Semitic, but once again I should note that we don’t limit our definitions of racism to “people who hate black people or Mexican people or whatever” so it would be pretty hypocritical if we limited our definition of anti-semitism to “people who hate Jewish people”

In this thread people have said israel stole the land through imperialism, ignoring they were driven from their lands

That also distort the truth

Example

During the embassy protests headlines in the media and here were israel murdered 60 palestenians

They ignored the rockets fired at israel first, ignored that of the 60, 54 were Hamas operatives dressed as civilians and used humans as shields. No, just israel is murderers

Yes israel intercepts many rockets with the iron dome and then retaliate and do much more damage than is done to them. Yes that can be criticized without beimg anti semitic at all

I complain about the media and un having an anti israel bias rather than an anti semitic bias

I wish people would actually research rather than just spout the left's anti israel pro pal rhetoric

The fact that there is sympathy for Hamas is unbelievable

Sympathy for the pA i can get sometimes. But not hamas

I'm jewish. Bar-mitzvahed at 14. I was held-back in Hebrew School errrr jk

The Jews have a tiny sliver of land and a history of unspeakable persecution prior. Simply put, they can err on the side of preservation-of-self for the duration. Not interested in getting into the minutia.

Yes i was called racist for saying it's nice to see north korea beimg civilized and letting their citizens see their family from south korea

https://www.politico.com/states/new-...urvival-609491

I think the dems are going to lose seats in the senate if anything

They probably will take the house but even that's not a given

I think the most likely outcome based on the polling is that the senate stays about the same with maybe 1-3 seats currently held by each party switch hands and the Democrats probably take the House but it’s close

That said recent elections have tended to have a pretty high correlation between the direction and magnitude of polling misses both regionally and nationally, so it wouldn’t be all the surprising to see the republicans keep the house and also end up with 54 or so Senate seats, but it also wouldn’t be all that surprising to see Democrats barely take the Senate while roughly flipping the current house composition. There are a lot of republican house districts that are currently in the R+5 to R+10 range when it comes to partisan lean, so if the Dems get to or close to a double digit win in the House popular vote the number of flipped seats could grow fast, whereas if the republicans can hold the margin within about 5 points nationally the geographic advantages they have will probably be enough to hold on to a majority

The Menendez situation in New Jersey is first an foremost an example of Democrats being stupid (and how did he get left out of the worst establishment Dem conversation earlier lol) but he’s still probably safe the way the National environment looks for Democrats overall. In a year like 2014 he’d probably lose, but I think if Republicans can get him this year it probably won’t matter for control of the senate because they probably also did well enough elsewhere that they wouldn’t need that seat

Mets did you ever watch that YouTube video I linked you to?

i was thinking about this situation...

reporter: miss cortez, what's your position on abortion? do you support a woman's right to choose?

aoc: i'm sorry. i'm here to support abdul

"Geographic advantages" is an interesting way to put "illegal and immoral gerrymandering"

There’s some of both at play here, since the Senate is even more tilted towards republicans and the only gerrymandering of that body is state lines. I chose not to mention the gerrymandering because it leads to some true but misleading whataboutism that always devolves

The reason people would be upset by this but not by what she said about withdrawing troops from the Middle East is because people don’t actually care about troops in the Middle East

yeah, i wasn't thinking so much about people being upset. i was thinking how easy it is to answer a simple question

would have been sick if the reporter asked this as a follow up question

So as an aside at noon today I was pretty close to 100% sure that Kavanaugh was going to get confirmed to the Supreme Court and nothing that had happened did anything meaningful to change that

Obviously there’s still stuff developing but while I still think it’s more likely than not my certainty level has gone down considerably over the last 5 hours.

I’m going to wait on commenting about the specifics until we get some clarity over time but it definitely seems to me as though a named accuser who is talking and giving details is considerably more significant than an anonymous accuser giving only a summary in a letter

Oh yeah you are absolutely right. She didn’t answer because she doesn’t support withdrawing the troops

she didnt answer cause she knows jack **** about foreign policy.
but that is okay, she can learn

bird post your stupid link again i said i think i did and i will watch if if its not 8 hours long, not that you pay mind to anything i link that doesnt interest you