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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.
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?
That claim cannot stand without accepting the story of gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. Without it, the claim is non-recoverable:
If you take that away, there is no alternative explanation for where, when, or how the Germans were supposed to have murdered those Jews. You are left with the claimed murder of 3 million people with 0 bodies, 0 documents, 0 physical evidence, 0 witnesses, and 0 theories of how it was supposed to have even happened at all. In other words, it didn't happen. There is no substitute for the gas chamber claim in substantiating the accusations the Nazis "attempted to exterminate all the Jews." They did not, the gas chamber lie is the only thing holding that other lie together. This isn't a rhetorical point. If you admit 3 million people weren't killed in death showers it's an impossible task to explain where, when, and how those 3 million claimed victims were supposed to have been murdered by the Germans.
If the gas chamber story is dropped, the claim the Nazis "attempted to exterminate all the Jews" goes along with it. The dependency of the claim that the Nazis "attempted to exterminate all the Jews" on the gas chamber myth is also due to the fact that:
Lest you think Revisionists are straw manning the mainstream position in that passage, you can read Raul Hilberg's position on how the German plan to exterminate all the Jews supposedly came about:
So there you have it- no plans, no budget, no orders; instead it was "mind-reading" by lower-level officers. This is the mainstream position which has emerged due to the inability of mainstream historians to find any documents substantiating their characterization of German policy in this respect.
On the other hand, there are thousands of documents directly stating that the German policy with respect to the Jews was exactly what Revisionists say it was. Whereas the mainstream has resorted to "mind-reading" in a theory they call gradual radicalization.
The gas chamber myth is the only leg that other claim is standing on.
This is the reason the gas chamber story will never be conceded like so many other myths about Jewish soap and human-skin lampshades have been Revised. And all the claimed gas chambers in the Western-liberated camps were investigated and proven false. It's only the "gas chambers" supposedly found by Soviet-Polish investigators, who banned outside observers from accessing the facilities and investigating the claims, where the death shows are said to exist today.
This was a crucial part of the Aha moment for me: "Ok so the Western Allies liberate the Western camps and immediately claimed finding extermination camps with gas chambers disguised as shower rooms. But then those claims were investigated and proven false. The Soviets liberated the Eastern camps and immediately claimed finding extermination camps with gas chambers disguised as shower rooms and banned outside observers from investigating. Those are where all of the extermination camps are claimed to exist today."
What are the chances of that? Versus the chance that the whole story was wartime atrocity propaganda that got dropped in the Western camps but maintained in the Eastern camps under the auspice of Soviet investigation.
Finally, the gas chamber story is the most important aspect of the Holocaust because it's the single most visceral depiction of the Holocaust that influences mass audiences. Children watching Schindler's List for example and, in school, being shown children gassed inside death showers. If that gets dropped and admitted as a propaganda lie, there's no recovery for the Holocaust narrative as a whole.
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