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[socialjusticefail]

Soviet Antisemitism: a hundred years of recycling!

It's interesting to note just how much of the rhetoric launched against Jews, "Zionists," and Israel originates with the Soviet weaponization of antisemitism. Much of this will sound familiar to you, especially after what we've seen on social media and in real life these past few months, though unfortunately it's been present for a very long time.

Stalin indulged in a virulent hatred of Jews up until his death, not only using claims of "Jewish influence" as a tool to bring down and constrain political rivals, but targeting all aspects of Jewish life within the USSR. If not for his death in 1953, he had planned to use the Doctor's Plot--fabricated blood libel against Jewish physicians--as a pretext for shipping off the USSR's Jewish population to gulags in the Urals where they would eventually all be murdered or worked to death.

(As an item of interest, this is the same Soviet Union whose delegation vetoed all drafts of the UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide whose definition of 'genocide' included eliminating social or political classes, lest Stalin himself be implicated.)

Not wanting to appear antisemitic despite clearly being so, the government invoked sleight of hand, speaking instead of "cosmopolitans" and "Zionists" rather than "Jews."

This continued for decades. Antisemitism became engrained in the USSR's Cold War strategy, especially in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez Crisis in which the Soviet Union came to see Israel as fundamentally aligned with rival American interests rather than its own.

In 1972 the KGB launched Operation SIG, spreading antisemitic conspiracies and misinformation throughout Arab countries to link "American imperialism" (sidestepping their own imperialism) and "capitalism" with "Jews," "Judaism," and "Zionism." This went on for nearly 20 years.

They also translated The Protocols of the Elders of Zion into Arabic, distributing "hundreds of thousands of copies" across the Middle East.

To further demonize Jews and the USSR's conspiratorial conception of "Zionism," the KGB forged documents claiming that Jews were inventing and provoking antisemitism to get other Jews to immigrate to Israel, that Jews were influencing the media to run "pro-Israel propaganda," and that Jewish leaders were actually stealing money meant as aid to Israel.

Plenty of people on social media encounter the phrase "Zionism is racism" while never having heard of the term "Zionism" before. Now you know where it comes form.

The equation of Zionism with fascism and Nazism? Of IDF soldiers with Nazis? Dismissing antisemitic incidents as intentional "provocation?" Same thing.

Here we have the use of state propaganda outlets trotting out anti-Zionist "good Jews" expressly to "expose the...anti-humanitarian nature of the diversionary propaganda and policy of Zionism."

More doubling-down on "Zionism" as Nazism, claiming that Israel, the IDF, and "Zionists" engage in "Nazi-like policies and practices."

More than a Century of Antisemitism: How Successive Occupants of the Kremlin Have Used Antisemitism to Spread Disinformation and Propaganda is freely available to read as a PDF, with citations at the end for those who wish to do further reading.

I hope this prompts some of you to consider why you have a certain conception of what "Zionism" is, particularly if you're interested in leftist critiques of imperialism, capitalism, and colonialism.

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Some of you don't have firm principles that transcend ideology, and it shows.

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*timeline restored*

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this is what jvp wrote in response to the butchered Hebrew. what a fucking joke.

Jews: "hey dude your Hebrew is written from left to right, you didn't even have the common sense to double check your spelling"

JVP: "umm actually it's Zionism's fault for forcing Hebrew on their Jews and erasing their real indigenous languages 🤡"

Jews: "you realise.... the seder plate.... is always written in Hebrew..... the language of the Torah.... and it has no connection to modern Hebrew whatsoever........ you literally just had to google a seder plate and copy the fucking words........"

and just to prove this takes 5 seconds to verify:

not only can you find a reference on google images pretty easily, you can also look it up on shopping sites like amazon to guarantee photos of empty plates (since a lot of the photos on google had the food items on them).

it's not hard to verify this, this even shows up if you google "passover plate" in case you somehow don't know what a seder is, there's no excuse for making a mistake on the most important item on the fucking table.

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One repeated refrain I keep seeing from the Pro-Palestinian crowd, from the most virulently Jew-hating to the most Jew-sympathetic, is pretty straightforward.

"Well, after 75 years of how the Palestinians have been treated, can you blame them for the 7/10 attack?"

And the response that I've been itching to give to that...

"So, you're saying that the Nakba was acceptable back in 1948? Because after 1000+ years of mistreatment by Muslim Arabs, including multiple massacres and ethnic cleansing in living memory, that means that the Jews were justified with the Nakba--indeed, they were restrained, because they could have easily done so much worse, and the Palestinians Arabs hadn't had any mistreatment yet. There was a clear side who had been the victims (the Jews) and a clear side who had been the victimizers for over a thousand years, as the Muslims been the ones doing the mistreatment to the Jews. If you're saying that 75 years of marginalization justifies mass rape and murder, then the Israelis in 1948 would have been justified in killing every single proto-Palestinian Arab by that same metric.

"No? That's different? How? How is it different? Explain to me how it's different without using the word 'colonizer', because a vast number of the Jews who lived there were native and had never been living elsewhere. Sure, they were just a portion of the Jewish population as a whole, but so are the Palestinian militants. Would someone whose family had been butchered in the 1929 Hebron Massacre not be justified in taking out their hate on other Arabs? Because that's the standard you're promoting now. How is it different?

"On what ethical grounds is it okay to say that the Palestinians deserve to get to rape and murder for 75 years of marginalization, and yet that the Jews simply displacing them but allowing them to continue living, sparing their lives after 1200+ years of brutal suppression... that act is somehow the most horrendous and monstrous act in the entire history of mankind, as some Pro-Palestinian activists have explicitly said?"

"Explain to me how 75 years of mistreatment justifies mass murder, but 1000+ years of legally recognized second-class brutal near-slavery doesn't justify displacement of your former oppressors."

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"go back to poland" means go back to auschwitz majdanek sobibor treblinka etc.

you are not slick lol

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I have to stress this. I value Palestinian liberation very deeply, but to my Jewish followers, if I am ever crossing the line into casual antisemitism, or accidentally reblogging from antisemitic sources, do not hesitate to let me know. Everyone deserves to be free and everyone deserves safety, and I want to make sure my blog reflects that fact, for both Jews and Palestinians.

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Friendly reminder to not use alt text for jokes, it's literally there as an accessibility tool.

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WAIT!

Before you hit send on that ask, reblog, or reply, remember to stop and PROOFREAD!

am I Pissing on the Poor?

did I Read the post in bad faith?

could I be Overexaggerating?

am I Out of line for saying this?

is it kind of Fucked up to say that to a total stranger?

is what I said Rude?

am I being Egotistical?

am I Angry at words that weren't in the post?

did I Dream up a pretend person to get mad at?

ONLY YOU CAN PREVENT YOURSELF FROM LOOKING LIKE A JACKASS ONLINE!

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You’re allowed to take a break from reading about the conflict.

You’re allowed to perform self care if the online discourse is becoming too much to handle.

You’re allowed to be gentle with yourself.

Anyone trying to guilt you into making the conflict all that you think about all the time is a toxic individual.

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It's interesting how in extreme leftists circles the two words Nazi and Zionist mean absolutely nothing, beyond "person I don't agree with." just that they figured out that they can now openly use zionism. It's not even like anyone is trying to make it a secret. Poc especially seem to relish in the fact that they can finally "kick out the whites" because to some of them it was always an insult that those they perceive and label as "white" would also face racism and discrimination.

Also, funny thing that "modern" racism was literally built on the fact to tell Jewish people, (and pale but not "central European" ethnicities like Slavs and the Irish) that they're not white. Like, Jewish people were always an outlier, because they're not white, your skint tone never mattered, people knew you were Jewish because there's more to it than just your skin.

People have decided that even though they'll constantly blame white people for "racism existing" (aka people using the system created to oust Jewish people), they'll kick out those that were basically the cornerstones of European racism existing the way it does/did, and then changed till now. Completely appropriating it to only fit the American standard of racial understanding, which oh just so happens to exclude Jews all of a sudden.

It's almost like a country built on insane levels of fundamental protestantism, letting those beliefs flow into every institution to the point even "non believers" follow that belief centuries later, would already have sowed the seeds for Antisemitism.

It's also laughable how people, activists, ESPECIALLY POC AND QUEER/LGBTQIA++ would dare use the "Well these Jews agree with my activism against the Jewish." Oh you for sure know that these very same people are the ones who tell you that you can't use the "But I have XYZ friends!!" would never fucking fly, but the themselves decided that it's ok when it's Jews? No fuck that, you do not get to use those arguments as a non-Jew. If this happens it's between the people affected, which is Jewish people, not some random POC or queer/lgbtqia++ person who wants to get some asspats and pretend they're not antisemitic.

I've seen POCs use terms like "blood money" as if they have any right to use the term, even as an "own" to zionists they dislike. If you're repeating antisemitic rhetoric when angry, if you feel like you're allowed to use any kind of insult, slurs and anything like that, you're an antisemite plain and simple. You do not get to wash your hands of it, no matter who you are. A non-black person calling a black person the N word in anger is just revealing their racism. A cishet person who insults a queer/lgbtqia++ person by using the F-word is just revealing their -phobia. If you use "blood money" or similar rhetoric against as Jew in anger, you're an antisemite. And nothing will change that, because that's what's deep inside you.

I feel like you identified exactly what is going on with the current discourse.

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Zionism Is Awesome

#LandBack #ZionismIsLandBack

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“I hate Israel/Zionists because they’re white colonizers!”

No, that’s not why, because you have never in your life directed this much hatred toward actual white colonizers. You have never protested or boycotted or ostracized or harassed any actual white colonizers the way you do Jews.

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“you don’t like the proliferation of terms like Unalive outside of TikTok because you realize that you’re aging out of youth culture and it makes you uncomfortable!”

no I don’t like it because there’s something INCREDIBLY dystopian about being forced to soften terms for basic parts of the human experience like death and sex (and even more so terms for oppressed minorities- call me a “le-dollar sign-bian” and I will bite you) purely because advertisers and corporations demand it

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Boeing’s deliberately defective fleet of flying sky-wreckage

I'm touring my new, nationally bestselling novel The Bezzle! Catch me TOMORROW (May 2) in WINNIPEG, then Calgary (May 3), Vancouver (May 4), Tartu, Estonia, and beyond!

Boeing's 787 "Dreamliner" is manufactured far from the company's Seattle facility, in a non-union shop in Charleston, South Carolina. At that shop, there is a cage full of defective parts that have been pulled from production because they are not airworthy.

Hundreds of parts from that Material Review Segregation Area (MRSA) were secretly pulled from that cage and installed on aircraft that are currently plying the world's skies. Among them, sections 47/48 of a 787 – the last four rows of the plane, along with its galley and rear toilets. As Moe Tkacik writes in her excellent piece on Boeing's lethally corrupt culture of financialization and whistleblower intimidation, this is a big ass chunk of an airplane, and there's no way it could go missing from the MRSA cage without a lot of people knowing about it:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-04-30-whistleblower-laws-protect-lawbreakers/

More: MRSA parts are prominently emblazoned with red marks denoting them as defective and unsafe. For a plane to escape Boeing's production line and find its way to a civilian airport near you with these defective parts installed, many people will have to see and ignore this literal red flag.

The MRSA cage was a special concern of John "Swampy" Barnett, the Boeing whistleblower who is alleged to have killed himself in March. Tkacik's earlier profile of Swampy paints a picture of a fearless, stubborn engineer who refused to go along to get along, refused to allow himself to become inured to Boeing's growing culture of profits over safety:

https://prospect.org/infrastructure/transportation/2024-03-28-suicide-mission-boeing/

Boeing is America's last aviation company and its single largest exporter. After the company was allowed to merge with its rival McDonnell-Douglas in 1997, the combined company came under MDD's notoriously financially oriented management culture. MDD CEO Harry Stonecipher became Boeing's CEO in the early 2000s. Stonecipher was a protege of Jack Welch, the man who destroyed General Electric with cuts to quality and workforce and aggressive union-busting, a classic Mafia-style "bust-out" that devoured the company's seed corn and left it a barren wasteland:

https://qz.com/1776080/how-the-mcdonnell-douglas-boeing-merger-led-to-the-737-max-crisis

Post-merger, Boeing became increasingly infected with MDD's culture. The company chased cheap, less-skilled labor to other countries and to America's great onshore-offshore sacrifice zone, the "right-to-work" American south, where bosses can fire uppity workers who balked at criminal orders, without the hassle of a union grievance.

Stonecipher was succeeded by Jim "Prince Jim" McNerney, ex-3M CEO, another Jack Welch protege (Welch spawned a botnet of sociopath looters who seized control of the country's largest, most successful firms, and drove them into the ground). McNerney had a cute name for the company's senior engineers: "phenomenally talented assholes." He created a program to help his managers force these skilled workers – everyone a Boeing who knew how to build a plane – out of the company.

McNerney's big idea was to get rid of "phenomenally talented assholes" and outsource the Dreamliner's design to Boeing's suppliers, who were utterly dependent on the company and could easily be pushed around (McNerney didn't care that most of these companies lacked engineering departments). This resulted in a $80b cost overrun, and a last-minute scramble to save the 787 by shipping a "cleanup crew" from Seattle to South Carolina, in the hopes that those "phenomenally talented assholes" could save McNerney's ass.

Swampy was part of the cleanup crew. He was terrified by what he saw there. Boeing had convinced the FAA to let them company perform its own inspections, replacing independent government inspectors with Boeing employees. The company would mark its own homework, and it swore that it wouldn't cheat.

Boeing cheated. Swampy dutifully reported the legion of safety violations he witnessed and was banished to babysit the MRSA, an assignment his managers viewed as a punishment that would isolate Swampy from the criminality he refused to stop reporting. Instead, Swampy audited the MRSA, and discovered that at least 420 defective aviation components had gone missing from the cage, presumably to be installed in planes that were behind schedule. Swampy then audited the keys to the MRSA and learned that hundreds of keys were "floating around" the Charleston facility. Virtually anyone could liberate a defective part and install it into an airplane without any paper trail.

Swampy's bosses had a plan for dealing with this. They ordered Swampy to "pencil whip" the investigations of 420 missing defective components and close the cases without actually figuring out what happened to them. Swampy refused.

Instead, Swampy took his concerns to a departmental meeting where 12 managers were present and announced that "if we can’t find them, any that we can’t find, we need to report it to the FAA." The only response came from a supervisor, who said, "We’re not going to report anything to the FAA."

The thing is, Swampy wasn't just protecting the lives of the passengers in those defective aircraft – he was also protecting Boeing employees. Under Sec 38 of the US Criminal Code, it's a 15-year felony to make any "materially false writing, entry, certification, document, record, data plate, label, or electronic communication concerning any aircraft or space vehicle part."

(When Swampy told a meeting that he took this seriously because "the paperwork is just as important as the aircraft" the room erupted in laughter.)

Swampy sent his own inspectors to the factory floor, and they discovered "dozens of red-painted defective parts installed on planes."

Swampy blew the whistle. How did the 787 – and the rest of Boeing's defective flying turkeys – escape the hangar and find their way into commercial airlines' fleets? Tkacik blames a 2000 whistleblower law called AIR21 that:

creates such byzantine procedures, locates adjudication power in such an outgunned federal agency, and gives whistleblowers such a narrow chance of success that it effectively immunizes airplane manufacturers, of which there is one in the United States, from suffering any legal repercussions from the testimony of their own workers.

By his own estimation, Swampy was ordered to commit two felonies per week for six years. Tkacik explains that this kind of operation relies on a culture of ignorance – managers must not document their orders, and workers must not be made aware of the law. Whistleblowers like Swampy, who spoke the unspeakable, were sidelined (an assessment by one of Swampy's managers called him "one of the best" and finished that "leadership would give hugs and high fives all around at his departure").

Multiple whistleblowers were singled out for retaliation and forced departure. William Hobek, a quality manager who refused to "pencil whip" the missing, massive 47-48 assembly that had wandered away from the MRSA cage, was given a "weak" performance review and fired despite an HR manager admitting that it was bogus.

Another quality manager, Cynthia Kitchens, filed an ethics complaint against manager Elton Wright who responded to her persistent reporting of defects on the line by shoving her against a wall and shouting that Boeing was "a good ol’ boys’ club and you need to get on board." Kitchens was fired in 2016. She had cancer at the time.

John Woods, yet another quality engineer, was fired after he refused to sign off on a corner-cutting process to repair a fuselage – the FAA later backed up his judgment.

Then there's Sam Salehpour, the 787 quality engineer whose tearful Congressional testimony described more corner-cutting on fuselage repairs:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP0xhIe1LFE

Salehpour's boss followed the Boeing playbook to the letter: Salehpour was constantly harangued and bullied, and he was isolated from colleagues who might concur with his assessment. When Salehpour announced that he would give Congressional testimony, his car was sabotaged under mysterious circumstances.

It's a playbook. Salehpour's experience isn't unusual at Boeing. Two other engineers, working on the 787 Organization Designation Authorization, held up production by insisting that the company fix the planes' onboard navigation computers. Their boss gave them a terrible performance review, admitting that top management was furious at the delays and had ordered him to punish the engineers. The engineers' union grievance failed, with Boeing concluding that this conduct – which they admitted to – didn't rise to the level of retaliation.

As Tkacik points out, these engineers and managers that Boeing targeted for intimidation and retaliation are the very same staff who are supposed to be performing inspections of behalf of the FAA. In other words, Boeing has spent years attacking its own regulator, with total impunity.

But it's not just the FAA who've failed to take action – it's also the DOJ, who have consistently declined to bring prosecutions in most cases, and who settled the rare case they did bring with "deferred prosecution agreements." This pattern was true under Trump's DOJ and continued under Biden's tenure. Biden's prosecutors have been so lackluster that a federal judge "publicly rebuked the DOJ for failing to take seriously the reputational damage its conduct throughout the Boeing case was inflicting on the agency."

Meanwhile, there's the AIR21 rule, a "whistleblower" rule that actually protects Boeing from whistleblowers. Under AIR21, an aviation whistleblower who is retaliated against by their employer must first try to resolve their problem internally. If that fails, the whistleblower has only one course of action: file an OSHA complaint within 90 days (if HR takes more than 90 days to resolve your internal complaint, you can no have no further recourse). If you manage to raise a complaint with OSHA, it is heard by a secret tribunal that has no subpoena power and routinely takes five years to rule on cases, and rules against whistleblowers 97% of the time.

Boeing whistleblowers who missed the 90-day cutoff have filled the South Carolina courts with last-ditch attempts to hold the company to account. When they lose these cases – as is routine, given Boeing's enormous legal muscle and AIR21's legal handcuffs – they are often ordered to pay Boeing's legal costs.

Tkacik cites Swampy's lawyer, Rob Turkewitz, who says Swampy was the only one of Boeing's whistleblowers who was "savvy, meticulous, and fast-moving enough to bring an AIR 21 case capable of jumping through all the hoops" to file an AIR21 case, which then took seven years. Turkewitz calls Boeing South Carolina "a criminal enterprise."

That's a conclusion that's hard to argue with. Take Boeing's excuse for not producing the documentation of its slapdash reinstallation of the Alaska Air door plug that fell off its plane in flight: the company says it's not criminally liable for failing to provide the paperwork, because it never documented the repair. Not documenting the repair is also a crime.

You might have heard that there's some accountability coming to the Boeing boardroom, with the ouster of CEO David Calhoun. Calhoun's likely successor is Patrick Shanahan, whom Tkacik describes as "the architect of the ethos that governed the 787 program" and whom her source called "a classic schoolyard bully."

If Shanahan's name rings a bell, it might be because he was almost Trump's Secretary of Defense, but that was derailed by the news that he had "emphatically defended" his 17 year old son after the boy nearly beat his mother to death with a baseball bat. Shanahan is presently CEO of Spirit Aerospace, who made the door-plug that fell out of the Alaska Airlines 737 Max.

Boeing is a company where senior managers only fail up and where whistleblowers are terrorized in and out of the workplace. One of Tkacik's sources noticed his car shimmying. The source, an ex-787 worker who'd been fired after raising safety complaints, had tried to bring an AIR21 complaint, but withdrew it out of fear of being bankrupted if he was ordered to pay Boeing's legal costs. When the whistleblower pulled over, he discovered that two of the lug-nuts had been removed from one of his wheels.

The whistleblower texted Tkcacik to say (not for the first time): "If anything happens, I'm not suicidal."

Boeing is a primary aerospace contractor to the US government. It's clear that its management – and investors – consider it too big to jail. It's also clear that they know it's too big to fail – after all, the company did a $43b stock buyback, then got billions in a publicly funded buyback.

Boeing is, effectively, a government agency that is run for the benefit of its investors. It performs its own safety inspections. It investigates its own criminal violations of safety rules. It loots its own coffers and then refills them at public expense.

Meanwhile, the company has filled our skies with at least 420 airplanes with defective, red-painted parts that were locked up in the MRSA cage, then snuck out and fitted to an airplane that you or someone you love could fly on the next time you take your family on vacation or fly somewhere for work.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/01/boeing-boeing/#mrsa

Image: Tom Axford 1 (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Blue_sky_with_wisps_of_cloud_on_a_clear_summer_morning.jpg

CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/deed.en

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Clemens Vasters (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:N7379E_-_Boeing_737_MAX_9.jpg

CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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I’m muslim but I’m upset with the free Palestine movement especially as a woman. they are only making it worse for Muslim women subject to governments which are misusing the teachings of the Quran. they do not care even about Uyghur or Rohingya Muslims

girl they only care about themselves and their posturing skills