Baghra: “What Are You Doing With The Tailor Girl?”

i don't even know how to rationalize the amount of hate i got exactly one year ago. i can't understand people gleefully rejoicing in the murder of my friends. i can't make sense of that, how deep-rooted some people hate is that they see an israeli mourn and decide to laugh in their faces. a normal person would just leave me alone but antisemitism makes y’all stupid and you cant help it. less than an hour into the massacrare and people were talking about “context” and “nuance” in my inbox. i didn’t just lose my friends a year ago, a thing that is terrible enough on its own, i feel like i’ve also lost my innocence when it came to just just how massive antisemitism is and how blind most people are to the fact that they are antisemites. how most people don’t think twice about it. how can they be antisemites? they never even met a jew, so how could they hate us. they’re just anti-zionist, anti-israel, pro-palestinian. whatever helps them sleep at night, thinking they’re punching nazis through the computer screen, they’re on the good side of history. maybe they rationalized it but i cant, i’ll never understand.

“For a thousand years the scapegoat of choice in Europe and the Middle East has been the Jews. They were the most conspicuous outsiders: non-Christian in a Christian Europe, non-Muslim outsiders in an Islamic Middle East. But this chapter is not primarily about antisemitism. It is about what gives rise to it. Antisemitism is only contingently about Jews. Jews are its victims but they are not its cause. The cause is conflict within a culture. It is the potential internal violence that, if expressed, has the power to destroy a society. Recall Girard’s point: the scapegoat is the mechanism by which a society deflects violence away from itself by focusing it on an external victim. Hence, wherever you find obsessive, irrational, murderous antisemitism, there you will find a culture so internally split and fractured that if its members stopped killing Jews they would start killing one another. That is what happened in Europe in the seventeenth century and again in two world wars in the twentieth, and what is happening today in Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and other war-torn regions in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. To understand the emergence of the Jew-as-scapegoat we must focus on certain key historic moments. The first is 1095 when Pope Urban II delivered his historic call for the First Crusade. In 1096 some of the Crusaders, on their way to liberate the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in northern Europe: in Cologne, Worms, and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than be seized by the mob and forcibly converted to Christianity. It was a traumatizing moment for European Jewry, and the portent of worse to come. From this point onwards Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen by many not as human beings at all but as a malevolent force, as an evil presence, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the host, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the fourteenth century cost many millions of lives. It was an age in which Jews lived in fear. That period added to the vocabulary of the West such ideas as public disputation, book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fé, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity it ranks among one of the most sustained chronicles of hatred in history… …Eventually Europe moved on, but not before two events that were to have significant consequences centuries later. The first took place in Spain, where, under threat of persecution, Jews had been living in fear from 1391, Spain’s Kristallnacht when synagogues were burned and Jews massacred, until their expulsion in 1492. Many, under threat, had converted. Some were suspected of maintaining Jewish practice in private and became victims of the Inquisition. Others, though, embraced the new faith and achieved positions of prominence in Spanish society. It was then that a new phenomenon appeared: the persistence of prejudice after its overt cause had been removed. The ‘new’ Christians were still hated by some, now not for their religion but for their race. Legislation was introduced to protect Limpieza de sangre, ‘purity of blood’. The first such statue appeared in Toledo in 1449. Originally opposed by the Church, it received the approval of Pope Alexander VI in 1496 and lasted well into the nineteenth century. It was the first appearance in history of the racial antisemitism that would flow through mainland Europe four and a half centuries later. The second significant development was Martin Luther. Initially favorably disposed to Jews, he believed that the reason they had not converted was the ineptitude and cruelty of the Catholic Church. Approached with love, he thought they would become Christians en masse. When they did not, his anger knew almost no bounds. In 1543 he published a pamphlet entitled On the Jews and their Lies that became a classic in the literature of hate. Synagogues should be burned. Jewish homes should be destroyed. Jews should be made to live in a single room or stable to know that they were no more than ‘miserable captives’. Their prayer books and Talmuds should be confiscated and their rabbis forbidden to teach. They should be forbidden to travel and given no legal protection until the world was rid of what he called 'our plague, pestilence, and misfortune’. The pamphlet was reprinted several times during the Nazi era, and its suggestions paralleled by the Nuremberg laws. Luther’s outburst ensured that hostility to the Jews would persist after the Reformation, and it left a lasting impression in countries where Lutheranism held sway. The striking Christian exception was John Calvin, who held the Hebrew Bible in high regard and was less inclined than most to denigrate the Jews. This had a lasting effect on Holland in the sixteenth century and England in the seventeenth, as well as on the Pilgrim Fathers in America. These were among the first places to develop religious liberty. It is at this point that the story takes a remarkable and tragic twist. Western Europe in the eighteenth century turned to the Enlightenment in the belief that reason could overcome the prejudices of the past. In the nineteenth century this was followed by Emancipation, through which minority religious groups, among them the Jews, were granted civil rights in the new nation states, held together not as in the past by religion but by citizenship and civil law. Yet prejudice persisted, as it had done in post-expulsion Spain. Among its practitioners were some of Europe’s leading minds. Voltaire called Jews 'an ignorant and barbarous people, who have long united the most sordid avarice with the most detestable superstition and the most invincible hatred for every people by who they are tolerated and enriched.’ He added, generously, 'Still, we ought not to burn them.’ Immanuel Kant spoke of Jews as 'the vampires of society’, and called for 'the euthanasia of Judaism’. Georg Hegel saw Jews and Judaism as paradigms of a 'slave morality’, unable to conceive or practice a religion of love. By rejecting Christianity, Jews had been stranded by history and were left as a 'fossil nation’, a 'ghost-race’… …Friedrich Nietzsche castigated Judaism as the 'falsification’ of all natural values. His great originality is that, instead of criticizing Jews for rejecting Christianity, he blamed them for having given birth to it in the first place. Anyone who blames religion for creating hate should consider these examples…philosophical antisemitism from Voltaire to Heidegger is a little-known phenomenon but a devastating one. As European culture became secularized and religious anti-Judaism mutated into racial antisemitism, the consequences were lethal. Christians could work for the conversion of the Jews, because you can change your religion. But you cannot change your blood or your genes. Antisemites could therefore only work for the elimination of the Jews. The result was the Holocaust.”

— Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks. New York: Penguin Random House LLC, 2015. (p. 76-80). (via eshusplayground)

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cy6hjeeyq4i/?igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

said this in a comment but as a non ashki jew, the way y’all (gentiles) talk abt ashkenazi jews is really fucking weird. you’re not being a savior to non ashkenazi jews or to black and brown jews (some of whom are ashkenazi) by painting ashkenazi jews as this nefarious group of elites plotting against everyone. the antisemitism doesn’t cancel out just because you’re targeting the group you perceive to be the “white ones.”

Just to remind you, this is the wonderful record that UNRWA schools have, when it comes to the education they provide to Palestinian kids (and we can all figure out what it translates into):

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

Today is October 7th. One year ago today, Hamas committed a massacre, taking hundreds of hostages, committing countless rapes, and killing over a thousand people, the single greatest Jewish loss of life in one day since the Holocaust.

Today is a day of mourning, of the loss of the dead and fear for the captives, but also of mourning for the world we thought we lived in on October 6. The bodies weren't cold before our neighbors, sometimes even our friends were out in the streets and online celebrating these murders and kidnappings, calling them resistance, calling them noble, calling these murders, rapes, and kidnappings, righteous. Days before Israel responded, Hamas' supporters in the US, Europe, Australia, all around the world, were in the streets, celebrating Jewish death and Jewish pain.

I want to say that again. Days before Israel did anything in response, Hamas' supporters around the world were already in the streets. And they have stayed in the streets ever since. No matter how many people I keep seeing claiming that they're marching for peace, the simple fact that they were out there chearing before Israel responded, belies those claims.

And what I never hear a single gentile talk about, is that last year, October 7 fell on a Jewish holiday, Simchat Torah, a day of dancing, and joy, of life and celebration. It's my mother's favorite holiday. I don't know a single Jew who is going to be up to celebrating this Simchat Torah. But we will try, because we have to.

So today we are mourning. And if that makes you angry, that's your problem.

i’m really upset by the amount of goyim that have the desire to convert but are ardently ‘antizionist’ to the point of excluding any perceived zionists.

i love when people convert. member of the tribe! many of my irl friends and mutuals are jews that converted!!

but it breaks my heart that there are people out there that want to cherry pick their own idea of my religion and people.

i didn’t get to choose. i was born into jewishness with family already in israel. israel as a concept is intertwined with my literal existence, every prayer i learned from birth is in hebrew, the shema begins with a call for israel, my uncle is an israeli rabbi, and i go by my hebrew name with a lot of my family and shul.

at this point in time, zionism is agreeing that the jewish people have a right to self determination in their ancestral land. which is israel. it is still the very same israel my family has been yearning for since before it was ever renamed to Palestine.

please don’t expect to come into my home, decide it’s also yours, then pretend like i don’t exist because i don’t fit your idea of it.

if you refuse to listen to all jews, you will never be one of us.

It’s maddening to find out that the scholar who first developed the idea that “Zionism is Settler Colonialism”, Fayez Sayegh, was a member of the Syrian Nazi Party during and immediately after the Holocaust, was an active participant in the Red Scare, using it to demonize Israel as a manifestation of a Global Communist Threat™️ through the height of the Cold War (true to his Nazi roots, accusing Israel of Judeo-Bolshevism) before switching to a Colonialism narrative when Post-Colonialism came in vogue in the 60s. And yet, the people I hear parroting the talking points of this anti-Communist, Ultranationalist Fascist-turned-scholar are the people who are constantly talking about how Liberal Progressives aren’t Communist enough and actually enemies because “Liberals will always side with Fascists”. Maddening.

If you’ve ever noticed how the “Zionism = Settler Colonialism” narrative eerily shares the core components of the far right’s Replacement Theory (that there are 1. Jews 2. conspiring to invade a given place and 3. replace the population with Jews), this is why; it’s because the idea that Zionism is Settler Colonialism came from a literal Nazi.

It is very literally Nazi propaganda.