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Jewish billionaires conspire to change the narrative on the protests. From WaPo. (Archive link)
Usually I wouldn’t post so much from the body of an article, but there’s a lot of information to unpack here. It appears that Jewish donors secretly plotted to influence government operations, as well as the highest levels of media and academia. This comes after Mitt Romney admitted the tik tok ban was influenced by the extent of pro-Palestine content. IMO this is going to be used in American discourse about Jewish power for many years to come. You have Jewish billionaires across industries banding together to manipulate the narrative, influence politicians, and “shut it down” — literally a trope of Jewish power. The influence here is, frankly, incredible: a dozen billionaires alone, conspiring with journalists and academics and advocacy group leaders, talking about using black celebrities to push their narrative and applying “leverage” to university presidents. As Cenk Uygur tweeted (no friend of the alt right), “You can't complain about the trope, if you do the trope”.
I kind of wonder if some of this is even illegal. Not that I am naive enough to believe a charge would occur if it were. They are sitting down in briefings with the Israeli government and discussing how to best push their influence machine. Isn’t this lobbying on behalf of a foreign power?
Haven't you noticed by now?
Anything done by anyone Jewish, or any cause that might be interpreted as positive for Israel, is inherently sinister and evil.
It really is quite tiresome.
How many levels of tiresomeness are you on?
On one hand I do sympathize, but after a decade of listening to how cis-straight-white-males are responsible for all of society's ills, I'm tempted to ask you to take a number, and go to the end of the queue.
Mainly at the level where I think, boy, it'd be really nice to read the Motte without the same two or three people every time yelling about the Jews.
Could we maybe have a few days' break from people repeating their theory that everything bad that has ever happened is due to the Jews? Oh no, I stubbed my toe, those damn Jewish elites! It's worse than incorrect - it's boring.
I agree with you! I can't wait for anti-sionism to be so mainstream that Jews are afraid to publish their pro-Israel opinions and have to get together on obscure pseudonymous message boards to dare express that 'perhaps Jews have a right to self-determination'.
There are, to be fair, plenty of contexts today where you would be afraid to publicly admit to being a Zionist, even by just a minimal definition of it (i.e. thinking it's good that Israel exists and wanting it to continue existing free of attack).
And plenty of contexts where it's no problem at all or even a given. Not quite the same thing as being a White nationalist. Is it OK to punch a Zionist yet?
There are absolutely places where being a Zionist will get you punched.
No, it's not as radioactive as white nationalism, but so what? There's plenty of room for Zionism to be unpopular and provocative and something that might make Jews afraid without it being exactly as bad as the worst thing in modern politics.
The fact that Zionism is not yet as universally loathed as Nazism (though, again, there are certainly crowds people who think it ought to be) doesn't seem to prove anything, to me. Unless you're asserting that it should be?
You're also equivocating a bit between 'Jews' and 'Zionists', so I suppose I'll ask directly. Do you think that Jews should get punched just for being Jews? Or Zionists just for being Zionists?
(And to pre-empt any attempt to turn it around, no, white nationalists or neo-Nazis should not be punched either.)
It seems to me that by any reasonable standard Zionism is quite widely and publicly hated. I mean, anecdotally I know Jews who have been taking self-defence classes and buying more home security and avoiding wearing any outward signs of Jewishness in public because they're afraid of being harassed or possibly attacked. Some of those fears are exaggerated, in my view, but they're not totally unjustified.
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You could block them. I haven't blocked SS, but I also don't read their screeds about the Jews.
I usually try to avoid blocking - in particular, in a case like this, the result would be that the front page would consistently have these large, highly-active threads, with dozens of responses to something I can't see. Realistically I suspect I'd just want to read the blocked content anyway, just to see what's going on!
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Well again, it's not that I don't sympathize, it's just it seems to be the times we're living in, everybody seems to be looking for a immutable-identity-scapegoat. If it's just two-three people on the whole forum that doesn't even seem to be so bad, compared to places like Reddit. Block, and move on, I guess.
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@coffee_enjoyer provides a source. It may be boring, but in this case it doesn't seem to be incorrect.
Oh, I have no doubt that it's true that wealthy individuals pressured Columbia in this way, and the fact that the individuals in question were disproportionately Jewish is unsurprising, since for very obvious reasons Jewish people are disproportionately likely to support Israel and to oppose the Palestine protests.
But I'm not blind. I can see the way that coffee_enjoyer specifically framed this around Jewish billionaires, and given that he is one of the small group of people on the Motte obsessed with Jews, the implication is not exactly subtle. In the top-level post he quite explicitly presents this as support for alt-right theories about secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation and so on.
I'd just like to maybe go a week without a bunch of people blaming everything on the Elders of Zion, you know?
I get that. I do think it merits discussion, however.
To take a brief tangent into UK politics, the previous leader of the opposition party was a man called Jeremy Corbyn. He was plausibly antisemitic, having literally shared a platform with Hamas. His party was definitely antisemitic, and produced nasty stories about bullying of Jewish members on a regular basis. He was also very far left. I wasn't a fan.
So when a lot of newspapers started publishing articles along the lines of "as a Jew, I'm very upset that the new Prime Minister may be a genuine antisemite" I was very sympathetic. But eventually it got to the point where literally 25% to 50% of the columnists I read on a regular basis had written "as a Jew" articles and the discrepancy between that number and the proportion of Jews in the population at large (275k / 66,000k = 0.4%) started getting big enough that it made me uncomfortable.
In short, I think it's fairly clear that Jews are highly overrepresented in the media at the very least. They also seem to be overrepresented in finance and positions of power generally. I think that that imbalance is a genuine, legitimate problem for society. Especially when you compound it with a (well-founded) persecution complex based on the events of the Holocaust and prior pogroms. It seems to me that it leads to an escalatory spiral where influence is exerted to stop people from discussing the use of that influence, leading to spiralling paranoia on both sides. So I'm reluctant to condemn all discussion of secret Jewish power manipulating Western civilisation because I think Western civilisation has a right to know if it's being manipulated and I think that Jews ultimately benefit from having the disproportionate influence some of them seem to wield out in the open.
Where it ends up, I don't know. Ideally I would like to see some kind of disclosure and recusement requirements. People (not just Israelis) with foreign ties or ethnic sympathies should be required to recuse themselves under certain circumstances, the way that I am not allowed to interview my friends if they apply to my company. I have no idea how you would turn that into a coherent system though.
What exactly is the nature of this Jewish influence? If we're still talking about the UK, I can only think of the Corbyn situation, and that strikes me as pretty weak. If he'd been openly friendly with the KKK, and refused to even say that associating with them might have been poor judgement, then the gigantic number of articles you'd have seen written by black journalists about how frightened they were by the prospect of his premiership would probably dwarf those written by jews in rough accordance to the ratio of black people to Jews. I wouldn't say that would be an example of "black influence".
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Well, I think it's just a fact to begin with that Jews are very heavily overrepresented in industries like media and finance. There are a number of ways to account for that historically, going back centuries to the only trades Jews were permitted in the Middle Ages, to the effects of Jewish settlement clustered around media centres (most famously New York), or even just the way that, as a culture with strong internal bonds and high in-group trust and a heavy focus on education, Jews were naturally set up to do well in modern society and benefitted from unusually strong patronage networks.
Where I start to get suspicious is where Jews in particular are singled out and other groups, which might be equally disproportionately represented, are not. I suppose an obvious example would be the composition of the US Supreme Court, which has been utterly dominated by Catholics for a while - it's currently six Catholics, two Protestants (one of whom was raised Catholic), and one Jew, and it's not been that long since it was six Catholics and three Jews. How did America get to a point of total Catholic domination? There are some theories I find plausible (in particular I note that Catholicism and Judaism are both religions with a heavy emphasis on law, so it makes sense that their practitioners might more of an affinity for become lawyers; this bodes badly for Protestants on the court in the future, but might imply that Muslims will do well), but what I find more striking is how few people seem to care. It's not as if anti-Catholic conspiracies are foreign to American history; yet there is no discussion of this at all.
Likewise there are other ethnic groups that are noticeably overrepresented in terms of wealth or power in the US. Setting aside the obvious modern ones (Indians are currently the top, I think?), I believe e.g. Scottish-Americans used to do extraordinarily well. Yet there is no particular interest in this today.
I grant, as a starting point, that Jews have done very well in the media in the US and probably in the UK (though I am less familiar with the British context). I think it's probably fair enough to have a frank discussion about that.
But what I am frankly not comfortable with is when that discussion seems to be, in my judgement, motivated by a hatred of Jews as such that appears prior to any evidence, or even prior to any attempt to treat Jews as ordinary people or fellow citizens. I think my starting point for talking about the particular history of the Jews is that no one's coming into the dialogue massively prejudiced. And unfortunately that is not a bar that everyone meets.
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I'd be tempted to answer with "first_time?.png" if I were Jewish.
Touché!
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