Status Updates From Antisemitism

‘Antisemitism waxes and wanes, but sometimes it catches fire […] This stuff spreads.

‘That’s why it matters. It matters because it smells. It rots the body politic. It leads to worse, and it renders rational thought incapable […] It destroys normal evidence-based rational thought’

‘If it is possible while self-identifying as an anti-racist to hold vile opinions about Jews, to think that Jews are not properly British, to conflate Jews and Israel, to see them as capitalists and the elite, and still say you’re an anti-racist, there’s a gas seeping out that will eventually kill us all. If you cannot see or feel these things, then you are a racist’

Corbyn conflating Zionism with simply being Jewish. Spoke in generalising terms: ‘British Zionists have no sense of English irony, having lived in this country for a long very time, probably most of their lives’. Here he means Jews. Zionism is a political term which doesn’t make sense being read here.

‘When Jews call out something as antisemitic, Leftist non-Jews feel compelled to tell Jews that they’re wrong, exaggerating it, or using it as a decoy tactic, and then to tell us what antisemitism actually is […] Treat us the same way you treat any other minority, no more, no less.’

In the Labour Party, conflation of Zionism with Nazism. Ken Livingstone likened Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard? Corbyn took a long while to respond & after Livingstone’s comments that ‘Hitler was a Zionist’, he was not expelled from the party (?????????)

Antisemitism = racism

So far, brilliant and balanced. But also shows just how pervasive antisemitism is. "... the idea that Jews control the media, the banks, politics, all for their own ends. This was, of course, a key part of Nazi ideology. What is so distressing is that these theories about control and world Jewish domination are all too pervasive once more. Truth no longer matters, and conspiracy theories can fester and flower."

"[Heinrich von Treitschke's] thinking gives a clear example of what marks out antisemitism from other forms of racism - that Jews are to blame for everything and are simultaneously alien, useless *and* too powerful. It stinks of a conspiracy theory."