#if that is what this supposed ‘antisemitic propaganda’ is then we have nothing more to talk about

[northern-passage]

I followed you for you game, not to see antisemitic propaganda.

I did not see you condemn hamas in any of your post.

if i've reblogged anything or said anything antisemitic, please tell me. i read the articles before i share them here and do my best to keep an eye out for any potential bias or bigotry, but it's possible i may have missed it. i do also understand anyone that may have been upset by my initial comment about dual citizenship; i regret being as dismissive as i was and i understand the potential malice behind such a comment regardless of my intent, and i appreciate the people that pointed it out to me.

but i'm not sure what me not condemning Hamas has to do with any of that.

you are trying to imply that me not condemning Hamas = me supporting violence = me supporting violent antisemitism, all of which are incorrect assumptions.

i support the Palestinian resistance. yes, this includes Hamas, as well as many other groups. i can think whatever i want about Hamas and still choose to support the resistance, because i understand the bigger picture, which is that Palestinians have been living under a violent occupation for decades, and now 9,000+ people are dead, including 3,000 children, all while Israel continues to block food and water and medical aid and telecommunications, all while Israel continues to bomb refugee camps and schools and hospitals and churches and mosques, all while people on the West Bank are being tortured and murdered - the West Bank, which Hamas does not control. and for some reason you really expect me to condemn the resistance that is actively fighting against the apartheid state that is committing this genocide? have you no shame?

when you ask me to condemn Hamas, what i hear is you asking me to reassure you that, yes, Israeli lives are actually worth far more than Palestinian lives. i hear you asking me to reassure you that the 9,000 dead Palestinians are worth it because at least you will be safe (you will not be, because Israel is a fascist, genocidal state and does not care about you or any Jewish person). i hear you asking me to reassure you that this retaliation is justified because, really, it's Hamas' fault, and they're "bad." this is what you're asking & i will not entertain it.

if you want Hamas gone, the actual answer is to end the genocide and to end the apartheid state. full stop.

[matan4il]

Hi!

Ah, how do you argue with a rabid antisemite who won't even consider for a second that they're wrong? 🙃

Someone I followed posted something about Israel being a "settle colonialist project", so I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt that maybe they're just ignorant and don't know the history of the land and/or Judaism. I sent them a message basically saying that considering Israel a settler colony is super problematic and antisemitic as it entirely erased the deep link between Jewish people and their ancestral homeland.

Well this person then went OFF the rails, spouting some of the most awful rhetoric I've ever read. You know, like 95% of Israelis are just white Americans playing dress up as middle easterners and have no historic claim to the land, Jews aren't the only Semites so she couldn't possibly be antisemitic (🙄🙄), Jews and Israel are the new Nazis and white supremacists, evil murderous baby killers etc.

She insisted that she was incredibly educated on the subject (!!!) and that I was the ignorant one, and I just don't understand how we're supposed to handle people like this, who are so full of hate that they can't be reasoned with. I guarantee that if any other minority told them that they were doing something offensive or racist they'd stop immediately and be incredibly apologetic. What makes us Jewish people so different?

😔

I just really needed to vent and for someone to confirm that I'm not the crazy one.

Thank you! 💞

Hi, lovely!

Let me start by assuring you that you are absolutely NOT crazy. And I am so sorry that you, and so many of us, have had to go through this experience, of encountering someone being that awful. I'm sending you lots of hugs, I know it's not much of a comfort, but you are not crazy, and you are NOT alone.

"She insisted that she was incredibly educated"

I've seen that happening so much. I wish they'd realize this is so false and condescending. No, reading lots of anti-Israel propaganda does NOT make them educated on this. No, using the propaganda to de-legitimize and silence the people most affected by the conflict, way more than these people are, is not okay, it is NOT the sign of an educated person (those truly educated can carry a debate about it, they don't need to silence others. In fact, many times they want to have a debate, because they're secure enough in their knowledge and information, that it does not threaten them. They don't need to block out challenges in order to be sure that their narrative won't fall apart) and it is INCREDIBLY patronizing. It's like a straight person lecturing me on what it's like to be gay, except only presenting the most homophobic idea one can picture of it. It's condescending on top of being hateful.

And I say this as someone who has lived this conflict her entire life, but also works at a Holocaust museum, which researches the Holocaust in particular, genocide in general, and Jewish history, including this specific chapter. You think any of these Israel haters care that they're lecturing someone with way more knowledge and experiences of this conflict than them? With more real life Israeli AND Palestinian friends than they have? Who has probably done more in her line of work to combat hate and the path to genocide than their keyboard fighting ever will? Do they stop and listen when we talk about the actual definition of Zionism, genocide, or even just some basic facts about the current war, like how many Palestinian terrorist organizations Israel is fighting? Nothing gets through.

So the most important thing I wanna tell you is to PLEASE not feel bad if you don't get through to this person. I think it is noble and brave to try. I have with some people who I mistakenly thought there was a chance they'd listen. And I never do it from a place of hate for Palestinians, because I do not hate them. I know enough of them who are great people, and I sincerely want the good people on both sides to have a better life. I always speak from a place of looking at the facts, current and historic. I believe it matters. We can't solve a conflict that we don't understand, and we aren't promoting any understanding (we're not helping in solving it) by spreading intentional lies about the essence of the cnflict. I've been translating the docu about Amin al-Husseini, because he's someone who infused the conflict with religious hate and antisemitic thinking. If we don't understand that, if we pretend this is just about land and liberation, we will never be able to address the true core issues of the conflict, and we won't be able to solve it, and provide the good people on both sides with this better life they deserve.

That's what I can offer to you, to speak about your experiences, the experiences of those you know or have heard of, who are affected, to speak from a place of care, and to insist on truth and facts.

That said, as you can understand, it doesn't always work. Some people I've tried with, they were just not willing to listen. When they stated something wrong, and I gave them a correction linked to a fact checked source, and they still ignored it and repeated their ignorant claims, that means they don't want to listen.

Which means that this false narrative serves some sort of need they have. Otherwise, if the facts that someone is presented with undermine their narrative, that should make them stop and question it. Stop and reevaluate why, if their narrative is true, do they get so many facts wrong? I'm not talking here about something like was this specific tweet or that particular vid true. I'm talking about basic facts, like denying that Jews are from Israel, are native here, and therefore have native rights here, that can't be erased with it being antisemitic.

What's the need that it serves? There are different motivations, one person can have more than one reason to choose to ignore the suffering of Israelis and Jews, but at the end of the day, what they all have in common, is that they're enabled by a certain degree of either antisemitism, or ignorance, or both. Antisemitism can be a sense of indifference regarding Jews, our well being, our safety, our rights, and it can also be based in a certain distorted view of Jews. And I just have to say that a certain lack of knowledge can lead to the latter even among Jewish people, even when it doesn't lead to antisemitism and hatefulness. It's just... Jews are so misrepresented, so... under-discussed. You will not believe how many times I've asked American Jewish visitors to our Holocaust museum how many Jews there are in the world, and they greatly overestimated the number. It doesn't point to anything bad about them, but it does reflect that they're a product of American society, where Jews are (even culturally) misrepresented as being far more omnipresent than we are (while also barely giving us our own voice).

Sorry, I know this got long. I guess because my answer to your first question, regarding arguing with a rabid antisemite is... you try you best, with care, and with facts. But you also mustn't feel bad if it doesn't work. If people have a vested interest in not listening to you, they won't. And it is not your fault. And also, you have to take care of yourself, too. So it's okay to stop and ask yourself every once in a while, whether a specific fight is one worth fighting. If it's someone that matters to you, and that you wanna stay in touch with, it may be even when things don't look hopeful. If it's a public argument, and there's a chance that this person won't listen to you, but a third party might read your replies and get something from them, then it may also be worth keeping up the debate then. But there are also times when, if you tried, and the person is insistent on not listening, and the odds of anything positive coming out of it are slim to none, it's also okay to take care of yourself, to disengage, and stay the hell away from someone that antisemitic.

IDK if this helps, but I really hope so, and I am sending you a lot of hugs, love, support and encouragement! And if you ever wanna ask me anything in order to have that as help in confronting antisemites, I will do my best for you. Take good care, lovely! xoxox

(for all of my updates and ask replies regarding Israel, click here)

[a-splash-of-realitea]

There is no such thing as unbiased reporting. Not only check your sources but check where they’re getting their info from and the other kinds of things they’re saying. Even if you trust your source because you’ve gotten it from a friend or youve seen it a lot check it. EVEN IF YOU AGREE WITH WHAT A SOURCE IS SAYING, CHECK WHO IT’S FROM. The next time I see a link that’s supposed to support palestine and click it and scroll for two seconds and see something like ‘down with Israhell’ (that phrase has been a right-wing antisemitic dogwhistle for many many years) I’m going to explode. We can protest human rights violations and push for peace without spreading misinformation or propaganda.

Please keep in mind that if you just started paying attention to Palestine on October 7th, propaganda and misinformation pre-dates your interest in this. Jews have been in what is now Palestine for thousands of years, and the current clusterfuck dates back much farther than 1948. If you think there is nothing complicated, that there is no nuance in the current conflict, you don’t know enough about it. You can (and should) condemn the IDF’s human rights violations and condemn that warmongering idiot Netanyahu and support liberation of Palestinians and protest the occupation of the West Bank and apartheid and all the horrendous things happening there WITHOUT spreading easily disproven falsehoods about Hamas or falling for old shitty propaganda that uses Zionist as a code word for ‘Jew’. If you feel the need to post about the situation in Palestine beyond the obviously good and necessary calls for humanitarian aid, pleeease do just a little reading up on it first. Even just a little. Read at least the Wikipedia page on the war of 1948, AKA the Nakba (the whole article, if you don’t branch out to other sources; Israel and Palestine have different narratives about it, as you might expect). Read the Hamas charter of 1988 and the revised one of 2017 where they changed their language to be more palatable to international support, notice what they leave out of the more recent version, how they claim indigineity solely for themselves while implicitly denying it to Arab Jews who have inhabited that land for thousands of years, how in the newer version they call Israel ‘the Zionist project’ and erase the fact of the British colonial experiment that got us into this mess and lay all the blame at the feet of Israel. Horrible shit Israel is doing is just as important, but given you’re on tumblr, I assume you already know all about that. Just make room in your mind for multiple truths: that Israel is committing horrific human rights abuses with a tremendous disregard for civilian lives; that the Palestinian people are suffering and in desperate need of humanitarian aid; that Hamas is a right wing extremist organization whose leaders proudly say they will repeat October 7th over and over, and who call their own citizens martyrs to their cause after using them as shields. Hamas is not Palestine, Netanyahu is not Israel, and you are not immune to propaganda.

[sailorsharky]

On Hogwarts Legacy and allyship.

TW/CW: J.K Rowling, Hogwarts Legacy, Transphobia, Antisemitism mentioned. Right. CW out of the way, let me preface this by saying that this may turn out to be a long ramble, but I feel the need to voice my grievances in some way as a non-binary person. First of all, let's set some boundaries. Arguments in bad faith and trolling shall be ignored and/or reported/blocked. Lately, with all this hassle going on about Hogwarts Legacy, I felt the need to air my frustrations. We have all seen many different arguments from across both sides, but I will try to keep this as short as I can.

This game has been talked about well before launch, and many trans and enby folks, as well as Jewish people have asked for people to show solidarity by not buying the game. As an ally, it's important to note that it's not a lifetime pass. Many think that being an ally just means saying you support something or be generally neutral and not saying slurs. That is not the case. To be an ally you have to listen to what marginalized groups are saying. The release of this game and the widescale purchase of it by people only talking the talk and not walking the walk has shown many of us under the Trans umbrella (as well as our Jewish comrades) that we cannot trust those we called allies.

I am not saying that playing this game automatically makes you a bigoted person. Some folks I know got it and one admitted that the last JKR controversy he recalled was the whole "Dumbledore is now gay" debacle. (Pretty solid rock you've been under. Room for one more? /j) My ire is not pointed towards people that were genuinely ignorant of the situation, though my disappointment still stands and my trust in them as allies is gone. What mostly draws my ire is the knee-jerk reaction of supposed "allies" when pointing out that they have crossed the picket line and attempt to rationalize their purchase with arguments such as "I'm only supporting the devs", "I'm seperating the art from the artist", "What will 60-70 bucks change?" and "It's okay though because I donated as much/more to a Trans charity!" and so on. Let's go through them one by one. I'd like to keep this as short as possible however as many others have pointed out why these fall flat. 1. "I'm only supporting the devs". If you ONLY support the devs (of which the lead dev and a voice actor share JKR's horrific viewpoints), why aren't you buying EVERY single game on every storefront you make use of? This is a non-argument. If you buy games ONLY to support the devs, then by all means, bankrupt yourself to do just that. But you don't. You wanted to buy this game for nostalgia's sake. 2. "I'm separating the art from the artist" As a fan of HP Lovecraft's work, I understand the want to separate the art from the artist. But 1) Lovecraft is rotting in the ground as we speak. JKR is very much alive. 2) It's hard to seperate the art from the artist when said art is used as a cudgel to infringe upon human rights and dignity. Every act of consumption of her IP she sees as a vote of confidence in her brand of hatred. You may not personally see it that way, but she does, and she relishes in it. "But you just said you like Lovecraft's work! He was VERY racist and xenophobic!" Yes, absolutely! Let's HAVE that conversation, but not on this post. I agree that Lovecraft's art needs to be talked about in a critical light and the setting needs to be reclaimed and distanced from his fear and hatred of all things Not-From-New-England.

For now, moving on to... 3. "What will 60-70 bucks change?" In the grand scheme of things? Nothing. But this was never about trying to ruin JKR's pocket book. This was a litmus test for allies. Stand side by side or cross the picket line and play a mid-tier magic game filled with propaganda and caricatures of Jewish people (among other things). No, I will not entertain statements such as "But I don't see that! If anything, you seeing Jewish caricatures means you are the antisemite!" No buddy, no no no, that's not how propaganda works. There are other posts that delve into this. But in short; recognizing when something is a racist caricature does not make you a racist. Nor does not recognizing it immediately make you a racist, it simply means that you do not recognize propagandic imagery and it's important to listen to people who do know about it, specifically people that have been so unfavourably depicted in the past and present. Moving on. 4. "It's okay though because I donated as much/more to a Trans charity!" Martin Luther would like to have a strong conversation with you. Specifically 95 Theses long. Karma is not a linear scale. Buying something that ends up directly harming people and then turning around to pledge the same amount of money (or more) to a charity is not going to fix the broken trust, nor will it actually help at that point. What might help mend the fence is recognizing what the issue is and listening to the voices of those affected. Granted, many of us feel that they can no longer trust former allies because of this. Once broken, trust is hard to repair. It's important to keep that in mind and not get upset when we point it out. Personally, I like to give people the benefit of the doubt, but with that said, I won't be so trusting of people calling themselves allies when they choose to spend 60-70 bucks on a game that directly benefits Queen TERF (Royalty cheques are a thing, remember? You ARE directly financing her hate) rather than saving the money or putting it to a different game or charity. In short, my advice for folks that call themselves allies is this; If you want to call yourself an ally, actually listen to what is being said and learn from it. We all make mistakes, but launching into a kneejerk reaction is simply degrading what little trust remained. Don't just virtue signal, but stand beside the voices of the marginalized in solidarity.

That is all I can spare at the moment. Please keep the responses civil among one another. Asking for clarification is a-okay. Repeating above mentioned "arguments" and more like them is not. P.S: Do forgive me if I forgot some key points, I've been running on very little sleep at the moment and I needed to air my frustrations in a constructive way.

[confluence-and-drift]

I know this is hardly an original observation, but upon checking out some zionist blogs just to see what kind of talking points are going around, it's nothing but *whataboutism to justify genocide*, *killing people is bad so the palestinians should stop and we blameless jews will consider doing likewise*, *some of the most sickeningly virulent racism concievable*, *as above regarding dead children this time*, *bad faith argument x, *bad faith argument y*, *something that shows the op is either a bloodthirsty monster or a fucking idiot *, *their pathetic little victim complex being used to justify crimes against humanity, AGAIN*, *calling anyone who thinks genocide is bad a nazi, see even Germany agree*, *israel isn't bad YOU'RE antisemitic n+1* ad nauseum.... It's such delusional bullshit that it goes past being sickening and gets into the surreal. And these are just the english stuff or that where the hebrew text could be highlighted and copy-pasted into google translate. Imagine the sheer scale of the violent bloodthirst that they're NOT openly expressing, ie. how violent bloodthirst is typically expressed. I know, objectively speaking, what we're observing is the effect of a 'nation-state' founded on lies, genocide and propaganda to justify it afterwards, and that survives due to lies, genocide and propaganda to justify it afterwards, but seeing the sheer brutality playing out whilst they bleat and whine about being the perpetual victims whilst gleefully celebrating the mass slaughter of innocent civilians who they've subjected to a long, slow apartied and ethnic cleansing over 70 years...

It's...pretty fucked up, ngl. I mean, it's not like a country being full of delusional morons is hardly new, I live in the UK, but the zionist entity really is a different beast, where the more you learn the more horrifying it gets and to add the fucked up cherry on the fucked up cake, you get the zionists bleating about they're so good and perfect and if any of our leaders dare say otherwise, well then a quick word with the zionist lobby later and they'll have changed their mind somehow... The shameless weaponising of antisemitism, the even more shameless usage of deliberate paralells to antisemitic acts in order to have a pre-loaded riposte to anyone who points out that making a game out of sniping pregnant women and children in the head (and manufacturing and distributing t-shirts boasting of their kill count...like consider how fucked a society has to be before that is even possible...) is kind of fucked up. It's like getting a glimpse into a sick, parody universe full of some of the most heinous bullshit imaginable and then some, insulting to the memory of those who survived the holocaut, you know, the genocide that they use as a convieniently universal and all-encompassing cassus beli ...... and we're just supposed to pretend this murderous little ethnostate is a normal country otherwise we're the bad ones? Otherwise we're the ones desecrating the memories of those who paid the ultimate price fighting facism?

No. Fuck that, that's utterly perverse and I refuse to play along with the sick pantomime that western geo-political interests demand that we do.

*sigh* Basically, I'm feeling sickened and despondent and am going to go relax after the recent additions to the zionist blocklist (I said I'd read what they think and try to understand them, not that I'd subject myself regularly to the putrid drivel that they mindlessly regurgitate - remember, block and don't engage, these people need genuine experts to deprogram the racist hatred that they're taught virtually from birth. (no seriously, reading the translations of some of the stuff they're taught in nursery/kindergarten is fucking chilling). Now for the obligatory disclaimer; I'm not a bigot nor whatever else the usual cadre of braindead scum would accuse me of. In fact, some of the people I respect the most are those citizens of the zionist entity that refuse to participate (5-15% of the populace, depending on sources, though most are towards the lower end of that) and seek to document and inform the world of the crimes of the land where, by accident of birth, they're forced to live. My heart genuinely goes out to those young kids whose choices are conscription (a fucked up and unethical concept even in a normal country...and they're not in a normal country) and carrying out genocide and ethnic cleansing or jail time. And the fact that there are young folk, teenagers, who look at this, the MASSIVE societal pressure, the ostracism, the violence they themselves are subjected to and choose the jail time, understanding that said jail time is a paid holiday compared to what your average Palestinian is subjected to by the occupation. They're folk who had the integrity to realise "Never Again" means "Never Again for ANYONE", and that makes them bigger heroes than any uniformed murderer posting snuff videos and 'trophies' to tiktok. Going to end this here, as having a rant about everything foul and perverse about the zionist entity and it's genocidal actions is an entire academic discipline's worth of writing and far more eloquent folk than I have made that point/written those books, and it's better you go read some of those. One day, in our lifetimes, Palestine will be free, from the river to the sea.

[jyndor]

I’m rewatching the Puppetmaster for ~research~ and ugh.This is such a good episode but I cannot stand the treatment of Hama and also Katara’s special bending ability. And I’m gonna talk about it because I can’t help myself. But I also want to offer a solution maybe something that the writers could have done instead. Granted I’m a white US American so while I am about to talk about imperialism, anti-indigenous racism and racialized misogyny, I am coming from a position of privilege here and ymmv. It’s important that we as fans (especially white fans) acknowledge the things that our favorite stories can do better so that we can make our fandoms safer for everyone.

And btw fans of color have been talking about this so I definitely am going to be quoting some phenomenal bits of critique I have read on here. Also you should follow @shewhotellsstories and @visibilityofcolor for anti-racist fandom commentary.

I am also going to talk about grooming, so just be aware if that is a trigger for you.

I. Hama as a Campfire Horror Story Monster

The episode starts out with the Gaang camping in a creepy forest telling ghost stories to each other. Set to spooky music, Katara tells a story about something that happened to Kya, a friend named Nini (likely) dying in a snowstorm and then haunting her family’s home as a ghost. Immediately after, Toph hears people screaming under the ground - and then Hama finds them and invites them to her inn.

Every so often, Hama says something spooky with the spooky music playing. Katara immediately takes to Hama, but the others (especially Sokka) find her pretty unnerving. Katara says she reminds her of Gran Gran before Sokka starts snooping around and finds a bunch of puppets and a comb from the Southern Water Tribe. It’s the standard horror movie fakeout.

Every so often we get an artfully placed hint about Hama’s agenda - pulling water out of thin air, showing Katara that “plants - and all living things” are made of water. And oh yeah, she makes herself ice claws. Cool skill, but in the context of the episode, a little more unnerving.

The “moon monster” that Old Man Ding mentions, the alleged Moon spirit, turns out to be Hama (of course) and the tension builds to a peak as the Gaang rush to save Katara from the “dark puppetmaster” that has imprisoned the villagers.

Meanwhile Hama and Katara stand under the full moon washed in spooky cool lighting with an ominous breeze around them. You see Hama practically transform into a monster in a way sort of reminiscent to a werewolf - her fingers become claw-like, her veins pop out. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say it’s a coincidence that as she reveals her true agenda, she becomes less human in appearance. Which... okay I’ll get to that later.

While I can’t say that Katara fits the Final Girl trope very well, I do think it’s interesting to note that horror movies often do feature women as heroes who defeat the monster/killer/whatever and usually the Final Girl is used to allow audiences to experience the full horror of the villain, which absolutely is how Katara is used here. Yes, her friends come to help, but she saves everyone in the end (my queen).

So here’s why that’s bullshit.

Framing Hama as a horror story monster make sense when you don’t think about the Implications of framing the indigenous woman POW living surrounded by people who have benefited from Fire Nation imperialism. It does - it’s a common trope: the reclusive witch who first seems kindly to some lost/wandering children before revealing her true intention - to use them for her own purposes. Yeah, I know they’re playing on Hansel and Gretel. But yeah, I’m gonna call bullshit on that too - drawing on a c*nnabalistic witch for inspiration when you’re writing an indigenous woman character is probably not the way to go.

II. Hama the Puppetmaster* and Groomer

A puppet master is obviously a puppeteer, and Hama has puppets (creepy though they may be). But in terms of the underlying meaning, she’s a chessmaster, an Emperor Palpatine/Dick Cheney kind of master manipulator who works mostly through other people. What most people would consider a psychopath (in layman’s terms). When her friendly mask falls, she is terrifying.

She is cold, calculating, manipulative as fuck - she isolates Katara almost immediately. Hama uses Katara’s desire to connect with her culture to groom her to become a weapon. It’s actually such a good example of grooming that it has to be purposeful:

Targeting a victim - Hama hears that Katara and Sokka are from the SWT. She also hears Katara tell a story about Kya. To Hama, a waterbender from her own culture is a hell of a target.

Gaining trust - Hama reaches out to Katara in particular, is especially kind to her, gives her individual attention that the others don’t get. She prepares a SWT feast for them and tells the Gaang about her heritage when they go snooping.

Filling a need - so once Hama has given Katara reason to trust her about waterbending, she promises Katara to pass on SWT waterbending heritage that only Hama knows. She fills a unique need of Katara’s.

Isolation - From then on out, we don’t see Katara with the rest of the Gaang until the end of the episode. Hama seems like a normal teacher but she does start to drop little hints, pushing Katara very gently to see how she will react to her real agenda and desensitizing Katara to what would otherwise seem unacceptable coming from someone else who hasn’t established that unique trust. “You’ve got to keep an open mind, Katara.”

So this would be the point at which Hama would make sexual contact but this is metaphorical so that obviously doesn’t happen. What does happen is Hama pushes Katara’s limits. She makes her pretty uncomfortable with the idea of killing the fire lilies for water, but when Hama appeals to their shared history of marginalization she gets over it.

Maintaining control: Hama makes her final move, which is obviously bloodbending, and reveals her true agenda - and when Katara refuses to manipulative living beings’ blood, Hama violates her bodily agency. And not only this, but she pushes Katara into bloodbending when she victimizes the Gaang, fully realizing her control. 

Hama sees it as a victory, and telling Katara breaks down at the end in one of the most emotional scenes in the show. She feels like so many of us have felt at some point: violated, betrayed by someone we trusted. And then they never really deal with that.

I actually think that’s the point of The Puppetmaster, especially given ATLA being a show for children. I think it’s supposed to be a metaphor for csa.

And... okay.

Undoubtedly it is important to send these messages to kids. And yes, people usually are victimized by those closest to them, by those in their own communities. But not indigenous women. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen, but according to the National Congress of American Indians, Native American women  and girls are more likely to be sexually assaulted by non-NA men. 57% of cases are perpetrated by white men. Not the people in their communities.

Choosing to tell this story with an indigenous woman POW (who very likely would have been victimized herself lbr) is a choice that I find really aggravating. When writers tell stories with a Point, it is incredibly important for those writers to understand the implications of what they are saying about the characters who they are using to make that point.

Like I’m not saying don’t make that point, or don’t use Katara (who would in real life be at a higher risk of sexual violence than the others) to make it, but why make the perpetrator someone who is statistically unlikely to be Katara’s abuser? I’m not sure I have a good answer to that question. My guess is, like with making Hama animalistic and about as unsympathetic as it gets, the writers just had blinders on about the cultural implications of what they were saying.

Not even considering the whole victimizing-the-“innocents”-of-the-Fire-Nation-town plot, Hama’s not a good person. This is probably because she was driven mad by the need for revenge, which, eurgh okay, but still it’s very apparent that she is not interested in winning over Katara’s support directly or honestly.

* also the antisemitic history of this trope hmm.

III. Hama and The Victims of Genocide Victimizing Oppressors #NotAllFireNation

Okay. So this is the part that I think annoys me the most because it’s so bad. Like, imagine for a minute that you’re a white guy and you’re gonna tell a story about a victim of genocide who is completely divorced from her culture and homeland, and furthermore is an escaped prisoner of war who has radicalized in prison - okay it just hit me, I know what they MIGHT have been going for, like maybe some kind of anti-Gitmo statement? But that didn’t happen. People who were stolen away from Iraq and imprisoned illegally in Guantanamo Bay, and who were released after being detained illegally, haven’t really shown any real radicalization. They’re pissed at the US for victimizing them, but like that seems pretty fair considering so many of them did nothing wrong.

That’s been the US government’s excuse for not releasing innocent people who were detained illegally. The idea that prisoners of war radicalized in Gitmo so they can’t be released because they’ll attack the US is propaganda. I’m not saying it hasn’t happened, but that’s where it comes from.

Considering the time period ATLA was written, considering how much of it was inspired by the US wars of aggression and imperialism, considering how political ATLA is (and why it was so popular during its initial run - during the years that Bush lost a ton of popularity) I think if that’s what they were thinking about, that’s not great.

But for all of Avatar’s good messaging on imperialism and war, it’s still written from a white US American mindset. Well surely I’m not responsible, surely you shouldn’t imprison and abuse me, a random white girl in the States. It’s my government, which I cannot control because of two-party politics or some shit.

So first off, that’s shitty because oppression is often about systems, not individuals. Sure we need to always consider the individual experiences of people who are victimized, but the people who are benefiting from imperialism? Me? Fuck if I care if someone in El Salvador or Iraq or Chile or idk any of the countries we have meddled in, let alone from a marginalized community in the United States, hates white US Americans for what our government has done - and that’s even silly because white US citizens support our government. Like we think the institutions are sound, although sometimes we don’t support the guy in charge. We think the cops are going to help us, even though that isn’t really the case.

Why frame it about what she’s doing to the Fire Nation civilians at all? Why make Hama the villain? I don’t think they wanted her to be unsympathetic, I mean they tell her story and I don’t think anyone would conclude that it doesn’t justify her desire for revenge, but why tell this story through a victim of genocide?

Recently I saw a post by @sunkin-akh where they point out that Hama basically quotes Malcolm X:

I was literally just watching the Hama episode again and I just noticed for the first time that while forcing Katara to bloodbend she says that they must fight back against the Fire Nation (and she used this exact phrase) “by any means necessary”, which is Frantz Fanon’s phrase popularized by Malcolm X during the Civil Rights Movement (iirc). They directly compared Black liberation to Hama’s evil acts and it disgusted me.

The full context:

Hama: The choice [to use bloodbending] is not yours. The power exists. And it’s your duty to use the gifts you’ve been given to win this war. Katara, they tried to wipe us out, our entire culture, your mother.

Katara: I know.

Hama: Then you should understand what I’m talking about. We’re the last waterbenders of the Southern Tribe, we have to fight these people whenever we can, wherever they are, with any means necessary.

I find that so appalling because it is framing resistance, specifically anti-racist resistance, as barbaric and monstrous. And given the way that Hama is portrayed at this point, about as inhuman as anyone in ATLA, that is extra gross.

Finally, after Katara defeats Hama, she is lead away by the authorities in CHAINS.

So now the FN cops are the good authorities who we’re gonna trust a SWT waterbender with? I mean she’s a villain so we’re probably not supposed to feel bad for her, like yeah sure the FN is usually bad but she’s a criminal so it’s okay that they take a POW back into custody.

No, no, no.

I know I am reading into this far more than the writers intended - but that’s kind of the point of critically engaging with media. Because shockingly writers don’t always question their choices - they are people and have implicit biases just like all of us. When those writers come from a privileged culture that has colonized the culture they are using as “inspiration” for their story, they need to be extra mindful of how they represent those people.

IV: How To Write Hama

Well, I’m not gonna talk over indigenous fans on this one on specifics, and you should read this rewrite by @kispesan​  but my thoughts generally are:

lose the horror framing it’s just not right for this context and this character

don’t frame Malcolm X as a villain because that’s nasty and racist

have Katara learn to use bloodbending in ways that she is comfortable with (and not just like once in one episode where she’s extra vengeful and the hero of the show doesn’t approve of her actions JFC) and don’t make the dark-skinned girl the only character whose special bending skill is dubious (I know she also has healing but still)

bring Hama home

have indigenous people in the writers room

Anyway, I’ve gone on wayyy too long. Let me know if I am speaking out of turn please if you feel that I am. and I’m sure I had other thoughts but if you want to read some other good pieces of Hama meta, I’ve listed some below:

post and another post by @marsreds​

this post and this post by @visibilityofcolor​

this post by @shewhotellsstories​

anyway katara is a queen and should have been allowed to heal, and hama never should have been irredeemable because if you can make iroh redeemable, if the show was going to redeem AZULA, you can make hama redeemable.

[the-kazoo-kid]

The Two Types of Goblincore

I’ll begin by saying that I’m a Jewish archaeologist, and one of my main areas of study is the pogroms of Eastern Europe during the beginning of the 20th century. This affects the way I think of goblincore in two major ways:

Goblins were used as a negative caricature of Jews to tother them and incite negative feelings and violence among non-news

I have been accused of only wanting to be an archaeologist so that I can dig up and hoard shiny things

I spend a lot of my time looking at images like this one. It’s an antisemetic political cartoon from 1898. 

Look at the crown, the long, hooked nose, and most importantly the clawed, webbed hands. His hands envelope the world, symbolizing the perceived universal greed of the Jew.

This stereotype of the greedy Jew didn’t originate in the 19th century either. It goes all the way back to the Middle Ages when Jews in Europe were banned from occupations other than banking. 

So now let’s talk about goblins in popular culture. First and foremost in my mind are J.K Rowling’s goblins who are portrayed as greedy, hoarding and-- you guessed it-- in charge of the money and treasure.

There are even physical similarities between J.K. Rowling’s goblins and the political cartoon above. Note the hooked nose and the hands. 

I was about eight when I read the first Harry Potter book. I remember bringing it to a synagogue event where one of the adults remarked about how uncomfortable the goblins made them. Before I was allowed to watch the movie my mother sat me down and explained what was problematic with those goblins and why.

Next up: LOTR

He has the crown and the hands, although not the nose, and while he bares less direct resemblance to that cartoon, this is still an example of antisemitism. This is a placeholder character for a Jew that is disgusting, hoarding wealth, and a direct antagonist to the main characters. 

Everquest 2:

(I found another image where this character was specifically labeled The Goblin Banker but tumblr wouldn’t allow me to upload it for whatever reason.) This goblin is so other that it’s not even recognizable as a person, and in fact in the game they’re classed as a Mob Race. Yikes. Additionally, Wikipedia describes them as “attempting to - unsuccessfully - forge gold coins, and yet they have no intention spending any of this money, they simply wish to 'have' it.” This goes along with a lot of the greed aspect of goblins and their obsession with hoarding.

So what do we do?

First, I want to say that just because these pieces of media (or any others) have these problematic aspects doesn’t mean that you have to stop consuming and enjoying them. If we never read books or watched movies or played games that were problematic we would back ourselves into a corner where nothing was permitted.

The important thing is to educate yourself to the point where you can recognize the negative caricature/stereotype in something that you come across, and to not create any new media containing the stereotype. 

But what if you really like goblins?

The good news is that this is the first, older kind of goblincore, but it’s not the only one out there. There’s a new wave happening that emphasizes the positive things without including the negative ones. These next examples are technically called trolls in their respective universes, but they really get the vibe that I’m going for.

Boxtrolls:

See? Shiny treasure thing, delight, and no malice. Admittedly the trolls in this movie are some funny looking creatures, but they don’t come across as perpetuating the negative Jewish stereotype to me.

Frozen:

Cute little guys made of stone and moss. They live peacefully, and when they encounter the protagonists they have a nice musical number and then dispense some wise advice. No greed, no bad intentions. Good for them.

(Again, these examples are both technically trolls but I think the idea comes through, especially since they’re so far from the large, lumbering brutes that are trolls in say... Harry Potter or LOTR.)

Now I’m going to hand this conversation over to @goblinblogging who is a Jew working on reclaiming and reworking the idea of what a goblin is and what a goblin does.

-Reid

Now, I know learning that something you’re doing could be problematic is scary! I also know that a ton of people have abandoned goblincore just because they learned of these stereotypes. 

However, you don’t have to abandon something you love! What you need to do is educate yourself and learn about why these things are harmful and learn what you can do to make sure you aren’t doing something harmful yourself! 

Let's start off with how this stereotype came around (Or at least, one way it originated.) In the book Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts: Immigrant Folklore in the Western Mines, the author goes into detail about how European origins say the goblins of the mines were the ghosts of dead Jews, sentenced (in properly medieval anti-Jewish fashion) to perpetual restlessness for their supposed role in the crucifixion of Jesus. Which is where the “Goblins live in caves and mines” came from! 

So this explains that the ghosts of Jews became goblins because they were being punished for killing jesus. Already a pretty rough start! Now for common goblin appearances that are nothing but antisemitism in disguise. First, and most obvious, large, hooked, warted noses. I don’t really feel like I have to go into much detail about this one. Anyone who took history class in middle and high school should know about Hitler’s propaganda against jews and the depictions of their bulbous noses, often covered in warts. This caricature directly translates over to goblins having their predominant warted noses. Second, Let’s have a look at green skin. Hitler in particular loved to depict jews with green skin, or at the very least, in very green light so it turned their skin green. 

Image source

Notice the green tint, the evil sneer, hooked nose, and pointed ears in this one! All very reminiscent of traits we commonly see in goblins. 

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 This last one is a movie poster “Suss the Jew” produced by Terra Film at the behest of propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and considered one of the most antisemitic films of all time. Notice the green skin! 

 Next is horns and teeth. Hitler in particular would depict jews with devil’s horns hidden under their Kippah (also referred to in Yiddish as a yarmulke, or less frequently as a koppel.) He’d also just depict them outright as demons. 

Image source

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This one is Ukranian. Translated means “Satan has taken off his mask” Notice how “satan” has huge teeth and horns, red skin, with the star of David carved into his forehead. Also notice how his jewish mask has a large nose.

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This one is from Russia (1919), a caricature of Leon Trotsky, who was viewed as a symbol of Jewish Bolshevism. Notice the red skin and pointed ears. Also notice how he’s sitting above the people down below (who are sitting on skeletons and bones) symbolizing the Jew’s greed, which we’ll get into later.

And then there’s this one, where you can see (white) people inside of the Jew’s mouth, you can also see horrendously sharp teeth crushing them. Also pay attention to the large nose and pointed ears. I just remembered that I forgot to cover another very important anti-jewish facial feature, which is that many jews in propaganda have dark beady eyes and drooping eyelids. These are things you can see for yourself in the images above!

Next, we’re moving on to greed. This one in particular hits me close to home. I’ve heard the phrase “Jewing me out of my money” too many times to count. Or alternately, “Don’t be a Jew” when the other person doesn’t think that I’m giving them enough of what they want. (Could be money, could even be sweets. The first time I heard this phrase I was a little kid and I had a bag of skittles. I wanted to share with everyone but I still wanted to have enough for me to eat myself. I was passing out handfuls when my friend’s older brother (he was a teen) didn’t like how much I gave him. He said to me, “Come on, don’t be a Jew, give me some more skittles”. I didn’t understand and when I asked my mom what it meant later she was horrified.) Jews, and their caricatures, have almost always been viewed as greedy and power hungry. As @whalefromwales said above me, Jews in Europe used to be banned from any job besides banking. 

We also have images like this from WWII: 

Image source

Anyone who has taken any class where the Holocaust was talked about should be able to recognize this image, The Eternal Jew. He has money in one hand, which is reached out to demand more - he’s also looking at the money, and a whip in his other hand. In his arm, he holds the whole country of Germany.

Image source

There is also this one. A jew, tinged with red, weighs a man’s life against a large pile of money. Notice also how he’s looking at the money - not the man. 

And this one should also be easy to recognize. It reads “The Jews - A People of Contagion!” A city burns in the background as a jewish man sits atop a pile of bones counting his money. Notice the bulbous, hooked, nose, black eyes with drooping eyelids, and large hands! Hitler depicted jews this way (and as goblins) in order to segregate us. “Us VS Them”. “We are the Good Human Beings and Jews are monsters!” in order to make it easy for him to begin committing the atrocities that he did! It never happened overnight, there were key stepping stones that built up to concentration camps. One of those was “Jews aren’t really people, so it’s okay that we’re doing this to them. We’re doing it to save us, the Good Christian Germans.”  

So what does all of this mean? Well, first and foremost, it means that you have to be careful how you depict your goblins. How? When drawing your goblinsonas or goblin ocs, stay away from drawing them with huge, hooked, and warted noses, don’t make their skin green or red (personally, I prefer grey skin for goblins.) If your goblin has sharp teeth, don’t make them huge and obvious. Because modern goblins are fair folk, it’s difficult to depict them without pointed ears, but try not to exaggerate the proportions.  

Behavior: Stop with the “greedy little goblin” thing. That DIRECTLY comes from jewish stereotypes. Your Goblins are allowed to collect shiny things they find, but don’t make them greedy about it! Have your goblin share what they collect, make it a community effort. Sharing the things you love is way better than being miserly anyhow, and sharing more represents what we as goblins should want in our community! Also, be careful with your goblins being terrors. Yes, there are usually evil beings in every single race (whether mythological or real) but just be really really careful. Hitler loved to depict jews eating the Good Germans(™) or terrorizing communities. So even if your goblin is an evil one, be really really careful and be sure to educate yourself first so you’re not just perpetuating the same tired shit that Hitler did.Collecting coins. 

Now, this has been a huge topic of discourse lately. Coins are shiney! I understand why people would want to collect them. Hell, I have some awesome 50 cent pieces and gold dollars in my collection. You just can't depict  yourself or your goblin character collecting only coins and being very greedy with them. That’s literally doing nothing but echoing the same propaganda that Hitler used against us. Collect them all you want, but if I see “Greedy little goblin hoarding coins all for themselves” I swear I’m gonna hit the fan. To clarify, you can absolutely show off you coin collection in the goblin tags, just be careful how you frame it. “I’m really interested in history, so I collect old coins because I think they’re neat” is waaaaaay different then “Horrible littel crecher is greedy for shiney monies” (That last quote is something I’ve SEEN in the tags, luckily op was just completely unaware of why that was so wrong and they removed the caption after they were educated.) 

 So please, enjoy being into goblincore. Enjoy the culture and the fantasy. Goblincore is about appreciating the things about us that may be depicted as “weird” or “ugly”. Goblincore is a safe haven for neurodivergent people (I’m Autistic!) and also Trans and other LGBTQIA+ people! It’s a culture for appreciating nature, collecting things that may not be seen as normal, and sharing these things with other people. It’s a culture where you shouldn’t be ashamed to be who you are or afraid to get dirty. Goblincore is a support network for the weirder folks where we strive to uplift one another. Goblincore is wonderful and I’ve been so impressed at how welcoming everyone is! Especially on tumblr! Before the discourse happened, I was sure that goblincore was one of the kindest communities on tumblr. However, I understand why the discourse happened, and goyim in the goblincore tag really did need to be educated, but that doesn’t mean you have to leave! So be sure to educate yourself and be aware of how your actions could negatively affect folks. Listen to other Jewish people and be mindful of what they say. Some Jews are very uncomfortable with goblincore, and for very good reason! And I do not claim to speak for all Jews with this post. 

I am trying to reclaim the word goblin for use by any person who wants the label. I no longer want these fantasy creatures associated with such a beautiful and vibrant culture of people. Goblins are very interesting as a fantasy race, but the negative stereotypes do nothing but hurt real life Jewish people. Which is why I’m hoping that folks will read this post and realize what behaviors and depictions of goblins are wrong and harmful. Also, tag your goblincore appropriately! Again, many Jewish people are uncomfortable with goblincore because of antisemitism that has happened in their past. I’ve been compared to a goblin many times! So keep your goblincore in just the goblincore tags. There are many overlaps between goblincore and other micro communities on tumblr (Such as crowcore, cottagecore, naturecore, and vulture culture) but be mindful of what you’re putting in those tags. Most vulture culture people hate us goblins cuz we put pictures of dirt or “I’m just a smol crecher” in their tags, and I don’t blame them! Vulture culture is only for the remains of dead animals, and dead animal remains should be the only things added to those tags. So fellow goblins, I’m going to end this post with a sincere thank you for reading, be mindful of your actions, and most of all, HAVE FUN with goblincore! 

Here is where you should be able to read Knockers, Knackers, and Ghosts for free if you want.

TLDR: This is what we, as Jewish people, mean when we say that goblins are based off of negative stereotypes of jews. This is also why some jews get really upset at goblincore, however, there are many ways to participate in goblincore without using harmful stereotypes! So please, use this post to educate yourself so you can both be good goblins and good Jewish allies.

- @goblinblogging

[hopeymchope]

hey, sorry to barge into your inbox despite being a total stranger (and feel free to respond to this privately if you want) but i came across some of your s/n/k critical posts and i just wanted to say i agree SO much. and i wanted to thank you for vocalizing this opinion because i know both i and some others agree with you. i've personally felt that everything after chapter 80 was a mistake (because i thought the whole serum fight over erwin vs armin was pretty fuckin stupid too) and it's kinda funny (i guess) to see the ending 100% validate my opinion completely. i can't believe every character was done this dirty for the sake of a very poorly constructed "both sides are bad" scenario that was also in VERY poor taste considering the explicit allegories to n*zi germany and a literal race war. like what's up with the jews - sorry, the "eldians" - once ruling the entire world via a bloodthirsty empire and also being inhuman creatures? gee, that sure doesn't sound like every antisemitic conspiracy theory i've ever heard. and way to rationalize oppression, too. the entire point of an oppression narrative is supposed to be "hey, the oppressor's prejudices have no rational basis and are literally mistreating this oppressed group due to their own selfishness and cruelty," not "oh btw marley's fear/hatred of eldians kinda makes sense considering eldians once enslaved the entire planet and can turn into giant man-eating monsters." is*yama SERIOUSLY should've just stuck to writing glorified vore lmao.

and while all the characters were either killed, turned into plot devices, or both, it hurts that EMA and the main protag himself suffered this treatment as well. i still think pre-timeskip eren is utterly irreconciliable with post-timeskip eren and the fact that both fans and the author himself try to make it seem like "hey he was ALWAYS a batshit crazy psychopath from the start!" is sort of pathetic to watch. like yeah, lemme just ignore the first 80 chapters of character development for this guy. or lemme pretend that the author didn't spend the significant majority of the decade making eren the most empathetic character in the entire series. or let me also pretend that eren killing those human traffickers to save a 9 year old girl from being a child sex slave is somehow evidence/foreshadowing/etc of him eventually growing up to destroy 80% of the planet. like, what? not to mention he even rebuked himself for recklessly killing those two men like that in chapter 17...so am i supposed to ignore that too?? and don't even get me started on the "eren went insane and accidentally caused his mom's death." bro. BRO. i've watched the entirety of game of thrones yet i STILL have never seen this level of "edgy plot twist for shock value with no benefit or relevance to the story whatsoever" in any media to exist.

well anyway...sorry for ranting in your inbox like this LMAO i really just wanted to tell you that i agree with your opinions about both the series ending and the series as a whole. i doubt i'll ever engage with this cursed manga ever again but at least pre-chapter 80 s/n/k will always be a thing and i can pretend they all got reincarnated into a modern AU where eren and mikasa are happily married and living with their bff armin in a nice condo or something. they alternate between visiting carla and grisha or mikasa's family on weekends. yeah that sounds pretty good. if you made it this far then kudos to you and thank you for reading lol

Thanks a ton for the kind words of commiseration. It feels like there’s a plurality of people who are unhappy, sure... but it comes off as still being a minority, and even among that minority, it seems like most people are still fine with most of the timeskip so long as they stuck the landing. But I think they were much too far off-course pretty fast after the Timeskip started to really correct it very well. It was possible, but the writing was on the wall. The intentions were already clear pretty early on after the skip. 

That said, I try to keep this Tumblr mostly positive and DR-focused, yet I still absolutely had to rant about SNK 139. The more I thought about it, the more I disliked it... and this comes from someone who was already unhappy for a while, obviously, so. Yeah. Of course I was gonna dislike it on some level, but I thought it’d at least provide closure to the Timeskip arc, even if I do think the Timeskip arc feels at odds with everything else the series was for 3/4 of its run.

And HOLY SHIT I literally forgot about the Eldians’ history of apparently being horrible, vicious rulers of a sinister empire. You know why? Because I NEVER BELIEVED IT. I was so 100% certain that it was going to be outed as bullshit propaganda from Marley that I never once thought it was plausible, so I just... pushed it out of my mind as soon as I read it. After all, all that kind of talk about the arch-conspiracy of Jews has always been total bullshit from anti-semetic monsters, so why would I put any stock in this kind of talk being applied to the Jewish race of Attack on Titan? 

But now, at the end of the story... yup, I guess he never DID go back on that! So it was fucking true?! The Jewish people in this WWII analogy were apparently an evil master race at one point?! Oh. OHHHHH. Go fuck yourself with a shovel for that one, Isayama. 

And yeah, Eren... god, what a sad story. He becomes unrecognizable as the same character thanks to the Timeskip, the new characterization is never explained or justified retroactively - it’s just opposite day now, forever - and he dies accomplishing nothing. I don’t know what to say, except I do know how much I loved that character and this series before things went south. I didn’t even mind the backstory for the Titans and the horrible story of Eldians in Marley... because it seemed so obvious that it was setting up a battle against a hateful, technologically advanced foe that was beyond the darkness of anything they’d fought before, y’know? Marley, as it was set up in the flashbacks before the Timeskip, is Nazi Germany if the Nazis had tech and scientific horrors and numbers far beyond what the Allies had. And nobody EVER feels bad for killing Nazis, so this was obviously going to be a final battle to destroy the Marleyan military, with Zeke likely to serve as a Final Boss who has totally 100% bought the propaganda and who hated everything Eren stood for. It was all RIGHT THERE. Maybe it was just too easy to tell that story, because instead, Zeke is suddenly supposed to be a gray character (very hard to accept given his backstory), and we end with the “uwu both sides were bad bc war is hell” message that is really pretty fucked up, as you already correctly pointed out.

[softgrungeprophet]

more thoughts on flash and agent venom and propaganda, a topic which i am always thinking about but which is particularly relevant now in thinking about how comic fans and writers seem to contradict themselves in every way, how they just don’t GET it

flash thompson went from “tolerating” the army in the 70s, to outright uneasy about his service in the mid aughts, and even downright unproud, wallowing with his medal on the FLOOR, uncomfortable with being congratulated, all that showing he clearly was not proud of being military despite what every writer wants to say about “heroism”...... to being all ra-ra patriotism god and country backtracking his acceptance of a disability in order to peddle the Cool Military Venom shit and that’s what i am talking about when i talk about the propaganda of (particularly early) agent venom-- the advertisement-esque plasterings of ARMY logos, characterization sacrificed specifically for a military agenda, the presentation of the “cool military operations, wow just like a secret spy” plots, etc.

it’s all propaganda, and blatantly so, even BEFORE that happens. that weird terrorist villain (in web of spider-man, i think it was?) is just, conceptually I hated that, and again the story presented this strange gross angle in terms of flash “working out his anger in a healthy way” (unspoken: by fighting an unjustified oil war) as if it were this great, reasonable thing and that is just

no.

also propaganda, even if it is presented by the villain in the piece it is clearly presented as positive in spite of that (weird approach)

flash as a character is fraught with a lot of weird contradictory shit, where he is both uncomfortable with his role as a(n ex-) soldier, and then is turned right around to be uncharacteristically proud of his service and suddenly more religious as well, a character whose father is viciously, violently abusive and fully capable of killing his family, but “was a good cop” who got his “redemption in death” and HOW hollow is that? how can I see both the on-page and implied-via-color violence and cruelty and yet also accept that somehow he is a “good cop” (which does not exist)

even the same writer does this kinds of things, remender wrote these kinds of contradictions, and it is clear how much they simply do not get it.

a different non-flash thompson related comic comes to mind.

captain america corps. that’s a fun miniseries. it came SO close to REALLY getting it. and then at the last minute it turns out the villain is the lady who wanted to start the femizons and is orchestrating everything behind the scenes so ALL the stuff that so closely parallels our current day--the police state, the racism inherent, the protestors and insurgents imprisoned for going against the MAGA-esque hyper-patriotic government (I would say it was heavy handed if it weren’t so startlingly like real life) 

allllll of this gets immediately undermined by the revelation that it was NOT whiteness at the core of this but in fact militant feminism--now, we can talk about how those two go hand-in-hand, and the woman in question is 100% white, but this story does not go there. it’s all a personal vendetta against Cap for foiling her femizon plans and her costume has a huge venus symbol on it and it was such a disappointing way to end on, tbh. It came SO close, so very close, it got right into the core of how things really are, down to racial profiling... but it fucked itself over in the end

other people are also talking about the ways superhero comics have failed to accurately grapple with and reflect the things they’re writing about and how they obviously deify government agencies and the police (recommended reading: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/protest-backlash-failings-a-superhero-culture-1297024?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social ) and how militarized the movies are, etc. etc.

It’s true, from older comics onward, increasing to the point of like, SHIELD being corrupt... but it’s because of those outside forces obviously. Nothing to do with the power-serving people already there. It’s just those HYDRA infiltrators. Those “outsiders” (cold war as fuck)

EVEN when it was not that, before the supposed infiltration, even in comics like the She-Hulk graphic novel (which has its own serious issues in terms of misogyny and race) which presents SHIELD as unquestionably the bad guys--well it’s not ALL of them. It’s this leader, this group, Fury’s still good, there’s the good guys, blah blah blah so even that falls short. There are moments, there are always moments--She-Hulk and Wyatt standing up to an antisemitic cop for example--but even from the early, early days (take this from someone who has recently read the first 8 issues of Amazing Spider-Man from 1963-4 ish) there are still these little notions that, well, even though the cops want to arrest Spider-Man, most of them don’t really believe he’s all that bad. They’re mild bystanders at worst until some other person agitates them into attacking Spidey, and they’re still defenders of the people in those comics (as true as that most certainly was NOT in the early 1960s)

This post is a mess, and other people are definitely saying it better than me lmao but there’s a lot of contradictions in superhero comics particularly when the police or military or govt agencies are involved, where even when they’re bad they’re still “good” and blah blahhh blahhh

honestly one of my biggest criticisms of robbie thompson’s Silk run is the SHIELD stuff and mockingbird. that’s a series that gets into some good stuff. in which felicia, the criminal leader, is working for and with the people (homeless youth, etc) but it still is very weak in the tooth and shield is pretty much just there to be the cool government group for the most part despite arresting cindy at one point--i guess because bobbi was heading her team, and they can’t very well have mockingbird be the bad guy but man. didn’t bobbi used to be a CRIMINAL?

anyway

idk what i’m even saying

this got into a few things XD

the problem with straight white men who are unaffected by the same things as a lot of their readers, writing, editing, and drawing the majority of a company’s works becomes pretty clear when you get into just how waffle-y so much of the results are. characters who spent their youth or adolescence hunted by the authorities get older and they get put into those same groups that didn’t trust them, like every time a white punk singer grows up and decides “the machine is good actually”

that sucks huh

[soulfulauror]

The topic I’m bringing you today is one that I’ve grappled with for nearly as long as I’ve played Tina: Jewishness and the Wizarding World with respects to Tina.

Let me preface this that while I’m a conversion student (reform) I’m not from a Jewish family myself. Although I’ve started to practice religiously I cannot and will not call myself an authority on the matter for ethnic/secular Jewish people. As this is also a headcanon post while I will touch on minute details of my research I will not express every nuance, but I am happy to share texts and ideas.

Being a wizarding Jew: Religious or Ethnic? One of the biggest misconceptions I’ve seen in the FB fandoms in regards to the Goldstein sisters is that their relation to their Jewishness has to be religious. It does not. The Jewish people are one of the oldest people with written history, language, and culture in the world. There are people born Jewish, by Jewish law, that do not practice religiously and don’t believe in a higher being. This is the first thing I like to make a point of when writing either of the girls: They don’t have to be religious.

America in the 1920s in relations to Judaism: Like many different ethnic and religious groups there was a spike in immigration by the Jewish people in the 18th through 20th centuries. In particular, in the 19th century immigration happened due to Russian pogroms. Antisemitism was on a global level with Henry Ford in the United States writing propaganda in the early 20th century.

The 19th century also saw the introduction of a new form of Jewish movement in Baltimore, the Reform movement. Jewishness on a religious level within the United States was broadening. There were “modern” Jewish plays on Broadway. The introduction of the reform movement was considered a revitalization by some and in other ways, it was pulling away from a traditional Jewish identity in a time where being Jewish was dangerous and on a global scale unwanted by peers. This only heightened post WWI where the Jewish people were considered the “problem” and we know what happens from there.

New York in the 1920s had one of the largest Jewish populations on the planet and today still holds the second largest (after Israel). Different census says that the Jewish population at the time was anywhere between 30-50% of the population and reached a high in the 20s*. This means the wizarding population of New York would have, subsequently, had a large Jewish population and their own cultural identity.

Religion and witchcraft. This is a topic that I consider on all types of levels-- For a strict, orthodox Jewish person the idea of witchcraft would be considered against the Torah. For Conservative and Reform Judaism it might change a bit. But even for Orthodox Jews for the wizarding world it might be considered “an exception”. For this I’d like to direct you to a fanfiction about an orthodox Anthony Goldstein: here who explains the concept far better than I can.  The idea essentially is that if not doing something (practicing/learning sorcery) will become a danger to others is it strictly wrong. And in this case, we know that magic can act explosively if not handled properly and, if repressed, results in an Obscurial.

Jewishness also has pagan roots and it’s own mysticism in Kabbalah. Early temple era practices involved ritual sacrifice (largely of animals that eventually got written out). I haven’t done enough research into Kabbalah itself to want to firmly say anything on it but a quick definition is, “ Practical Kabbalah in historical Judaism, is a branch of the Jewish mystical tradition that concerns the use of magic. ...  “ Sukkot is, in a sense, still one of the most pagan-like traditions held.

So what does this mean for Tina and how does she handle her Jewishness? Well, not that we got the highlights of what I consider about her identity itself down let’s discuss Tina’s history itself:

Regardless of what debates may come up I will always write Tina as ethnically and religiously Jewish. Full stop. However, I also consider the effect that having lost her parents would have here. For my version of Tina I write as if her parents died somewhere in between her being 8 to 9-years-old. By this age she has a more firm grip on how her parents treated their own identities and it’s part of the cultural values she grew up in.

However,  that was over fifteen years ago and for 9 of those years she would have been in most of my verses an orphanage (and I have reasons for that and I’ll write a headcanon on that one day). And when she wasn’t she was at Ilvermorny which, instead of collaborating cultural identities seems to be like England and no-maj America more Christain based. I’d like to think in a perfect worl children would be excused for religious holidays to practice, but given how religion is non-existent in this world it’s doubtful. So she went to a secular boarding school where Christmas, Easter, etc would have been the major holidays.

Still with me? Cool. So now that we’ve gotten all of the bits and pieces together that I’ve considered for Tina the fun part comes in:

I write Tina as culturally Jewish, led by Jewish morals and ideals, without a belief in g-d.

 By the time her parents died Tina’s morals would have been formed and these are the things I have written into her character. Without dwelling on it long I’ll lift some titles from one of my favorite works Jewish Wisdom by Rabbi Joshua Telushkin on this. “When to Give, What to Give, How to Give,” “Helping the Helpless,” “The Obligation to criticize, How to do So, and When to Remain Silent,”  “Listen to her voice,” “Either friends or death,” “A Person is Liable by his Actions”.

These are just some of the passages in this work that I feel plays into Tina’s character and I try to subtly put in. Because I do feel like that I shouldn’t have to constantly say she is Jewish for her to be Jewish-- Action speaks just as loudly as words and that’s what, to me, fits Tina best. So when I write her I consider how the Torah and Talmud would work and this Jewish morality, not necessarily adhering to mitzvahs (though she does to many, but she doesn’t live by them).

Saying she doesn’t feel religiously Jewish, however, doesn’t mean I don’t feel like she does nothing either. The interesting thing about Judaism is that you are allowed to grapple with it and come at your own terms. It’s that reason that it’s completely possible for wizarding Jews to be religious too-- Because it’s all about finding your own identity with g-d.

Tina’s had a difficult life, though. She lost her parents at a young age, she’s seen cold nights with no food, struggled to be successful and it’s always been something she had to do on her own. It’s not necessarily that she doesn’t believe in g-d she’s just come to terms with h him in her own way-- And this way is more of a spiritual reflection than anything.

She does believe in the holiness of Yom Kippur, for example. It’s the one time of year that I write she asks for off and insists on. Any other holiday she’ll work if she has to, but this is the one time she pressed for because it’s a period of reflection for her-- She’ll work through the week leading up after Rosh Hashanah but she earnestly takes the time Yom Kippur gives to understand herself, come to terms with what she did during the year, and it’s also a time she pays respect to her parents.

Tina’s Jewish identity for me is directly connected to the loss of her parents. After they pass away she has no reason to go to shul anymore, no reason for prayer, other than daughterly obligation. Again, she lived in an over-crowded era where kids like her would have been extremely lucky to eat properly. She’d have no reason to believe in those circumstances, but se still tried.

 Every year without fail Tina lights a candle on Yom Kippur. She’d save up whatever nickles she could find when she was little. And now on the anniversaries of their deaths she visits their gravestones and places a rock. When she was old enough to give Queenie anything on Chanukkah she’d present her a single present, not much and it took too long to get the money for it--

--But for Tina she’s a woman who holds onto those memories and moments with her parents. She lives in her mother’s old apartment, wears their old clothes, keeps a locket that I personally write as her mothers. Holding onto these small moments is like holding onto a piece of them.

Tina is also a bit of a scholar as seen with her various books and I don’t feel that ends on the magical spectrum. She does earnestly want to know about the background she comes from, so she’s read the Torah and she reads scholastic works. And occasionally if she’s off at the time she walks to the nearest shul on Shabbat mornings.

Her Jewishness is a part of her and it’s something she grapples with. A younger her was angry at the concept of g-d allowing her parents to die, an older her understands that some things happen and it’s how you deal with them, the strength that pulls you through that happens. That there are no guarantees and what you can do is by acting with just and moral decisions. And that’s exactly how she lives.

Kosher is something I waffle on and this goes back to the remarks of “Hot dog, again? ...Not a very wholesome lunch.” Which I and many others do think is supposed to go back to that, but again I think it’s much more complicated-- Technically eating pork/non-kosher/what not is allowed if there’s nothing else to eat and you’ll starve otherwise. So I think as a child, before her parents died, Tina ate kosher-- But after they died it became eating whatever came by. That included pork or dairy products or whatever was there. 

As an adult she does try to eat kosher for the most part, but she also eats at a matter of convenience. Hot Dogs could be kosher, but stand ones are unlikely so she probably justifies it by she needs to eat and she doesn’t know (and Waterston has saidt hat Tina gets so stressed out/works so much that she forgets to eat). There’s also some Jewish people who eat kosher in the home by don’t outside of it simply because of the idea they don’t actually know if a place is entirely kosher (since strict Judaism calls for such foods to not even be cooked on the same utensils).

The last and final element I consider is the fact that Tina is a woman who has high morals, strong loyalty, and a constant work-ethic. What this means is that although I feel she asks for at least one holiday off a year she doesn’t stress the others-- Her spirituality is more important and she can’t justify taking many off. Especially not during the High Holidays in the fall when you’re not /technically/ supposed to work for a month. She simply can’t afford that and I’ve read a few articles where even on Shabbat if it’s a greater loss to you (ie: money/food/etc) it can be justified and since her Jewishness is more spiritual than religious...

Well. Tina is a practising Jew, within the confines of the life she’s been given. She is very culturally Jewish and knows Yiddish and Hebew passably enough, Yiddish more so. She’s even a scholarly Jew, wanting to learn what she can even if it’s not necessarily something she makes part of her identity. Tina is very proud of being Jewish and holds it close to her heart as part of her parents. She’s just not a Jewish person who has quite come to concepts with her own idea of g-d or if one exists for her.

I would go on but this is already long and I think this covers quite a bit of information without going into my feelings on Tina versus period-antisemitism.

Thanks for coming this far if you have!

[schraubd]

The Problem With Canaries

A group of pro-Israel, anti-BDS students at a variety of college campuses issued a statement harshly criticizing the Canary Mission for hindering their efforts on campus and unjustly maligning fellow students. They wrote:

Canary Mission is an anonymous site that blacklists individuals and professors across the country for their support of the BDS movement, presumed anti-Semitic remarks and hateful rhetoric against Israel and the United States. 

As a group of conscientious students on the front lines fighting BDS on our campuses, we are compelled to speak out against this website because it uses intimidation tactics, is antithetical to our democratic and Jewish values, is counterproductive to our efforts and is morally reprehensible. 

This blacklist aggregates public information about students across the country under the guise of combating anti-Semitism. It highlights their LinkedIn profiles, Facebook pictures, old tweets, quotes in newspapers and YouTube videos. The site chronicles each student’s involvement with pro-Palestinian causes and names other students and organizations with whom the given student may be affiliated. 

We view much of the rhetoric employed to villainize these individuals as hateful and, in some cases, Islamophobic and racist. In addition, Canary Mission’s wide scope wrongfully equates supporting a BDS resolution with some of the most virulent expressions of anti-Semitism and anti-Israel rhetoric and activity.

The ADL initially supported the students, referring to Canary as "Islamophobic & racist". Critics quickly contested what, exactly, Canary did that was "Islamophobic & racist", and a day later the ADL backed off, apologizing for "overly broad" language. I want to talk through why I think objections to Canary as Islamophobic are potentially justified. But I want to do so in what I think is a more nuanced and specified way, because there really are interesting questions here regarding the ethics of counter-antisemitism (or counter-racism, or counter-Islamophobic) discourse that I think are being elided in the usual rush to back our friends and lambaste our enemies. Let's stipulate for sake of argument that Canary doesn't use specifically Islamophobic rhetoric (in the form of racial slurs, conspiratorial claims about creeping Sharia, and the like), and that in general the factual claims they make about the targeted persons (that they did say X or join group Y) are factually accurate. I'm open to the possibility that they do use such rhetoric or that their claims aren't factual (in which case the argument that they're Islamophobic becomes trivially easy). But I make the stipulation because the case I'm going to make doesn't depend on any such behavior by Canary. Instead, let's focus on what we might think of as Canary's strongest possible foundation: factual revelations of things the profiled individual has definitely said, or groups they have definitely joined, absent any additional commentary. Again, I'm not saying that this is, in fact, all or even most of what Canary does -- I'm saying that this sort of thing would presumably represents the formulation of Canary's mission that would be most resistant to a claim of Islamophobia. So. First, I do not generally think it is a smear or otherwise wrongful to simply republish a terrible thing somebody has said (with appropriate caveats about not taking things out-of-context, omitting apologies, etc.). For example, the other day Seth Mandel accused me of a "smear" and a "lie" towards him in the context of my column on sexist responses to Natalie Portman not attending to the Genesis Prize. The irony of Mandel's complaint was that he was actually never mentioned in the column at all; he only appears in the context of two of his tweets being republished, verbatim, with no additional commentary or interpretation directed towards him whatsoever. If you can be "smeared" simply by quoting your own words back to you, then I suggest that the problem lies inward. Moreover, I'd suggest that there actually is something important about revealing the prevalence of antisemitism that exists amidst certain social movements (on campus or not) -- if only because Jews are so frequently gaslit on this subject. Just this week, the Interfaith Center at Stony Brook University had to release a statement (cosigned by a wide range of campus Jewish, Christian, and Muslim groups) in solidarity with campus Hillel after a campus SJP member demanded that Hillel be expelled from campus and replaced with "a proper Jewish organization" (proper, the student confirmed, meaning anti-Zionist). This blog had already covered the Vassar College SJP chapter distributing literal (1940s-era) Nazi propaganda about Jews. These things happen, and there's something off-putting about claiming that it's a form of cheating or a smear to document it. Too many people think that naming and shaming antisemitism is by definition a witch-hunt. That cannot be right, and we should be very suspicious of political arguments which act as if it is right, or act as if the very act of accusing someone of antisemitism (or, for that matter, racism, or sexism, or Islamophobia) is dirty pool or foul play. So what accounts for my unease? Well, for one it might be the sense that college students, in particular, often say dumb things they regret, and there shouldn't be an entire website dedicated to spotlighting them and inviting people to berate them for it. How much one sympathizes with that point would seemingly correspond to how much one dislikes "call-out culture"; if you're not a huge fan of it (especially when it comes to young people not otherwise in the public eye) then Canary would seem to be one manifestation of a generally malign social trend. Another basis for objection might be the distinctively chad gadya character of many of Canary's entries. If one reads the site, very frequently a profiled individual is listed because he joined a group which hosts a speaker who supports an organization who bit the cat that ate the goat ... and so on. There's a very distinctive "guilt-by-association" character to what Canary does that I think is obviously objectionable, regardless of how you label it. And note how it resonates with the way blacklists are being deployed against Jews and Jewish groups right now (e.g., the announcement by several NYU student groups that they were boycotting a bevy of Jewish organizations -- including the ADL). Such calls very frequently proceed by similar logic: the group supports a program which hosts a speaker who said a thing ... so on and so forth. Such logic could be used  to ensnare essentially anyone who affiliates with anything -- which means in practice it must be deployed selectively to delegitimize certain groups and causes under the guise of neutral idealism. If that stunt makes us uncomfortable when it's deployed against Jewish groups, it should make us uncomfortable when it's deployed against Muslim groups. And here is where I think the Islamophobia charge has legs. I don't want to say "imagine if this were done to Jews", because it is done to Jews (albeit perhaps not in quite as organized a form). But there absolutely are cases of blacklisting Jewish students simply because they've joined pro-Israel groups, without any claims that the student has said or done anything remotely racist or Islamophobic. And such behavior I think is rightfully thought of as deeply chilling, and striking too deep in terms of the way it polices to the letter Jewish political and communal participation. Many Canary entries seem to be based entirely on groups the individual has joined (everything from Students for Justice in Palestine to the Muslim Students Association -- the latter of which, it is worth noting, joined the letter in solidarity with Hillel at Stony Brook), rather than any specifically antisemitic things that the individual has said or done. That seems to be as dangerous as equivalent blacklist efforts targeting Jews who are part of Hillel, or Students Supporting Israel, or J Street (yes, J Street). Indeed, I could go further. Let's take the case of the students who have, themselves, said antisemitic things -- they're on the record. Surely there could be nothing Islamophobic about including them in a database? Yet even here, I'm conflicted -- and again, the mirror-case involving Jews perhaps reveals why. Imagine there was a website which cataloged people -- mostly, though not exclusively, Jews -- who were members of Zionist or Zionist-affiliated groups for the purpose of declaring to the world that they were racist and should not be worked with. Wouldn't we view that as being antisemitic in character? Suppose that it limited itself solely to those persons who had engaged in Islamophobic remarks -- with the goal of showing the degree to which Islamophobia and racism were prevalent in Zionist discourse, in a way that gave the impression that such views ran rampant amongst (Zionist) Jewish college students. Could that be viewed as antisemitic? My instinct is yes. It is an instinct that is, admittedly, at war with my above acknowledgment that documenting the real and non-negligible existence of antisemitism that exists in pro-Palestinian movements is not a form of cheating (and I'd likewise agree that documenting the real and non-negligible existence of Islamophobia that exists in Zionist movements is likewise not wrongful). But in both cases it is a delicate thing, lest the impression be given that Jews Are The Problem or Muslims Are The Problem. It isn't wrong to demand that groups be attentive to that possibility and work proactively against it, and it isn't wrong to be suspicious of them when they seem indifferent to it. What was it that Maajid Nawaz said? “Who compiles lists of individuals these days?" Of course, the answer is "many people and many groups," and maybe that's not per se wrong (or even avoidable). But certainly it is something that requires considerable care and concern, and Canary -- given its propensity for guilt-by-association, given its wide sweep, and given the range of individuals it includes under its ambit -- doesn't strike me as expressing said care and concern. Is that Islamophobic? Depends on how you define it, but I would suggest that there is a prima facie case of a sort of moral negligence directed at Muslim students. In other circumstances, that same sort of moral negligence impacts Jews. Either way, it's a wrong, and it's entirely fair to label it as such. via The Debate Link https://ift.tt/2r7Rd2y

[lesbeet]

Hi Sefa, I was just wondering if you had any resources about why Zionism is such a popular viewpoint in the west, or if you could point me in the right direction. Sorry if this is coming off like "it's your duty to teach me" but your post has just really shown me I don't know nearly enough about the subject

hope you don’t mind me posting this! some disclaimers: i am not, nor do i claim to be, an expert on this by ANY means. i don’t really have specific resources for you but i’ll try to give an explanation based on my own views. i’m mostly going to be speaking from personal experience as someone who grew up as (and still is) a mostly mainstream american jew. i would offer links and sources but it’s hard to find unbiased ones so rather than give links to sites i can’t guarantee the objectivity of, i’ll give my knowledge and then encourage you to go explore more info on your own if you so choose. this is gonna be long, so buckle in.

so first of all, zionism, from what i know, was originally a movement to unite jews worldwide into a singular group and to eventually gain self-determination. early zionists always had their eye on palestine, but were also looking at several other countries in which to establish a sovereign jewish state, like uganda. since the establishment of the state of israel in 1948, the goal of zionism is essentially to support and justify the reason for israel’s existence, and to purport that jews deserve to live safely in a nation of our own. it’s essentially a form of jewish nationalism.

prior to the holocaust there was nowhere near as much widespread jewish support for zionism. global antisemitism is an enormous reason why so many jews are zionists, which, while not justified or acceptable, is an understandable path of logic. additionally, and perhaps due to that, jews in the west (and possibly elsewhere, but i can’t speak on that) are often basically brainwashed into idealizing israel as the be-all end-all of judaism, the eventual endgame we should all strive toward.

there’s a lot of anti-arab and anti-palestinian propaganda, a lot of historical revisionism, and it’s fed to kids at such a young age and then reinforced through many jewish institutions throughout our lives. i definitely considered myself a zionist at one point in the not-so-recent past, though i also considered myself pro-palestine (which obviously doesn’t work). it’s a dastardly combination of real antisemitism and embellished logic fed to corruptible people who really don’t have the knowledge to believe anything else.

i grew up at a conservative synagogue and a reform summer camp, and they both fairly equally contributed to this brainwashing. american jews pray facing east, we say prayers for the state of israel. young kids slip tiny notes and prayers into paper and cardboard models of the western wall. we learn about israeli culture and at camp several times a summer we had israel day. when i was a sophomore we had army day at one point in the summer, and our counselors (who were all israeli in that particular unit) pretended to be our army commanders for the day. we had educational programs about israel. it’s a lot of reinforced bias and brainwashing so that by the time you’re old enough to think critically, your mind is already made up and it doesn’t even occur to you that you’re misunderstanding SO many things.

we’re taught to essentially keep israel in our back pockets as an option in case antisemitism in our home countries gets to be too dangerous. we’re supposed to believe that israel really is the center of judaism and that diasporic jews are just waiting to come home. it’s insidious. and naturally i learned a bunch of false or revised versions of history that led me to believe, of course israel should exist and has always done the right thing, everyone just hates israel because everyone hates the jews and we’re not safe anywhere else.

so essentially there are two kinds of zionists that you’ll come into contact with in the west: those who are fully aware of the objective facts and still support the ideology,  who use twisted versions of that information to brainwash others into agreeing with them, and those who have been brainwashed. you’ll meet much more of the latter group than the former, especially if they’re just mainstream western jews who have never really taken the time to learn about israel for themselves beyond what they were taught by mainstream jewish institutions - and that rarely happens.

it’s the perfect system. they point out the very real antisemitism that exists in the world and they say, “look! look at how dangerous it is to be jewish in this world! this is why we need a place of our own, where we can be safe and we can be jewish in peace!” which isn’t inherently a nasty idea on its own, but jewish safety CANNOT come at the expense of others. and having an established state comes at the expense of displacing and enacting violence and oppression against the palestinian people.

jewish antizionists aren’t self-hating internalized antisemites, we just don’t believe our own well-being should come at the expense of the well-being of other people.

what i really believe is that rather than taking an attitude of “if you’re a western jewish zionist literally don’t ever come in contact with me and also you should die” i think we should be reaching out to these people and having these discussions, explain the realities of the evils and crimes against humanity israel is committing against the people of palestine, and explain that it is VERY possible to have a strong jewish identity while condemning atrocities committed against others. in fact, zionism as it exists really can’t be reconciled with judaism at all.

that kind of reaching out would have helped me learn the truth much sooner, and i think that’s the way we need to approach this. maybe this wouldn’t be an effective strategy in every situation, but i truly believe is that a lot of mainstream american jewish “zionists” wouldn’t really support zionism if they knew the truth - that’s what happened with me and a number of other american antizionist jews that i know. so rather than pushing them away and declaring them to be lost causes, we should be educating them and gaining their sympathies for our cause, because after all the entire purpose is to stop the nationalist ideology and to stop the oppression of palestinians, not to yell at zionists for social justice brownie points and then do nothing material.

as far as non-jewish zionists, israel is a major u.s. ally and also some sects of christianity believe that jesus won’t return until the jews have control of israel. so that’s why a lot of (mostly conservative) goyim in the u.s. consider themselves zionists. 

i hope that made sense? again i’m not a historian or an expert or anything of the sort, this is just a brief (lol) explanation of how i personally have come to interpret the situation

[attackfish]

I started writing this essay as a response to this reblog of my post by @luminousfinn: [Link], but it has since grown larger and much more off the topic of the original meta we were discussing. Instead it’s time for a rant about Joseph Campbell, soft cultural imperialism, and the universalization of Christian myth.

Joseph Campbell is a mythology scholar, in the very loosest sense, whose shtick was claiming that all world myths were variants of the same set of stories, and that all mythologies were at their base fundamentally the same with only surface differences.  He also goes further to imply that all cultures fundamentally hold the same values and ways of looking at the world.  Not only is this wrong, horrible scholarship, and an insult to the variety and complexity of human thought and imagination, it’s downright racist.

Because of course the values that every culture believes in underneath their supposed uniqueness in the eyes of Campbell and his followers are those of Western Christianity.  And here he is, a famous scholar and expert saying these things.  You person from a culture trying to explain that no those are not the values and ways of thinking you and your people subscribe to?  Oh you silly creature, you think you’re unique.  This feeds into the attitude I talked about in this post about how Joseph Campbell’s ideas trick Westerners into thinking they know more than they do: [Link].

However, this flattening of culture that Joseph Campbell championed does something else as well.  With the universalization of Western Christian myth and values comes the universalization of Western Christian biases.  In this I don’t mean that those biases are spreading, though of course they are by other processes of cultural imperialism and through the more benign processes of cultural contact and diffusion.  No, what I mean by this is that this flattening of cultures encourages a Western Christian audience to view their particular cultural biases as universal.

Myths and folktales, like all human stories, are products of the specific cultural and historic environments in which they were first told, and in the environments in which they are and were told and retold.  This is not exactly a novel idea, for all it stands in contrast to Campbell’s monomyth.  It is in fact the position of nearly all credible anthropologists and historians.  Many of these stories had a a deliberate agenda, and some are effectively fossilized propaganda.  In many cases, we no longer have the context for this propaganda.  It’s hard for us to see that a myth about several Gods and Goddesses, in which the role of one Goddess has been reduced from an earlier no longer extant version, or in which she has been supplanted by another Goddess signals that the city she was the patron of got conquered or diminished in prestige.  However some of the time, we do know the context of mythological propaganda, indeed sometimes it is still potent as propaganda.

Such is the case with Christian supersessionism, the view that Christianity and Christians replace Judaism and the Jewish people, and that the remnants of the Jewish people remaining are representative of some pre-Christian ignorance and stubbornness.  This belief was created by early Christian theologians when the Roman Empire was still oppressing the Christians and the Jews, and primarily oppressed the Christians as a sect of Judaism.  Though it might seem surreal to us now, given the fact that modern Judaism in almost all forms is extremely against proselytizing and only accepts converts after a pretty arduous process, Judaism in ancient Rome did in fact proselytize and win converts, something that put Judaism in competition with early Christianity.  Early Christians had two goals:  Distinguish themselves from Judaism and establish themselves as a separate religion, and also legitimize themselves as a religious movement in the eyes of Gentile Romans.

Ancient Rome at the time was having something of a spiritual crisis.  Thousands of Roman residents, especially wealthy women, but also soldiers, were looking for something beyond the Roman state religion, something that gave them a sense of meaning and purpose.  Think the US and parts of Western Europe in the 1960s.  And much like the West in the 1960s, the religions that drew the most new followers were religions from the exotic East.  Of course their exotic East was a little different from what the hippies saw as the exotic East.  They were looking to Egypt, Persia, and Judea.  Yeah, Christianity was an exotic Eastern religion once upon a time.

Anyway, one of the key appeals of these eastern faiths was their supposed ancient wisdom and legitimacy as ancient faiths.  Christianity didn’t have this, Judaism did.  Christianity had to find other appeals and a different way of legitimizing themselves.  Supersessionism allowed them to piggyback on the age of Judasim while simultaneously delegitimizing Judaism.  Indeed much of the theological underpinnings of Christian anti-Judaism have their roots in this early competition between the two religions, and in the earlier intra-community battle for the leadership of the Jewish people after the fall of the second temple and rapid waning of priestly power.

Supersessionism and other antisemitic Christian myths remained useful to the early Church as it spread and became the state religion, by the time of the High Middle Ages and the popularization of courtly love, they were firmly established.  The religious and cultural philosophies developed and espoused by aristocratic troubadours in the South of France, grew out of this cultural background, as well as the historical times in which those troubadours lived.  They lived on the border with Muslim Spain, with its tradition of love poetry and transcendent romantic love.  They lived in a world where the first pre-Reformation stirrings of heresy talked about laypeople interpreting the bible for themselves, or not needing the bible and a priest to hear the word of God.

This is the world that gave birth to the three stages of religious or spiritual life that Joseph Campbell talks about in his work on Grail myths.  There is nothing more specifically Christian in all the world of Christian myth than the Grail myths.  They are entirely distinct from their pre-Christian Celtic and Germanic antecedents, heavily steeped in Christian philosophy and worldview.  However, in Campbell’s universalizing doctrine, the specific idea that the supersession of the Jewish people by the Catholic Church should itself be “completed” by the individual moving away from the formal teachings of the Church to a personal enlightenment based partly in romantic love and partly in sheer hedonism, becomes instead a metaphor for stages of human civilization and development (itself an obnoxiously racist Victorian notion).  It gets decontextualized and universalized.

In short, it stops mattering that this idea, this story, is a fundamentally Western Christian one, because all myths are universal.  It doesn’t even matter that this is a blatantly anti-Jewish idea, because the anti-Jewishness doesn’t matter.  Any “less enlightened” group could be substituted for the Jews (and this itself isn’t antisemitic at all, I’m sure).  It doesn’t matter that the piece of media one is examining was written and directed entirely by Jewish people.  It’s a universal metaphor after all.

And this is how Joseph Campbell’s monomyth-style cultural imperialism leads to comparing a villainous character who leads an organization deliberately written and designed by the movie’s Jewish writers and directors to be space Nazis, to the Jewish people.

That his work is used in this spectacular a display of antisemitism would not surprise or horrify Campbell, as he was a noted antisemite and cryptofascist as well as a generally racist orientalist hack: [Link].  However, this assumption that Jewish filmmakers, or Cambodian filmmakers, or Sudanese filmmakers, or not even filmmakers, but people in general, would hold a Western Christian worldview is not unique to Campbell’s followers or to people who take it to the appalling conclusion I talk about above.  It’s embedded in so much media criticism.  I face the assumption that I as a Jew hold a fundamentally Christian worldview every day talking to people.  And somehow it always seems to lead to the assumption that Jews buy into antisemitic Christian myth.

[irenenorth]

New Post has been published on Irene North

New Post has been published on http://www.irenenorth.com/writings/2017/02/i-am-not-your-enemy/

I am not your enemy

On Friday night, Donald Trump tweeted, once again, about his disdain for the media.

The FAKE NEWS media (failing @nytimes, @NBCNews, @ABC, @CBS, @CNN) is not my enemy, it is the enemy of the American People!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 17, 2017

My twitter feed filled soon after with cases of journalists who are not the enemy. Journalist Lauren Wolfe pointed out countries, such as Russia, Burma and Venezuela where the media has been declared enemies of the state.

For speaking out, speaking up, speaking the truth, Wolfe was soon targeted.

Let's be clear: I am being targeted by #antisemitic #misogynist #Trump supporters because I spoke up about freedom of the #press & democracy

— Lauren Wolfe (@Wolfe321) February 18, 2017

In addition to seeing the faces of the journalists who have died doing their job, Phil Williams tweeted a powerful photograph from the newseum.

This is the @Newseum's Journalists Memorial, listing the 2,291 individuals who have died around the world reporting the news #NotTheEnemy pic.twitter.com/FazzRTTQyL

— Phil Williams (@NC5PhilWilliams) February 18, 2017

At the 2014 Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) International Press Freedom Awards, Sandra Mims Rowe, CPJ’s chairman of the board said, “Those who are threatened by information believe that silencing journalists will prevent the global community from knowing what’s happening inside a given country.”

Columnist Bret Stephens spoke at the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture this week about intellectual integrity in the age of Donald Trump.

When you work at The Wall Street Journal, the coins of the realm are truth and trust – the latter flowing exclusively from the former. When you read a story in the Journal, you do so with the assurance that immense reportorial and editorial effort has been expended to ensure that what you read is factual.

Not probably factual. Not partially factual. Not alternatively factual. I mean fundamentally, comprehensively and exclusively factual. And therefore trustworthy.

This is how we operate. This is how Danny operated. This is how he died, losing his life in an effort to nail down a story.

We were supposed to be different. Freedom of the press was so important to a working democracy, it was placed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But our president believes I am his enemy and an enemy to the American people.

Like Stephens said, we have a responsibility to separate truth from falsehood. It doesn’t matter if it’s a local person or the president of the United States. It is unethical to do otherwise.

If you do not like the facts, that is not the problem of journalism. If you disagree, it is not fake news. If you don’t like a story, it is not your right to demand a journalist be fired.

For the three years I wrote a column at the Star-Herald. There was usually someone yelling for me to be fired for what I wrote. Their did not like what I wrote and thought I should not be allowed write anything non-conservative in a conservative community. They could not refute the facts I presented and, instead, turned to Ad hominem attacks.

If the president, or anyone else, accuses a media company as being fake news, ask yourself, why?

When the White House tries to delegitimize a media organization by calling it fake news and propping up those who the president favors and who will make him look good, you are watching propaganda in action.

Instead of saying a paper is too liberal and not objective all the time, then having a conversation about the issue, they become fake news and a failing paper. Repeat it often enough and people will believe it without checking.

People want to believe. They want to believe the person they vote for isn’t a vile human being who has the ability to destroy the country they love. So they rationalize his actions, scrutinize his words, look for some kind of meaning to assure themselves they made the right decision.

The same Republicans I know who believed Bill Clinton to be a disgusting human being, found nothing wrong with rape allegations from Ivanka Trump during her divorce from Donald Trump.

I have spoke to Republicans in Scottsbluff and Gering who see nothing wrong with a man who freely admits he can “grab women by the pussy” if he wants or walk up to a woman and kiss her simply because he’s rich and can get away with it.

Republicans I know locally rationalize these stories and refuse to admit the person they voted for might not be as he presents himself.

Our politicians hem and haw when questioned about despicable behavior of others. If there is something to gain, they will do whatever is necessary to keep their own meager power.

Yet, the media is the one who is the scourge. We are vilified for reporting the truth. If journalists do not present the truth, your news is nothing more than propaganda to make whoever is in power look good.

“We each have our obligations to see what’s in front of one’s noses, whether we’re reporters, columnists, or anything else. This is the essence of intellectual integrity,” Stephens said.

We look at the facts, regardless of opinion. We speak the truth, “irrespective of what it means for our popularity or influence.”

I may disagree with you. But I am not your enemy. Daniel Pearl died for the truth. I hope our country never reaches that point. If we do, will you be there by my side or willfully holding a knife at my throat?