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Notes -
Mayor Mamdani Bends the Knee - and the Problem with Left-Wing Antisemitism
According to Mamdani the initiative entails "investing millions in Jewish cultural centers and nonprofits" as well as bussing students to the Museum of Jewish Heritage. The high-level details are available in the report.
NYC already hosts two dedicated Holocaust Museums and 6 memorials, but the plan also "calls on the federal government to support Holocaust educational centers and museums in New York City, and to continue to support the large number of Holocaust survivors in NYC through existing federal programs. Additionally, the Mamdani administration supports federal legislative efforts to increase Holocaust educational programming." The plan also pledges $2 million capital investment in the design and construction of the Queens Holocaust Memorial.
The plan also includes a $2.5 capital investment in the Center for New Jewish Culture, a Jewish-dedicated private space. The plan also pledges additional NYPD resources for Jewish neighborhoods.
One of the fascinating aspects of this announcement is that it cites and then wildly misinterprets a passage from the Talmud:
The standard print versions of the Talmud, which Jews actually study, specify "mi-Yisrael" or the soul of a Jew. And this gets to the heart of the problem of left-wing antisemitism, especially with notorious left-wing commentators like Hasan Piker. They always denounce antisemitism in their diatribe against Israel. When in fact the right-Wing antisemites are correct that this is not only a problem with Israel, it is actually a problem with the way Jews politically and culturally organize in the United States. It leads to wildly inappropriate and disparate treatment of Jews in which they get all sorts of public funding and support for their dedicated spaces, combined with unlimited cultural veneration and educational propaganda.
This puts the left-wing antisemites in an impossible position, they are unwilling to admit that it's not just an Israel problem or a Netanyahu problem. The game they are trying to play is impossible, and trying to split those hairs just makes them get immediately bulldozed and subjugated in trying to defend themselves from the accusation of antisemitism.
If you're like me you've encountered Jews who were absolutely certain that Mamdani was going to bring Sharia to NYC and expel the Jews or something. Instead we just even more Jewish special treatment and taxpayer-financed privileges from the left-wing Israel critics who are completely in denial of the actual problem.
Weak aura. He should've demanded the construction of the Museum of Amalekite Genocide to provide an even-handed approach to genocide education.
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This is almost certainly a performative move to keep the eye of sauron (the feds) off him. The current admin is very philosemetic and has been suing people left and right for letting muslims and their supporters harass jews. Whether on campus or otherwise. I expect the left wing antisemites to return to having a backbone on hating jews domestically when another Democrat takes the Oval Office.
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Can you help me understand what the pronoun this represents above? Does it refer to Jews systematically favoring the interests of their fellow Jews over the interests of non-Jews as part of the observance of an explicit religious obligation? Is it Jews hiding their general perfidy by systematically misrepresenting their religious beliefs to non-Jews? Something else entirely?
Also, what is the educational propaganda you have in mind here? You've called (many times) for a rejection of the broad historical consensus that several million European Jews were systematically murdered in WWII - is that what you mean? Are you talking about disinformation surrounding the historical settling / foundation of Israel and Israel's conduct in its historical / current wars? Propaganda about Israel's treatment of non-Jewish residents within its 1967 borders and the occupied territories? Propaganda about Jewish religious beliefs and obligations? Something else?
It does refer to Jews being bestowed special ingroup status by their religious doctrine and the particular obligations they have to each other within their ingroup. It's misleading to present it as being universal because it is not. It is evidence for the ethnic particularity built into the religion but it gets presented to Gentiles in a way that intentionally obscures the meaning of the passage. The motive for including that in the statement by Mamdani is unknown. Mamdani himself may have heard it and recalled it, but I consider it unlikely. Most likely it was ghostwritten or suggested by Jewish contributors to the initiative, of which I am sure there were many. If it were the latter it would fall under perfidy.
I've called for a rejection of the historical consensus that several million European Jews were murdered inside gas chambers that were deceptively disguised as shower rooms. That claim is the centerpiece of the Holocaust, and it forms one crucial component of educational propaganda but is by no means its only aspect.
I am talking about their strategy for maintaining the consensus that Jews are not allowed to be criticized for their own behavior, including their organization and activism in the United States and especially that which is on behalf of Israel. Holocaust Education is and always has been central to that goal- establishing it as taboo to make any criticism whatsoever about the way they organize politically and culturally- because that's supposed to be antisemitic. The way you enforce that convention is with initiatives like these. And left-wing antisemites themselves try to play along with that standard, begging Jews to accept the difference between their criticism of Israel and criticism of Jews as a whole.
Consider that Mamdani has accused the Israeli government of committing a genocide in Gaza. Yet he is pledging public money to bus students to the Museum of Jewish Heritage which is an institution that supports Israel and without question curates the content of the museum in an attempt to foster support for Israel, particularly among young people. So Mamdani says Israel is committing a genocide, and then uses taxpayer money to bus kids to institutions dedicated to exposing children to lies about gas chambers disguised as shower rooms in order to guilt them into supporting Israel and never being critical of the way Jews assert themselves in culture, politics, and religion.
No; the centerpiece of the Holocaust is that the Nazis attempted to exterminate all the Jews and got a substantial amount of the way there. The alleged means are and always have been secondary at best - it is well-known that the extermination program started with firing squads. We've done this dance before, but on that occasion, you ceased responding when I got to asking an important question which I'd like you to answer now: why, in your view, did the Nazis not try to exterminate the Jews? Do you claim that they didn't want to, that they inexplicably had some moral qualms? Or that they wanted to, but didn't believe they had the means? Or is it that they wanted to, but only meant to get around to it later and hadn't actually started by the time the Reich fell? Which is it, and what makes you believe that?
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Huh, you're correct. It's right here, Sanhedrin 37a:
I have to admit that this is a pretty weird verse to cite. It's not particularly relevent to anything mentioned in the announcement. Seems like a plausible dogwhistle.
I get the sense that Mamdani has "cracked the code" so to speak of American politics. Helicopter money isn't enough. The politician must create a salient connection between himself, his political project, and the benefit to the people in the mind of the voter. Giving away 70,000 Met Opera tickets by lottery is, by any rational standard, retarded, but it will be more effective politically than subsidizing ticket prices or opera supply costs could ever be.
I disagree. The spectacle alone increased interest in opera, probably getting ~12mil views online across platforms. The lottery artificially makes opera appear more desirable, thus increasing interest further. So if opera is socially beneficial, a 70k ticket lottery is beneficial. And I’d say opera is socially beneficial for two reasons: (1) the selected emotions are higher and more pristine, (2) it trains delayed gratification and focus because there are only a few good moments of musicality and plot interest. How else can you train someone’s attention on one long point of focus for 4.5 hours today? You have a captive audience.
I mean, there's a reason that Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan and Isolde is performed as a standalone piece. It's because the 4 hours in between is a waste of time.
I do hope that some intrepid young reporter asks Mamdani if he prefers Wagner to Mendelssohn. I wonder how many articles The Free Press could milk out of that.
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Politics in America is an enormous iceberg where all the weightiness exists under the surface. There are votes and then there are pre-votes and you can control the pre-votes by influencing media, news, algorithms, education, ad spending, and so on through advocacy groups. Mamdani is pretty clever because he allocated some money to Partners Against the Hate, which itself funds the Arab American Association of New York which itself funds anti-Muslim awareness campaigns. Of course, every possible category of person has these advocacy groups except for the people who actually created the country and bled for it, which makes quite literally zero sense, but I foresee this changing within the decade.
Recently I’ve been looking into the Indian advocacy network and it’s fascinating, just obviously fresh off the boat Hindus with clear ties to the Indian political state working in concert to weaponize thousands of Indian-origin advocacy groups for power —
In the case of Mamdani, I imagine he feels that he has to set a good example so that future Muslim politicians can point to him as an example for the next couple decades to come. I do not think he actually believes the stuff he’s saying wrt antisemitism. He’s doing his own group’s advocacy, Jews are doing their own advocacy, it’s advocacy all the way down. I guess the original Americans in this extended metaphor are the passengers on the Titanic.
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It's because the White man is the Jew to Mamdani. Secular progressive Jews and Muslims have a common enemy. It shouldn't be any surprise that white identity politics are on the rise because of it. It's a shame.
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