AB

[AB @abartfeld]

@AustraliaCalli1 @lectorintende @chiefrabbi @EzraACohen Hatzalah exists in Australia too. You’re welcome.

[AB @abartfeld]

@TheB1M American public transport

[AB @abartfeld]

@geneva_airport 40 min wait for departure passport control is unacceptable. This is the last impression your visitors have of your otherwise great city

[Dave Rich @daverich1]

378 people were murdered at the Nova music festival in Israel on 7 October. Today, tens of thousands of their counterparts at Glastonbury chanted “Death, death to the IDF”. In doing so they revealed a deep sickness at the heart of our culture. Full link in the next post.

[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

[Dave Rich @daverich1]

To boycott writers and publishers not necessarily for anything they have done, but because they have not expressed the correct approved opinion about the alleged actions of their own government, is Stalinist. It reeks of a totalitarian urge to crush individual voices in pursuit of ideological conformity.

To apply this standard, this political test, to one nation only, over and over, and to choose not to apply it to any other nation, is not a principled stand for human rights. It is discriminatory, and it shames any writers and publishers who go along with it.

That is why I have signed this letter.

https://t.co/AvyLVNdgiG

[Rachel Riley MBE 💙 @RachelRileyRR]

Sudan is the world’s gravest humanitarian disaster – but almost nobody cares | Jonathan @Freedland

https://t.co/QARS9tznCC

[AB @abartfeld]

@BrokerWx 66

[AB @abartfeld]

@MaxBlumenthal Are there any other forms of racism which you think don’t threaten the victims in a “concrete way”, or is it just Jews who aren’t worthy of allyship or even self-defence?

[AB @abartfeld]

@PeterBeinart @StateSEAS So Jews can only fight antisemitism if they a) denounce Israel and b) fight all other forms of racism simultaneously? It’s hard to imagine you believe your own diatribe, this is just trolling for clicks.

[Dave Rich @daverich1]

Read this to the end, if it's the only thing you read today. And then try to imagine how many other stories there are like this, that will never be told.

[AB @abartfeld]

@JewishChron Are there any other civilians who @CrispinBlunt thinks can be legitimately murdered, or just Israelis? This sinister idiocy does nothing to advance peace.

[AB @abartfeld]

@gwenshap To be fair it's not really a social context when one party is paying the other. I agree it's uncomfortable, but 99% of references are just fact-checking, few candidates are foolish enough to offer a referee who isn't going to be complimentary.

[H.E.T. @HolocaustUK]

Our crowdfunding campaign #TheirLegacyOurFuture is now LIVE! For the next 36 hours you can donate to help us in our mission to ensure all future generations are educated about the Holocaust.

Donate here: https://t.co/UgS9m8IBdO

[Cloudera APAC @ClouderaAPAC]

Cloud Director for @ClouderaAPAC talks about her passion for helping organisations adopt new technology effectively and power #DataDriven decisions. She shows us what's in store for #cloud and where @Cloudera is headed. https://t.co/bHs46xvSNt

[Cloudera @cloudera]

The banking industry is at the height of #DigitalTransformation - financial institutions that want to remain competitive need to learn how to manage and capitalize on data. #FinServ https://t.co/dgVcZZTuHb

[Cloudera @cloudera]

Feeling bogged down rather than inspired by your data? Tackling your data lifecycle management may be the key to turning that around. #MachineLearning #AI https://t.co/FlmZDwnjaa

[AB @abartfeld]

@chris_herd @DanKaszeta Hard to believe. Almost zero companies mandate full time in the office, the best people don’t all want to work remotely, and the CEO didn’t hire them all.

[Cloudera APAC @ClouderaAPAC]

We're so proud of our Rising Star Preety & Shining Star Fanly who represented Cloudera at the Women in ICT awards. Huge congrats to Fanly for taking the title of "Rising Star"! What you have achieved for Cloudera Indonesia is absolutely remarkable.

#WIICTA #ChannelAsia

[Dave Rich @daverich1]

This racist and Islamophobic graffiti is utterly disgusting, and the use of a Jewish symbol alongside it is abhorrent.