Roy Startup

Wants to be England manager but starting small first. ITFC till I die.

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

Be careful what you wish for #itfc

[Ipswich Town @IpswichTown]

Three years of KMc.

[Calev Ben-Dor @Fathom_Editor]

Antisemitism explained in 846 words

Antisemitism is the rumour about 'the Jews'. It has taken on radically different forms and supposed ‘rationales’ in different cultures at different times.

Antisemitism isn’t just a prejudice against Jews. It is also a fear of their supposedly tremendous (but always hidden) power to shape the world.

Antisemitism is an irrational fantasy, often linked to wild conspiracies and apocalyptic visions of the world. For the antisemite, the powers of the Jew are unlimited: indeed they verge on the supernatural or devilish. The Jews (but today, often, ‘the Zionists’) are seen to control everything: they run global media, finance and politics, they start wars, run the slave trade, do 9/11 (while warning all the Jews about it the night before), cause financial systems to crash, and organise fake antisemitism crises – such as the one in the Labour Party, supposedly contrived by Jews to bring down Jeremy Corbyn.

In that sense, antisemitism sometimes functions in some different ways to other prejudices, other racisms. (Which is not to say it is any ‘worse’ than any other prejudice. There is no league table. All racisms are unique and all are to be fought.)

The leading US democratic socialist Michael Walzer argues antisemitism has been ‘a tool in many different intellectual efforts, religious and secular, to understand the world and to denounce opposing understandings of the world’.

Similarly, another socialist, Steve Cohen, in his pioneering study of left antisemitism That’s Funny You Don’t Look Antisemitic, pointed out that antisemitism, ‘provides its adherents with a universal and generalised interpretation of the world’.

Medieval priests made one claim about ‘the Jews’, Enlightenment philosophers made another. The Nazi SS officer had his claim, as did the Stalinist Central Committee Member.

Each told a different story about the supposedly alien, all-powerful, always malevolent and always tricksy Jew. Each story has served to justify a murderous attack upon the Jews who have been indicted, through history, as:

➡️the betrayer and killer of the universal God, drainer of gentile blood, poisoner of the wells, etc (Medieval Christian antisemitism);
➡️• the tribal anachronism, the enemy of the Age of Reason (Enlightenment antisemitism);
➡️• the rootless cosmopolitan, everywhere the enemy of and fifth column within organic nations (Counter-Enlightenment antisemitism);
➡️• the biologically programmed threat to all races, to be eliminated to the last child (Nazi antisemitism);
➡️• the sons of apes and pigs who will be killed on a Day of Judgment (some forms of Islam and modern Islamic antisemitism);
➡️• the arch-capitalist exploiter – to be hung from the lampposts as German Communist Ruth Fischer put it (Left antisemitism).

Today, in addition to all of the above (each of which is still with us; they all co-mingle, today), there is a new form of antisemitism which has been the consequence of the birth of a Jewish State – Israel – and the demonisation of it.

‘Zionism’, properly understood as a movement of national liberation for the Jewish people, is demonised by the new antisemitism through the antisemitic ideas of the ‘The Zios’, ‘The Zionists’, ‘Global Zionism’ and ‘the all-powerful Jewish Lobby’.

Once it was ‘the Jew’ now it is ‘the Zionist’ that is absolutely malign, still controlling the world for Jewish purposes, and still string-pulling.

The Zionists’ power is still cast as virtually unlimited, still exercised through their hidden control of global media, political parties and governments, and global finance, still pulling the wool over the eyes of the poor gentiles for Jewish purposes. They are still uniquely evil, cast as the modern-day Nazis no less. This is antisemitism ‘dressed up’ as anti-Zionism.

Maybe Dave Rich explains things in the clearest terms: ‘Nowadays antisemitism often appears in discourse relating to Israel, either by targeting Israel itself as a proxy for Jews or by repeating old antisemitic slanders with “Israel” or “Zionist” swapped in for the word “Jew”.’ He goes on: ‘Antisemitism in today’s Labour Party … usually involves language that draws on old racist lies about Jews, but reframes the bigotry in a modern, “anti-Zionist” setting that has nothing to do with what Zionism is, or with how Israel actually behaves.’1

In short, that which the demonised Jew once was in older forms of antisemitism, demonised Israel now is in contemporary antisemitic anti-Zionism: all-controlling, the hidden hand, tricksy, always acting in bad faith, the obstacle to a better, purer, more spiritual world, uniquely malevolent, full of blood lust, uniquely deserving of punishment, and so on.

In consequence, as historian David Nirenberg, author of the seminal work Anti-Judaism: The History of a Way of Thinking, puts it, ‘We live in an age in which millions of people are exposed daily to some variant of the argument that the challenges of the world they live in are best explained in terms of "Israel’".

In every single iteration of antisemitism, including the latest, the antisemite believes there is a utopia that humankind could reach if we could just - as they put it - get the bloody Jews out of the way. Every antisemite thinks they are on the 'right side of history'.

And not one ever has been.
@daverich1 @DavidHirsh @centre_as @antisemitism @AntisemitismEye @NHSAntisemitism @caaauk @StopAntisemites @CombatASemitism

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

After 14 years of Tory rule you'd think we'd have a more compassionate government with Labour, sadly the cruelty has got a lot worse.

[Robert Largan @robertlargan]

A few moments after MPs voted for assisted dying, the Government Whip on duty objected to and blocked the Children’s Hospices (Funding) Bill.

[Robert Largan @robertlargan]

A few moments after MPs voted for assisted dying, the Government Whip on duty objected to and blocked the Children’s Hospices (Funding) Bill.

[Viz Comic @vizcomic]

subscriptions >>> https://t.co/35D27IBRQH

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

Shooting persistent shop lifters would not affect the vast majority, but that doesn't mean it's the right thing to do
https://t.co/yZuUcKdco1

[Sam Barber @SamBarber1910]

A reminder that folks who are leaving Twitter are doing so not because they were not permitted to express their opinion, but because you *are* permitted to express yours.

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

Can we wear pink every week #itfc

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

Walton in goal, slicker on the bench for Leicester please, Muric should be playing in league 2 #itfc

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

@Stuart_Watson No Taylor as well

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

Probably a good place for him

[TWTD.co.uk - #itfc @twtduk]

Muric on bench. #itfc

[Joe Fattorini @joefattorini]

A quick question for @jamesmurray_ldn - if you increase tax again on alcohol, what other spending commitments are you going to cut?

#laffercurve

[Keir Starmer @Keir_Starmer]

Looking ahead to winter is frightening.

I’ve met pensioners who have no idea how they’ll heat their homes. Parents who will have to skip meals so their kids can eat.

The Tories are too busy fighting each other to notice.

Labour has a plan that meets the scale of this crisis.

[Peter Hitchens @ClarkeMicah]

Is there now *any* aspect of the case against Lucy Letby which is not called into serious question? Insulin? The wrong tests. Air embolism? doubted by medical experts. Door-swipe evidence? Flat Wrong. Now the famous 'confession' dissolves https://t.co/yu52O36tIz

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

@MartinSLewis @terryelaineh1 @RachelReevesMP That's a non issue, they stop child benefit when one person in a household is above 40% threshold, it would be easy to do the same with WFP.

[Hugh Osmond @hughosmond]

£310 million paid to wind farms to NOT produce electricity last year. All added to consumer bills.

These kinds of massive subsidy never appear in the cost of wind generation showed to us by the green grifters of course.

Anyone still think renewable energy is cheap.

[Roy Startup @RoyStartup]

I think Cole Skuse would disagree #itfc

[Football Tweet ⚽ @Footballtweet]

🗣️ Kevin De Bruyne: "I think 'passes completed' is the most useless statistic there is.

I can have 96% pass completion playing sideways or backwards without being dangerous for the whole game. That means I haven't done anything. What's the point?"

[Andrew Doyle @andrewdoyle_com]

The 2013 Keir Starmer makes a really good point…

[Max Trorey @MaxTrorey4]

10/10 placement 😍 #itfc #ncfc

[GB News @GBNEWS]

'When BLM riots happened in 2020, the media coverage was all asking the question "why do black people feel the way they feel?" but no one seems to be prepared to ask these questions this group of people.'

Sunil Sharma, on how to stop the ongoing riots in the UK.