Politics and Culture
Jack Delano, February 1943. "Chicago, Illinois. One of the Pennsylvania Railroad's giant '6100' class [T1 prototype] engines pulling out of Union Station on the 'Manhattan Limited' run."
[Photo: Shorpy/Jack Delano for the Office of War Information]
In Athens, Greece, a crowd of Pro-Palestinian protestors is combing the streets for Israelis who are staying at a nearby hotel. Many are even trying to break into the hotel to get to the Israelis inside.
A group of people is being hunted and attacked solely because of the… pic.twitter.com/PrkKG2TSne
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) May 7, 2024
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"A group of people is being hunted and attacked solely because of the country they come from because the dehumanization of Israelis has been allowed to escalate unchecked.
"We said it was this bad and you refused to listen."
A lynch mob looking for Jews.
Victoria Smith at UnHerd quickly disposes of the "my toilet at home is gender neutral" argument regularly trotted out by those who can't, or won't, see why single sex toilets are so important for women:
Do the people who make the “gender-neutral at home” argument offer up their own toilets for use by any passers-by? I suspect not, yet theirs is an argument predicated on ignoring that there is an important distinction between private and public space. Given the history of public toilet provision for women, it is telling, to say the least….
Female-only toilets are essential for women’s privacy and safety, given men’s greater propensity for flashing, voyeurism and sexual assault. To view all this as “excluding” is to see it purely from a male perspective. Female toilet provision is about granting female people equal access to public space, space from which we — not male people — have long been excluded due to men’s violence and their creation of resources which centre their bodily needs. We are nowhere close to having this equality yet.
As most women will know, even public spaces which have both male and female toilets tend to have far longer queues for the ladies’. To witness the latter opening up to male users in the name of inclusion has been galling (more often than not, the men’s remains the men’s — and even if it doesn’t, one cannot identify into being able to use a urinal). True inclusion would mean creating more women’s facilities than men’s. In the meantime, if we cannot have that, ensuring that sex-specific toilets for women are in all new builds is a start.
Because Kemi Badenoch has taken a stand on this issue, it will of course be argued that what is, in practical terms, a requirement which supports female participation in life beyond the home is actually a “Tory culture war”. I will hear none of it. To those who say “your toilet at home is gender-neutral”, I would politely point out that women are allowed to have an existence beyond it.
A comment: "A quick google search on ‘hidden camera toilet porn’ throws up 107 million results – that alone is reason for single sex toilet provision…"
It's a constant struggle, battling the spread of non-socialist behaviour, and impure recorded materials from other less enlightened countries:
The North Korean police have been deploying special teams to crackdown on illegal behavior on trains traveling between Pyongyang and other cities. In particular, the authorities believe that the trains are a conduit for videos from other countries.
Speaking on condition of anonymity, a source in Pyongyang told Daily NK on Thursday that the country’s national police agency, the Ministry of Social Security, has been conducting raids on all trains entering Pyongyang since Apr. 15 on the grounds that trains are a hotbed for the various kinds of non-socialist behavior.
According to the source, the ministry believes that “impure recorded materials” from other countries are one of the causes of capitalist culture making inroads in the public, along with sudden changes in the ideological mindset of young people and university students. As such, the ministry has been seeking ways to eliminate those videos.
In the ministry’s view, the reason that foreign visual content continues to spread in the society rests in the government’s failure to prevent their circulation. That gave the ministry the idea of searching the trains, which are often used to transport the videos, the source said.
“The police agency sent special teams to all trains traveling on the Pyongyang-Hyesan and Pyongyang-Onsong lines that searched for any impure video recordings that they might be transporting. The agents found illegal merchandise, SD cards containing large numbers of impure video recordings, and illegal publications and printed materials being transported in the baggage and cargo compartments of several trains,” the source said….
Article 7 of the Reactionary Ideology and Culture Rejection Act, which North Korea enacted in late 2020, outlines the principles for punishing offenders as follows. “When an individual commits the act of importing, viewing or circulating reactionary ideology and culture, the offender will be subjected to harsh legal sanctions up to and including execution, depending on the severity of the act, and regardless of the offender’s station in society or the reasons for their behavior.”
From CNN – The case for saying ‘pregnant people’ and other gender-inclusive phrases:
After we struggle past:
A person’s sex is what they were assigned at birth based on biological characteristics of maleness or femaleness as indicated by chromosomes, gonads, hormones and genitals.
And…
Gender identity is an aspect of gender that describes a person’s psychological sense of their gender, which may or may not align with one’s sex, according to the American Psychological Association. Someone whose gender identity conforms with what has been culturally associated with the sex they were assigned at birth is known as cisgender, while those whose identities don’t align may be transgender or a nonbinary gender (someone who doesn’t exclusively identify as either of the binary genders).
We get this:
And contrary to what some may think, saying things like “only women can get pregnant” excludes more than just intersex people or those in the LGBTQ community, Miller said — that’s because such statements can also convey that a ciswoman who can’t get pregnant is no longer fully a woman.
Oh dear. No it doesn't. That's a fundamental logical error. "Only humans can walk and talk" doesn't mean that people who can't walk or who can't talk aren't human.
The stupid is very strong…
"It's not about Jews we swear!"
This is a Holocaust monument in Denmark.
There are images of Hamas leaders, who have called for the deaths of Jews and have openly denied the Holocaust, quite literally pasted on this Holocaust monument.
"Why do people think these protests are… pic.twitter.com/kwgxczDp0R
— Hen Mazzig (@HenMazzig) May 6, 2024
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"Why do people think these protests are antisemitic?" I don't know, it's unfathomable. One of the great mysteries of the world.
A Rally of Children in St. Louis, Missouri:
"Hey hey, ho ho, Zionism has got to go!"
In Nazi Germany, children chanted "Juden Raus" (Jews out!) at rallies and even had a board game of the same title.pic.twitter.com/0MbgrLr1Hy
— Shelley G (@ShelleyGldschmt) May 5, 2024
From MEMRI:
Hizbullah Deputy Secretary-General Sheikh Naim Qassem saluted American pro-Gaza protesters in a May 3, 2024 interview with Al-Manar TV (Hizbullah-Lebanon). He said that Hizbullah appreciates and values them very much, and that the protests will have a great impact on the U.S. elections and will influence President Biden’s policies. He also said that this might impact the extent of the support America provides for Israel, which in turn can bring upon the destruction of Israel without much effort on the part of Hizbullah.
They must be so proud, those campus protestors…
The current Green Party coalition.
Not sure even the greatest satirist could top this. pic.twitter.com/7zhTuYaKdn
— Chris Rose (@ArchRose90) May 5, 2024
Yossi Klein Halevi at the Times of Israel – The war against the Jewish story:
How has it come to this? How is it possible that Israel, rather than radical Islamism, would become the villain on liberal campuses? That thousands of students would be chanting “from the river to the sea” even as the Hamas massacre revealed that slogan’s genocidal implications? That the most passionate outbreak of student activism since the 1960s would be devoted to delegitimizing the Jewish people’s story of triumph over annihilation?
This moment didn’t happen in a vacuum. The anti-Zionist forces in academia have been preparing the ground for decades, systematically dismantling the moral basis of each stage of Zionist and Israeli history.
The attack began on the very origins of Zionism, which was transformed from a story of a dispossessed people re-indigenizing in its ancient homeland into one more sordid expression of European colonialism. (Europe’s post-Holocaust gift to the Jews: leaving us with the bill for its sins.)
Next, the birth of Israel in 1948 was reduced to the Nakba, or catastrophe, a Palestinian narrative of total innocence that ignores the ethnic cleansing of Jews from every place where Arab armies were victorious and the subsequent uprooting of the entire Jewish population of the Muslim world. Post-1967 Israel was cast as an apartheid state – turning Zionism, a multi-faceted movement representing Jews across the political and religious spectrum into a racist ideology and reducing an agonizingly complex national conflict into a medieval passion play about Jewish perfidy.
And now, with the Gaza War, we have come to the genocide canard, the endpoint in the process of delegitimization.
To turn Israel into the world’s arch-criminal requires three forms of erasure. The first is of the connection between the land of Israel and the people of Israel. In the anti-Zionist telling of the conflict, a 4,000-year connection that has been the heart of Jewish identity and faith is irrelevant, if not contrived outright by Zionists.
The second is the erasure of the relentless war against Israel, placing its actions under a microscope while downplaying or entirely ignoring the aggression of its enemies. There is never any context to Israel’s actions. Only by erasing Hamas’s atrocities can Israel be turned into the villain of this war.
In focusing on Israel’s actions and dismissing those of Hamas, campus protesters are providing cover for October 7 denialism. This is a new version of the Holocaust denialism prevalent in parts of the Muslim world: The atrocities didn’t happen, you deserved them and we’re going to do it again (and again).
On a recent trip to New York, walking along Broadway on the Upper West Side, I saw dozens of defaced posters of kidnapped Israelis. Rather than tear down the posters, the vandals had blacked out the Israeli faces – a literal defacement. And a useful metaphor for the anti-Zionist assault on our being.
The third form of erasure is dismissing the history of peace offers presented or accepted by Israel and uniformly rejected by the Palestinian side. No offer – an independent Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza, the re-division of Jerusalem, the uprooting of dozens of settlements – was ever sufficient. It is hard to think of another national movement representing a stateless people that rejected more offers of self-determination than the Palestinian leadership.
The ease with which anti-Zionists have managed to portray the Jewish state as genocidal, a successor to Nazi Germany, marks a historic failure of Holocaust education in the West.
This moment requires a fundamental rethinking of the goals and methodology of Holocaust education. By over-emphasizing the necessary universal lessons of the Holocaust, many educators too easily equated antisemitism with generic racism. The intention was noble: to render the Holocaust relevant to a new generation. But in the process, the essential lesson of the Holocaust – the uniqueness not only of the event itself but of the hatred that made it possible – was often lost.
Antisemitism is not merely the hatred of Jews as other but the symbolization of The Jew – that is, turning the Jews into the symbol for whatever a given civilization defines as its most loathsome qualities. For Christianity until the Holocaust, The Jew was Christ-killer; for Marxism, the ultimate capitalist; for Nazism, the defiler of race. And now, in the era of anti-racism, the Jewish state is the embodiment of racism….
Unlike the Iranian regime, which clumsily tries to deny the historicity of the Holocaust, anti-Zionists in the West intuitively understand that coopting and inverting the Holocaust is a far more effective way of neutralizing its impact.
Many, perhaps most, of the campus protesters are likely not antisemitic. They may have Jewish friends or be Jewish themselves. But that is irrelevant: They are enabling an antisemitic moment.
What is under assault is the integrity of the mid-20th century Jewish story, of a people rejecting the self-pity of victimhood and fulfilling its most improbable dream: renewing itself, in its broken old age, in the land of its youth. The shift from the lowest point Jews have known to the reclamation of power and self-confidence is one of the most astonishing feats of survival not only in Jewish but world history. It is that story that is being distorted and trivialized and demonized on liberal campuses.
One of the best and clearest statements on the current antisemitic moment that I've read recently…so no apologies for quoting at length.
["Europe’s post-Holocaust gift to the Jews: leaving us with the bill for its sins" – great comment!]
Mick Hartley 