The pathology of anti-Semitism
Douglas Murray makes some good points below but I think he oversimplifies a complex historical, sociological and psychological phenomenon.
Although all types of antisemitism are overgeneralizations, it is important to note that there is more than one type and source of antisemitism and that the types matter. It is the extreme examples of antisemitism that are dangerous and they are most safely seen as sui generis. Contrary to the popular impression, extreme antisemitism has been in recent centuries mostly Leftist. I try to be more comprehensive in my coverage of the matter
One of the best ways to work out that somebody has not thought deeply about anti-Semitism is if they say that they wish to destroy it once and for all. When in a corner, even Jeremy Corbyn could be found saying that we must end anti-Semitism for good. Though he was of course unable to resist forever adding ‘and all other forms of prejudice’. As though such a day could ever come.
Demonstrating that it will not, last week Corbyn’s old ally and motorcycling companion Diane Abbott could be found complaining that black people have always had it worse than other groups, and that while Jews, like gingers and gypsies, might be subject to ‘prejudice’, only black people can be subjected to ‘racism’. In the ensuing storm, and while removing the whip, Keir Starmer reiterated his claim that he would ‘tear out anti-Semitism by its roots’.
Whenever I read such a sentiment, I always wonder how people can know so little. Have they read nothing? I ask because I am afraid that it is the nature of anti-Semitism that it is ineradicable. It can be subdued, and it can be called out, but it cannot be ended ‘once and for all’. The reasons lie deeper than our age is able to consider.
Take the masterful work of Gregor von Rezzori with the slightly lurid title Memoirs of an Anti-Semite. In it, Rezzori draws a subtle but devastating portrait of attitudes towards Jews in pre-war Romania and other parts of the now long-dead Habsburg world. Perhaps the keenest insight in the book, as well as the most dramatic, is the moment when a young Romanian nobleman who has fallen for an older Jewish woman takes her out on a date and not only feels shame when his friends see them, but comes to loathe his date because she has tried to make herself look and act like everybody else. Tell me how you can eradicate a hatred that complex and deep.
Another writer, more celebrated today, addressed the same question. Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate is now recognised as one of the great novels of the 20th century. Its 900 or so pages take us through the midnight of the century, from the camp at Auschwitz to the Gulag. But one of the things that has always impressed me on a technical level about the book is that at the midpoint of the action, Grossman suddenly takes a step back. For three pages he meditates on the nature of anti-Semitism. What a thing to do in the middle of describing Stalingrad and much more.
But the more you think on it, the more this halt in the action makes sense. He says at one point in this short passage almost all that need be said about the pathology in question. Grossman writes: ‘Anti-Semitism can take many forms, from a mocking contemptuous ill-will to murderous pogroms. It can be met with in the marketplace and in the Academy of Sciences, in the soul of an old man and in the games children play in the yard. Anti-Semitism is always a means rather than an end; it is a measure of the contradictions yet to be resolved. It is a mirror for the failings of individuals, social structures and state systems. Tell me what you accuse the Jews of, I’ll tell you what you are guilty of.’
It has always been like this. So tell me exactly how you propose to ‘root out’ or ‘end for good’ a pathology which blames Jews for being poor and for being rich, for integrating and for not integrating, for being stateless and for having a state.
People who have thought about this at a facile level can be relied upon to back schemes such as Holocaust education centres and memorials almost everywhere on Earth. One reason why so many MPs back an ugly Holocaust memorial in Victoria Tower Gardens is because they imagine troops of schoolchildren being ‘educated’ about how not to hate Jews. They say that it is important to ‘learn the lessons’ of the Holocaust, as though these lessons are straightforward; as though it was almost generous of Herr Hitler to provide such a massive historical reference point for our own moral betterment.
Such people should read the most recent work of Dara Horn (author of People Love Dead Jews), who recently showed in the Atlantic how the proliferation of Holocaust education centres in America might actually be increasing anti-Semitism among the schoolchildren who are taken there. Well-meaning (generally non-Jewish) curators and guides have no time to analyse the centuries of Jew-hatred that led up to the Holocaust. Instead, the visitor is simply left with the knowledge that in the 1930s and 1940s something terrible happened. A surprising number come away with the belief that the Jews must have done something to provoke such an outrage – that they were, perhaps, disproportionately rich, for instance. What all these displays have in common is that they finish with a sort of facile generalised lesson. Don’t be mean to people. Or the question ‘Who are the Jews of today? What forms of prejudice exist in our own day that should be tackled in order not to end up with Auschwitz again?’
As Horn notes, the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington does not finish by generalising the black American experience. It does not ask whom we treat today in the fashion that American blacks were once treated. It is recognised to be an evil of its own, worthy of its own respect and historical treatment.
Not so with dead Jews. They must forever be used to improve us, available to be used by anyone wishing to make a point about – say – border security in the 21st century.
What Abbott and others consistently demonstrate is precisely what Grossman said: anti-Semitism is a mirror. We use the Jews as victims in our society because we live in a society which celebrates victimhood: victimhood without much serious suffering, of course. And we become so high on that search for victimhood that we can even forget the peoples more victimised than any other.
Tear that out.
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/anti-semitism-will-never-go-away/
*********************************************Leftist racism again
When the Murdoch-owned Herald Sun ran a cartoon depicting Serena Williams throwing a tantrum, the Guardian reported that News Corp had ‘come under global condemnation for publishing a racist, sexist cartoon’, supplementing multiple news stories with several condemnatory op-eds. Other newspapers who have found their cartoons scrutinised for racial undertones by the Guardian include the Times, the New York Post, the Australian, the Boston Herald, and Charlie Hebdo.
So how exactly did Martin Rowson’s latest cartoon manage to slip past editors? Ostensibly a comment on how Richard Sharp’s resignation proves that everything Boris Johnson touches turns to shit, the illustration quickly attracted attention this morning for its depiction of the outgoing BBC chairman.
Sharp is drawn in a grotesque caricature that looks nothing like him, complete with sunken, drooping eyes, jowly cheeks, a sinister-looking grin and a noticeably prominent nose. He is carrying a box marked Goldman Sachs which contains a vampire squid. Behind him, a large pig is vomiting into a trough.
Individually, these elements are benign enough, the usual knockabout stuff of editorial cartoons. In toto, however, they take on a more insidious flavour. Antisemitic propaganda has typically depicted its targets as hideously ugly, with dark or unusual eyes, a menacing smile and a protruding nose. Such fare would also caricature the Jewish people as a giant squid leeching onto the planet. Swine, because they are considered unclean in Jewish religious law, have been used to taunt and abuse Jews. Richard Sharp is Jewish.
The depiction of Richard Sharp in today’s @guardian cartoon falls squarely into an antisemitic tradition of depicting Jews with outsized, grotesque features, often in conjunction with money and power. It’s appalling. Here’s why ? pic.twitter.com/RI46VmL6z8
— Dave Rich (@daverich1) April 29, 2023
Now, you might say this is a case of over-sensitivity, that it’s an unfortunate coincidence that several elements of Rowson’s drawing overlap with classic antisemitic imagery. You might note that Sharp previously worked at Goldman Sachs and that the bank was famously described by a left-wing journalist as ‘a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money’. You might argue that pigs in the trough is a commonplace image when political corruption is being imputed.
And it’s not impossible to imagine that a political cartoonist could create this illustration without its undertones ever occurring to him. It’s even possible to image the cartoon going through the entire editorial process, from commissioning to publication, without anyone spotting any problems. The problem is that this is Martin Rowson and this is the Guardian and they both have form.
In 2013, Rowson drew Henry Kissinger with blood-soaked hands. This on its own seems fair enough, given Kissinger’s role in shaping deadly and disastrous US policies in Indochina. Why, though, he did he depict the Jewish Kissinger with a hook nose and walking into a Bilderberg meeting no less? In 2006, the Guardian published Rowson’s take on the second Israel-Lebanon war, his Jewish knuckleduster cartoon. This involved a giant fist studded with blood-smeared Stars of David bloodying the face of a young Arab boy. The cartoon is not of an Israeli knuckleduster, with the Stars of David between two horizontal bars, as is seen in the Israeli flag. Nor are the stars blue, as they are in the flag. These are plain, simple Stars of David — the universal symbol of the Jewish people and the Jewish religion.
If you’re still not convinced, here is what Rowson told the left-wing magazine Red Pepper in 2011, an interview dug up by the pro-Israel media watchdog Camera UK:
‘The Israel lobby is particularly masterful in using this to silence criticism of their brutally oppressive colonialism… You can’t win – it’s the ultimate trump card. No matter how many innocent people the Israeli state kills, any criticism is automatically proof of anti-semitism. No wonder idiots like Ahmadinejad want to deny the holocaust. They are jealous. They’d love to silence their critics like that.’
Bear in mind, this is the same interview in which Rowson said of the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed:
‘You have to question the motives behind this commission, and to bear in mind the context of years of anti-immigrant propaganda in Denmark. There was no real point behind publishing this stuff other than to feed this victimisation of a minority.’
So Martin Rowson understands that satire can have questionable motives, that the political and social context is important, and that cartoons can contribute to hatred of a minority religious or ethnic group. The question, then, is why this understanding seems to fail him when it comes to Jews.
When judging a satirist, the test is whether they are as willing to lampoon the powerful without fear or favour. Which takes us back to the Richard Sharp cartoon. Were the outgoing BBC chairman a black man with left-wing politics, appointed under dubious circumstances by a socialist government, would Rowson depict him in a comparable light, with exaggerated features and imagery familiar from racist illustrations of black people? I could be wrong but I don’t believe he would, given his comments on the Danish cartoons and the ideological worldview his cartoons articulate.
Moreover, I don’t think the Guardian would publish such a cartoon. It did publish Rowson’s this morning but this afternoon the content was removed from the paper’s website. Readers were instead met with the statement: ‘The cartoon that was posted here today did not meet our editorial standards, and we have decided to remove it from our website.’ Maybe we should take encouragement from the fact they eventually deleted it, or from Rowson’s statement, issued this afternoon, which reads in part:
‘Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa. To work effectively, cartoons almost more than any other part of journalism require eternal vigilance, against unconscious bias as well as things that should be obvious and in this case, unforgivably, I didn’t even think about. There are sensitivities it is our obligation to respect in order to achieve our satirical purposes.’
The question remains: why are some progressives who are woke to racism in most circumstances unable to see it when it comes to certain minorities whose politics they disapprove of?
https://www.spectator.com.au/2023/04/the-guardians-shameful-double-standards/
*********************************************************Woke ASPCA Allocates Mere 2% to Animal Shelters, Millions Funneled to Execs and Idle Accounts
A new report has revealed that one of the country’s most well-known animal welfare groups, the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (ASPCA), has been sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars, including millions in offshore Caribbean accounts, while giving just 2% of its budget to pet shelters.
The report has been released by the Center for the Environment and Welfare (CEW), a recently established think tank that has launched a paid media campaign to expose the ASPCA’s alleged duplicity.
The ASPCA, known for it’s heart-string pulling commercials with images of abused cats and dogs while listening to Sarah McLachlan singing “Arms of an Angel” which helped raise millions of dollars from viewers believing their money would go to help these animals.
In an interview with Fox News Digital, CEW Executive Director Jack Hubbard stated that the ASPCA is more focused on enriching itself and pushing a radical political agenda than helping pets in need.
“We’re concerned about misinformation and a lack of information about the true agenda of the ASPCA,” Hubbard said. “We’re trying to educate the public about who this group is and who it’s not.”
The report cites the ASPCA’s most recent tax filings as the source of its figures, indicating that only 2% of the organization’s budget is given as grants to community pet shelters.
Meanwhile, the ASPCA had $390 million in revenue and $575 million in assets in 2021, including $310 million in investments and $105 million in savings.
Even more concerning is the ASPCA has $11 million in offshore accounts in the Caribbean, not to mention the absurd salaries employees receive.
The organization’s CEO, Matt Berkshadker, receives nearly $1 million a year, with 259 of his employees earning six-figure salaries.
Hubbard has called for Berkshadker to cut his salary in half and for the ASPCA to distribute its roughly $300 million in investments to local shelters.
CEW’s findings appear to be in line with a 2021 investigation by CBS News.
The investigation reported that while the ASPCA had raised more than $2 billion for animal welfare since 2008, it spent just $146 million, or about 7% of the total money raised, in grants to local animal welfare groups. In contrast, the organization spent at least $421 million on fundraising.
“When you start sharing this information with people, especially animal lovers, they’re outraged,” said Hubbard. “There’s a euthanasia crisis in this country, with more than a million animals killed, euthanized in the US each year, and you’ve got this group sitting on $300 million in investments.”
The ASPCA is not affiliated with local SPCAs. It only runs one adoption center in New York City.
“Most people believe they’re associated with all the local shelters, but they’re not,” said Hubbard. “The ASPCA should change name its name to the Midtown Manhattan ASPCA.”
The ASPCA has also been criticized for its lobbying efforts to influence the 2023 Farm Bill.
The organization is leading a coalition of 40 animal rights groups in this push, advocating for a national moratorium on new and expanded large livestock feeding operations, a complete ban by 2040, and the creation of new animal welfare standards for the transport of livestock and poultry.
The coalition also supports a proposal for a $100 billion program to transition animal feeding operations to raising pasture-based livestock or growing specialty crops and organic commodity production.
CEW claims that the ASPCA’s goal is to incentivize livestock farmers to stop raising animals and focus instead on crops and plants. Hubbard has called the group’s lobbying campaign “radical,” suggesting that it is pushing an “anti-farmer” agenda.
He argues that the changes sought by the ASPCA would harm both low-income Americans and national security by making the country’s supply chain more vulnerable and raising food prices.
“I’m really concerned about animal rights groups trying to change the country’s food policy,” Hubbard said. “We have the safest and most abundant and affordable food supply in the world. It’s good for people at all income levels.”
“If the ASPCA is successful, the food crisis will increase, and we’re already in a hyperinflationary tailspin,” Hubbard continued. “Talking about measures to raise prices of healthy animal protein is beyond irresponsible and poorly timed.”
The ASPCA has defended itself by stating that all its efforts are meant to ensure the welfare of animals.
A spokesperson told Fox News Digital, “For more than 155 years, the ASPCA has been actively pursuing our mission ‘to provide effective means for the prevention of cruelty to animals throughout the United States.’ All of our lifesaving work is dedicated to rescuing, protecting, and caring for animals in need.”
https://thefederalistpapers.org/us/woke-aspca-allocates-mere-2-animal-shelters-millions-funneled-execs-idle-accounts-report ?
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Can Trump win?
When it comes to contemporary politics, Americans don't see eye-to-eye on much. But they agree by large majorities that Joe Biden and Donald Trump should not be seeking another term as president. An NBC News poll released last Sunday found that 70 percent of respondents, including 51 percent of Democrats, believe Biden shouldn't run for reelection. Similarly, 60 percent of Americans — including 1 out of 3 Republicans — think Trump shouldn't be trying to return to White House.
Of course, both men are running for president in 2024. Biden made it official last week, which means that his renomination at the Democratic convention in Chicago next summer is a virtual certainty. He has no serious primary opponent, and if he did it, likely wouldn't matter: The last time a sitting president was denied his party's nod for another term was 1884.
Trump does face credible primary opponents, both announced and likely to announce, including former South Carolina governor and former United Nations ambassador Nikki Haley, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, and former vice president Mike Pence. Thus far, though, Trump leads nearly every survey of Republican primary voters, and he has been endorsed by dozens of incumbent GOP governors and members of Congress.
So here we are: The election rematch America doesn't want is shaping up to be the one it gets. In 2016, Trump and Hillary Clinton were repeatedly described as the two most disliked presidential nominees in living memory. Eight years later, the same scenario is unfolding again. Only 38 percent of Americans view Biden in a positive light. Only 34 percent have a positive view of Trump.
Is there no way out?
At this point, only death or disability will keep Biden off the 2024 ballot, so Americans can avoid another Biden vs. Trump contest only if Republicans say no to the former president.
There are excellent reasons for them to do so, beginning with the fact that nominating Trump is the best way to ensure Biden's reelection.
If Biden and Trump are next year's nominees, they can count on the votes of their respective parties' most loyal voters. But the key to winning will be swing voters — and most of them recoil from Trump. It isn't just that Trump is viewed favorably by even less of the electorate than Biden. Rather, as Republican pollster Tony Fabrizio noted in The Wall Street Journal, when voters who dislike both Trump and Biden are asked whom they would cast a ballot for if they had to choose one or the other, Biden is the overpowering favorite, 54 percent to 15 percent. That's why Democrats hope and pray that Trump is the GOP nominee.
Make no mistake: There are strong arguments against reelecting Biden. His spending has fueled the worst inflation in 40 years, his handling of Afghanistan was a fiasco, he has presided over an alarming spike in violent crime, and, contrary to the moderate image he cultivates, he has gone along with many of the most radical priorities of his party's left wing. Above all, there is his advanced age — Biden is the oldest man to assume the presidency, he would be 82 at the start of a second term, and Vice President Kamala Harris is painfully unready for prime time.
But however strong the case against Biden, the case against Trump — the only president who ever tried to overturn an election, the only one to be twice impeached, the only one to call for suspending the Constitution, the only one to be indicted on criminal charges — is far stronger. If Trump is on the ballot next year, Republicans up and down the ballot will be forced to campaign with the shackles of Trump fatigue clanking around them. If Trump isn't on the ballot — if the GOP instead picks a standard-bearer who is more appealing and less bizarre — everything changes. Biden will still have the advantages of incumbency, but Republicans will have a much clearer path to recapturing the White House.
Nothing unites Democratic voters like their loathing of Trump. Democrats nominated Biden for president in 2020 because they concluded — correctly — that he had the best chance of ousting Trump. They suffered minimal damage in last fall's midterms because numerous Republican candidates endorsed by the former president went down in defeat. After three consecutive election cycles — 2018, 2020, 2022 — in which Trump proved to be an electoral liability for Republicans, will the party really be so foolhardy as to hitch the GOP wagon to his falling star again?
https://jeffjacoby.com/26938/republicans-can-spare-the-country-a-rematch-it
****************************************My other blogs. Main ones below:
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://antigreen.blogspot.com (GREENIE WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Kristina Pimenova, once said to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Note blue eyes and blonde hair
Bliss: What every woman wants: to feel safe and secure in the arms of her man. Robert Irwin and Rorie Buckey. See 
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