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PaperclipPerfector  2yr ago (text post)   29581 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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By white nationalist Jews, are you referring to Zionists? They are certainly Jewish nationalists, but they are demonstrably not white nationalists; see the Mizrahi and Maghrebi Jews.

Yes, that's who I'm referring to. Some of them having darker skin is not actually an argument against them being white nationalists - The Daily Stormer's readerbase doesn't get to go "Oh we're not white nationalists, we have a Sicilian division". Israel is essentially viewed as a colonial settler project on the left, with a bunch of white europeans coming in and oppressing a bunch of people of colour. Don't forget that "blackness" in the modern left is contingent upon being a leftist as well.

What views has the left not been hiding? Their opposition to a movement they perceive as white nationalist?

Yes! This support for Palestine and opposition to Israel isn't some surprise that was sprung on the jews after they reacted to an attack, but a core part of left-wing political ideology for the past few decades. They have been saying loudly, for years, that this is what their response would be.

What "sneaking suspicion" of Singal are you talking about?

I was making a joke - it is extremely obvious that Jesse Singal would have first-hand experience of what it is like to get Blocked and Reported.

Perhaps this by itself is not, but surely their broadly welcoming stance toward non-European co-religionists is. So too is their explicit policy of using Judaism, not whiteness, as an eligibility criterion.

Christian nationalism is largely thrown into the same bucket of deplorable ideologies that good leftists are duty-bound to oppose, and the religious aspects are often derided as simply cover for ethnic chauvinism. In the case of Israel it is actually just naked ethnic chauvinism, and 90% of the jews that modern leftists encounter are going to be white ashkenazim. Nobody is ever going to believe that Amy Schumer and Jerry Seinfeld are people of colour, and so when they see people like them advocating for an explicitly racist ethnostate they're going to call that white nationalism.

The whiteness of Jewish people is a matter of debate among the kind of left- and right-wingers whom I find distasteful,

I also find that interminable quibbling to be distasteful, which is why I largely don't engage in it. I find that categorising ashkenazim as a sub-category of white people is the most useful approach when it comes to discussing politics, so that's the approach I take. I don't really have an opinion on the actual question because I don't think it matters at all.

Zionism advocates for an ethnostate for Jewish people. An estimated 30 - 45% of Israelis are Mizrahi. The Venn diagram of Jewish people and white people is not a circle.

"We want an ethnostate for a people who are 55-70% white" pattern matches directly to white nationalism in modern politics, and I don't even think people are being particularly wrong or incorrect when they call that ideology white nationalism. When you look at actual Israeli policies (settling Gaza, surreptitiously administering contraceptives to black people, discriminating against muslims) that initial judgement seems totally correct from a left-wing perspective.

This is true, and recent polling suggests that the left, particularly the youth, no longer regard Jewish people as a historically or currently oppressed minority.

And why should they? The idea that Lloyd Blankfein is a victim of discrimination is just farcically wrong, and when you try to talk about how oppressed poor Harvey Weinstein was people are just going to laugh in your face - and they're correct to do so. If they actually are an oppressed minority, then that would show up in the data the same way statistics reveal discriminatory treatment towards black people... But when you look at the statistics you get the opposite result, which suggests that they are actually the opposite of oppressed. HBD answers (higher average verbal IQ translates to better outcomes in a society that rewards higher verbal IQ) can provide an explanation, but good luck getting the left to agree to that (and I'm not even entirely convinced that HBD covers all of it, I feel like there's at least some element of ethnic nepotism that contributes as well... but that just might be genetic too).

Sure, fair enough, Jewish progressives could maybe have predicted that the leopard would eat their face.

The only real surprise to me is that people are actually surprised about this - I was under the impression that most Jewish progressives in this case considered themselves part of the metaphorical leopard.

You don't believe it matters if Jews are white,

Correct. I'm not a white nationalist and don't think that "white" is a strong enough basis for any kind of group identity. Whether or not individual jews qualify under that umbrella is just not a question I care about because I don't think that information is useful at all. But when I'm talking about politics at a broader level, jews absolutely fall under the category "white" as defined by the modern left and it isn't even a question.

you also believe that progressives inevitably - and correctly! - regard Zionism as a white nationalist project because only 35 - 50% of Israelis are nonwhite? (Note that Mizrahim are not the only non-white Jews in Israel.)

If a Christian nationalist group arose with 40 - 50% non-white membership, and which demonstrably opened its doors to non-whites and made Christianity, not whiteness, its overriding membership criterion, it would be odd to insist that it was a "white supremacist organization." You can use words that way, but I confess the reasoning looks very motivated to me.

I'm not trying to be glib or motivated here, I'm basing my opinion on what I see people on the left saying and doing. Are you familiar with the Proud Boys? They were a right wing political organisation that was explicitly christian, and they've been called a white supremacist group as well... despite being led by a black cuban and not having any racial requirements for prospective members. It isn't like they're the one exception or anything - here's Al Jazeera saying that Zionism is "white supremacy" and not jewish supremacy. https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2019/1/9/the-zionist-fallacy-of-jewish-supremacy Here's Newsweek talking about how orthodox-raised jew Jared Kushner's white supremacy "shines through" https://uscpr.org/jared-kushners-white-supremacy-shines-through-opinion/ (though Newsweek later edited the title to remove the term white supremacy, they didn't change the URL and the author kept the original title for his website).

I actually agree with you that this is a bad use of language, and political thinking is made less clear by simply terming everything "white nationalist", but that's the world we live in right now and that's the approach that the left has decided to take. If you want to go and tell the left that they're being a bit too free and flippant with accusations of racism and white supremacy, I think that's an admirable goal and you should definitely pursue it if you're rich enough that you never need to worry about working again.

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