#cw ​blood libel

[notaplaceofhonour]

An Open Letter Regarding the Holocaust Inversion & Blood Libel of the “Average Pace” Meme:

The person who shared the screenshotted post deleted it after I sent the following message. I truly believe they shared it out of ignorance & not malice; I cannot say the same of OP who created the graphic. I am sharing my deconstruction of its rhetoric & imagery here as a learning opportunity:

Nothing justifies the injustices Palestinians have faced, and what Netanyahu is doing is vile. No country should be above criticism, nor its leaders above condemnation, but this is not that.

What people like OP are doing is weaponizing legitimate atrocities to spread the antisemitic narratives of Holocaust Inversion (an offshoot of Holocaust Revision & Denial that claims “The new Nazis are Jews”) and Blood Libel.

And no, the fact that these libels are made in criticism of Israel does not absolve them of being antisemitic narratives that predate the existence of the State of Israel. As if to hammer in that point, that is not the flag of Israel that the creator of this agitprop decided to equate to the Swastika—that is the Magen David. That’s just the symbol for Judaism.

Worse, to impose the Magen David over images of blood (especially what is implicitly the blood of children) is a direct invocation of Blood Libel, the antisemitic accusation that Jewish leaders thirst for the blood of children. This libel has incited the mass slaughter of Jews since long before the Shoah, and is still being used to this day to incite violence against Jews through Qanon & accusations that Israelis drink & bathe in Palestinian blood.

And if it truly weren’t about the Jewishness of Israel, why would OP pick the Shoah specifically? There have been countless other mass killings in the world, many with much greater resemblance to Israel/Palestine than Jews in Nazi Germany (see: ethnic cleansings in Liberia & India/Pakistan for instance). Meanwhile, the only things The Shoah/WWII and Israel-Palestine have in common is people dying and Jews being present. So why specifically invoke the slaughter of Jews to criticize Israel if it is not about invoking the Jewishness of Israel?

That doesn’t even get into how cherrypicked those numbers are to the point the exact same “average pace” metric could easily be used (and in fact is, by the German far-right) to present the Bombing of Dresden by the Allies—a campaign that killed more than 25,000 German civilians in 72 hours in an area much bigger & less densely populated than Gaza with a fraction of the bombs that Israel has used—as comparable to the death camps.

This rhetoric does not aid Palestinians in any way. In fact it drags the movement down by providing ammunition that can be used to paint all criticism of Israel as antisemitic & give people who just hate Palestinians the casus belli they need to shut it down. The only thing it accomplishes is hurting Jews; it twists the knife in the wounds left in our community, it trivializes the Shoah by universalizing it or presenting it as “the lesser of two evils”, and it incites violence by equating Jews to Nazis.

[darkersolstice]

It's just the funniest shit when I get the comment "If you're reading this as antisemitic, you're the one who sees these stereotypes everywhere and you're the antisemitic one."

Shit, son, you didn't have to grow up learning the A-Z of antisemitic tropes. My mother has said she put me and my brother into Hebrew school so we'd have an answer to "why did the Jews kill Jesus" and "where are your horns and tail?" If you didn't grow up learning all the ways your people have been hated, that's a privilege you had. If I'm hypersensitive, it's because this was beaten into my skull.

But also, y'oughta look up the Fettmilch Uprising of 1612, maybe. And the wikipedia page on antisemitic tropes. Because some of the ones we're talking about (like blood libel) have been around since the fucking middle ages. This isn't rocket surgery.

[dikleyt]

Accusing Israeli leaders of killing children in the context of the Gaza war is not inherently a dog whistle to the antisemitic blood libel, because it has long been a tactic of anti-war activists to call attention to the children killed by the violence.

E.g. the old Vietnam War protest chant: "Hey! Hey! LBJ! How many kids did you kill today?"

Because of this, though, when it is used as a dog whistle, it can be really hard to spot, because of how much plausible deniability there is

Look for people saying "Killing babies is in their DNA" about Israelis or whathaveyou

[calicostorms]

Fellow gentiles as The Terf (JKR)’s Game comes out this month I am gently reminding all of us that we should be thoughtful about centering ourselves and our experiences (eg. trans people) when speaking about this game given that the entire premise basically builds off blood libel and antisemitic tropes.

We should be doing more to care for our Jewish brothers and sisters and ensuring their well being, and that begins with acknowledging that even without the anti-trans agendas she pushes, she has pushed antisemitism within her books for years and though not directly involved, her upcoming game does the same.

Basically, all this to say: boycott the game for her transmisogyny, obviously, but the antisemitism should not be secondary to that, especially given the spike in antisemitic violence right now.

[undead-potatoes]

Now that honest reviews of the Wizard Game are coming out and people are giving it the mid scores it deserves, all the rabid fans are attacking journalists for being “biased” and not giving the game a better score, unlike the 9/10 scores that where all completely unbiased and objective and not affected by nostalgia at all and I can feel my brain mass seep out of my fucking ears jesus

[emberoops]

fun facts with ember!

each culture has a different concept of where the soul lies.

in judaism, we are forbidden to consume blood, because that is where the soul is thought to be held. to consume blood would, therefore, be akin to consuming something’s soul.

obviously, for a nafar, theres a different answer, and its....more concrete an answer than most species get.

but yeah, blood is significant to jews. like. really significant.

[nicastamatis]

NAURRRR GREG ELLIS IS IN HOGWARTS LEGACY????? ARE YOU KIDDDINGGGGG. WHAT IS THIS A CROSSOVER EPISODE

[jewish-vents]

Cw for mentions of the current war, and general i/p stuff

There’s this growing narrative in Jewish spaces that we can’t be mad when Palestinians, especially Gazans, do or say something Jew hating because they’re traumatised, and I just… I can’t anymore. I just saw a Jew say it’s fine if a Gazan calls a Jew a kike because ‘do what you need to do’. NO. I am NOT going to tolerate the most blatant fucking Jew hatred just because it’s coming from traumatised people. Like, I get it, be lighter, make sure to critically evaluate the statement and see if it’s actually bigoted or if it’s just in an iffy tone. Trying to tone police very recently and deeply traumatised people IS bad, but saying that they’re allowed to be as bigoted as they want?? What the fuck???!!!

It’s like how there are a few big Palestinian bloggers here who are very Jew hating. People who literally spreading things like blood libel with ‘Israelis kidnap blonde kids from Gaza’, updated well poisoning, saying Zionists need to fucking die, and then on top of that refuse to talk to Jews who aren’t there to tolerate the rhetorics that are being spread by them. And these people are fucking Jew haters. And they’re harming Jews and radicalising a LOT of people into Jew hatred because their audience is so big.

Palestinians can be Jew haters. Bigotry is never acceptable, no matter the status of the perpetrator. Jewish safety is not less valuable than Palestinian safety, they’re fucking equal because everybody in danger deserves to be safe. Fuck all of you in Jewish spaces who try to spread this shit.

It's worth remembering that, while Jews currently have systemic privilege over Arabs in Israel, there is a history of over a thousand years of Jewish oppression in the Muslim world, and antisemitism is just as baked into Islam as Christianity.

Jews have been ethnically cleansed from the entire Arab and Muslim world, and Arab and Muslim governments frequently deflect attention form their own abuses of their citizens by blaming the Jews. This is as true in Palestine as it is in Egypt and Iran.

The situation is complicated, and grace does need to be extended to those currently suffering because of Israeli action, but blatant antisemitic lies cannot be tolerated.

-🐞

[notaplaceofhonour]

FUCK

I can’t fucking take this timeline

Brian David Gilbert is reposting content from a Pro-Hamas, Pro-Houthi, Pro-Putin tankie now

We have day-after atrocity apologia, we have blood libel, we have baby Jesus deicide, we have ethnic cleansing slogans, we have Putin’s anti-Ukraine “denazification” propaganda, we have statements from the Houthis turned into propaganda posters! What don’t we have? I think I got BINGO

[the-diabolic-acid]

there was a post that showed up on my dash about mother gothel and antisemitism but the op blocked reblogs, and i would like to talk about it because the take was really bad and filled me with anger and this is my blog i make the rules. i have no clue how old it is. i dont care im upset and i wanna talk about it sjfkdgj

cw for discussions of antisemitism in tangled under the thing i got a lot of thoughts so read more my beloved

This is a bad take.

Whether or not it was intentional, Mother Gothel looks like a jewish woman. Her name is mother Gothel. making the protagonist of this story a blonde haired blue eyed girl who was kidnapped by a woman with dark curly hair and a hooked nose has implications whether you wanted to have them or not.

Not to mention! Blood libel! for anyone who is not aware, blood libel is a very old antisemitic trope that is found in Tons of pieces of media, where jews are accused of kidnapping and murdering goyim and using their blood in religious rituals. A lot of stories will use this trope without even realizing it, (Dracula is one that immediately comes to mind) which is why it is so important we talk about antisemitism and how pervasive it is.

A story about a woman with jewish features, named mother gothel, who kidnapped a blonde haired blue eyed girl and used her in a ritual to keep herself young has implications. Very bad implications. Passive antisemitism and active antisemitism are different, but getting defensive when someone (especially jewish people) tell you that a piece of media is harmful is in fact antisemitic and is very frustrating.

Yes! If you create a characters with stereotypically jewish features, especially in a medium that has a Very long history of jew coding its villains, that is a problem. You can say it wasn't intentional, but please tell that to all the kids in disney circles who compared me to mother gothel. (News flash, I don't look like the VA. I look like an ashkenazi jew.)

This isn't to say you can't still love Tangled. I'm in the fandom. I'd be a complete hypocrite. But ignoring the harmful parts only makes things worse.

By the way, a side note, I was not seething when I read this, but then I read the tags.

I'm sorry but. No? Respectfully can we not compare an antisemitic villain (she is antisemitic. I don't care if it wasn't intentional. Her design hurts jewish people.) to a genocidal maniac? Out of all the disney villains you could have picked to make that point you picked the one who explicitly wanted to commit genocide. I'm sorry but I really do not understand how you thought that was an OK and good point to make.

[creature-wizard]

(A CW for CSE and self-harm, since this is Laurel Rose Willson/Lauren Stratford we're talking about.)

In Satan's Underground, Willson/Stratford claims that she doesn't mention any specific locations or names in order to protect herself and other victims:

You will note as you read that no specific locations are mentioned. In part this is for my own protection, but it also serves to remind you that what I've endured is not limited to one city or region. I have also changed names and descriptions of many key figures in order to protect the victims.

This of course makes no sense, since if the Satanists are actually real and would harm her and others for exposing them, just publishing this book at all would put them in a lot of trouble.

However, this choice does make sense as the actions of a woman who is writing a book full of shit she made up and doesn't want anyone checking her story.

You will notice this kind of behavior a lot when it comes to "whistleblowers" in conspiracy theory communities. They act like leaving out certain pieces of information will somehow keep them safe from the conspirators. Q drops were frequently like this. Of course, the details they leave out are inevitably those that 1. would allow someone to verify their story, or 2. they just don't have the interest, knowledge, or imagination to fill in.

Stratford describes her mother as an incredibly abusive woman, and claims that her mother was responsible for pushing her into CSE. The book presents Stratford as an only child who had absolutely no one to rely on growing up.

But as it turns out, Stratford isn't being entirely honest. For one thing, she had an older sister, Willow Nell. When Cornerstone Magazine interviewed her in their research, she confirmed that their mother had a fearsome temper, but disputed that she was as monstrously horrible as Stratford made her out to be - much less pushed her daughter into CSE and Satanism. While Stratford claims that their father walked out when she was four, in reality he left when she was nine.

According to a friend interviewed by Cornerstone Magazine, much of the abuse Stratford claims her mother inflicted upon her was taken from the novel Sybil, which... that would make sense. This is the woman who pretended to be a Holocaust survivor, after all.

Cornerstone's investigations found that, in general, Stratford was manipulative, toxic, and constantly made things up. Many of her claims contradicted each other. So keep that in mind as we go forward.

She tells the story of how her mother pushed her into prostitution, and it's all very dark and horrible, and I don't think it's necessary to go into all the details. Some of what she claims sounds plausible (and is therefore possibly inspired by the accounts of actual survivors), while others are... strange, to say the least. (Like the claim that there were all these domestic workers her mother hired, that were willing to use young Lauren Stratford in place of actual monetary payment - like, how was she finding all of these people? Or does Stratford think that grungy-looking manual laborer = child molester?)

Stratford also claims that the CSM producers her mother eventually handed her over to were producing snuff films. There is literally zero evidence that snuff films have ever been commercially made, much less child snuff films. What we're looking at is another modern spin on blood libel - remember that during the Middle Ages, Jews were often accused of being secret Satanists who would kidnap and ritualistically slaughter Christian children.

Stratford basically claims that porn is a gateway to CSA, because supposedly once you leave the realm of safe, "normal" sex, you experience an "ever-increasing abnormal, uncontrollable craving for perversions that end in abuse, torture, animalistic behavior, multiple partner sex, and sex with children." She claims that "The cravings become more and more deviant, finally culminating with sexual acts that are almost unthinkable to the mind that hasn't been polluted with hard-core pornography."

This is of course pure bullshit. There's zero actual evidence that porn affects normal people this way. None whatsoever. There is, however, loads of evidence that religiosity (of the conservative Christian kind) really messes people up. The problem is created by the prudes, not the "freaks."

[jaycemeswain]

Ranting about HL

CW: transphobia

I swear with the wizard 101 wannabe game now releasing, we have so many cis white "allies" deciding their comfort is more important and also decide to make up excuses for playing said game instead of saying that "trans & Jewish lives matter less than their enjoyment/comfort of a mid tier IP". Said game has literal Blood Libel in it and the trans character they added in is clearly meant to try and drive away the arguement that "Rowling didn't work on this" but at the same time fit her naming convention(Sirona Ryan) and instil the thought that terfs like her want to instil about trans folk, as its a trans woman with a masculine voice(nothing wrong with irl trans women who don't have voice training, but this is Rowling's IP and we know her track record of minorities). Doesn't help said character is apprently working with the goblins that the story has your character kill/stop.

I wish that this cis white "allies" would also not take us as the trans community and the Jewish community saying "I'm unfollowing you because you're making content on a game where the owner of the IP is wanting to kill me" as bullying, oh wait one of them already did. Like all we want is for Rowling to lose her cultural relevance and the ability to use the HP/Wizarding World IP to ride the cotrails on so she can spew her bigotry

[lesbianmarrow]

summing up what the person said minus the spoilers (which really feels weird for that other anon to care about over Violent Antisemitism), they were listing the blatant antisemitism:

-stein being murdered by nazis

-season 3's blood libel episode of stein's ancestor being part of a cult using the blood of innocent murder victims to bring a nazi (darhk) back to life

-this one is moreso racism but ava being "the perfect woman"

-gary green being a nebbish stereotype (it gets far worse in later seasons)

-ray and gary working for an actual devil in s5

-stein forced to sing by nazis in a german club

-person said they're 90% sure the show erased that ray is jewish in the comics and made him christian

-appropriation of the dybbuk

thank you for sending me these comments without any spoilers. the arrowverse is kind of atrocious in its depictions of nazis and legends of tomorrow definitely has that issue as well, though fortunately it happens infrequently. i hadn't realized stein was jewish until they showed his funeral so a lot of that stuff slipped past me but yeah in hindsight i can see how the blood libel thing was especially awful. i wasn't sure how to feel about his death because it was very heroic and dignified but i can see how it's pretty insensitive for this show to have a jewish character killed by nazis regardless of the circumstance.

the thing with gary really bothers me bc like....it just feels very intentionally antisemitic, like the other things you listed seem like they could just be the products of thoughtlessness and ignorance (which is still bad, of course, but different from being malicious on purpose) but with gary it feels like a specific common antisemitic stereotype and like the sort of thing you would think would be too blatantly offensive for tv nowadays. and i wouldn't really expect that from any of these cw shows but especially not legends, which seems to have been a bit better at avoiding racist writing than the other arrowverse shows. i dont know how many of the legends writers are jewish but you would think marc guggenheim at least might have voiced some concerns about it. but yeah i dont really know what was going on there but it feels bad.

i mentioned it before but i dont really mind the thing with ava engineered to be the perfect woman just bc i dont think we as the audience are necessarily meant to agree with the ava corporation's idea of "perfect", like i don't think the show needs to walk us through the concept that this corporation is not objective or unbiased when it comes to standards of perfection. plus the show already does a good job of portraying women of color as beautiful and desirable. so that's just how i feel about that.

(as for comics ray palmer i looked it up and i'm pretty sure he's implied to be christian)

[tigger8900]

Not Good for Maidens, by Tori Bovalino

CW: discussion of antisemitism

⭐⭐

Eighteen years ago, Laura entered the goblin market to rescue her sister, May, who had followed a goblin girl down into the darkness. While she succeeded, the experience left both girls changed, their minds and hearts scarred by what they'd faced in the market. Now, it's Laura's daughter Lou's turn to descend into the market, this time in search of her young aunt Neela. As history seeks to repeat itself, Lou will have to fight not just to save her friend, but also to avoid the deadly mistakes her mother had made.

Y'all. Let's talk about goblin markets. So, their origin(the poem Goblin Market, by Christina Rossetti) is commonly agreed upon to have contained antisemitic depictions. You can find details on google, and I encourage you to read up if you're unfamiliar. So it's one of those things that you should tread carefully with. Maybe be extra careful not to Jewish-code your predatory goblins, right?

Unfortunately, I didn't find this book to be very careful about it. Not only did this version of goblins draw from several elements associated with negative portrayals of or conspiracies about Jews(green skin, monstrous appearance, untrustworthy, habitually disguising themselves in plain sight among the non-goblin population to seek prey, etc), but also the plot veered far too close to blood libel for my liking. Namely, the fact that the goblins are portrayed as tricking young people so that they would get trapped in the market, where the goblins would consume their flesh and, as described often and in great detail, their blood.

So that's my thoughts on that. The horror plot would have been fine without the elements that read as Jewish-coding, but with that being how it was it made me very uncomfortable to read. And it's a shame because there were other parts of this book that were so good, especially the way the relationships between each pair was written and the alternating present-past chapters. Even the environment of the market and the way the horror and suspense elements were written was great, but because of the elephant in the room I couldn't fully immerse myself in rooting for either pair of girls.

Readers who enjoy LGBTQ stories will find a number of characters here: Lou is asexual, May is explicitly bisexual, and Neela is assumed to be pansexual. I'd been concerned at first that the book might be saying something weird about bi/pan people and vulnerability to sexual temptation, but by the end of the story my concerns were assuaged. The queer rep in this book is fine. Love a good ace lead. I just wish the rest of it had avoided the antisemitic baggage.

[ayellowbirds]

the problem with all of these, “X creature is an antisemitic stereotype” is...

well, if they are, it’s a thoroughly recent invention

because, yanno

Christians didn’t need to come up with coded representations of the worst things they believed of Jews

they just presented it outright

we didn’t have “goblins hoard gold and control the banks”, we had “Jews hoard gold and control the banks and steal the Host and drink the blood of Christian babies and dig up our dead”

With the exception of impenetrable allegorical works that were just allllll about symbolism, from top to bottom... Notsrim didn’t need to invent some kind of fantastic monster to represent Jews 

because to them, we’re already monsters

this isn’t to say you can’t talk about stuff in the context of specific recent creators

JKR’s goblins are grotesque little antisemitic caricatures, just as many editions of D&D made goblins into anti-Asian stereotypes

remember that there’s no One True Goblin Form. There’s no codified rule about dwarves being greedy treasure-hoarding foreigners, in spite of Tolkien. There’s no rule about how long or how pointy an elve’s ears are.

this stuff is all centuries if not millennia old. It’s gone through countless variations in how it has been told. Sometimes, to some people, “goblin”, “elf”, and “dwarf” were all names for the same thing. Sometimes one or the other was extremely specific. Sometimes they were each broad categories, more akin to something like the Japanese “youkai” or “bakemono”.

sometimes, people have sat down and decided to take these ideas and use them to conceal their hatred, to signal others who believe as they do or to try to make their bigotry seem less bigoted by making it about something nonhuman

but that’s recent

because back when people were worried about elves swapping a changeling for their baby, or an ogre in the forest

they were also convinced that "Jew” was itself a category of inhuman creature.

[snarp]

If Sims ever goes back and rewrites/re-records ONE single thing, it has to be replacing the Haan family with the Carlisles. It’s obvious he’d never heard of the “baby dumplings” blood libel shit when he started writing that plotline, and wasn’t aware the general concept/history of Xenophobic Unclean Food Stories.

But nonetheless, he did accidentally write a new installment in this ancient but critically-panned series. It’s especially unsettling re-reading those episode transcripts now, with all the racist “wet markets” takes and endless fash chatter about Chinese people eating bats/rats/animal fetuses/etc. Racist narratives about Chinese food are very much materially affecting people’s lives right now.