Biden administration unveils new actions to combat antisemitism on college campuses
Biden administration unveils new actions to combat antisemitism on college campuses
They conflate antisemitism with anti-Zionism & anti-crimes against humanity in order to trample on people’s first amendment rights to speech & assembly.
Imagine being a Jewish student and having to be asked like 5x a day about the Palestinian/Israeli conflict as of you have anything to do with it.
Yeah that’s gotta suck, but also imagine being a Jewish student protesting Zionism and genocide and being called antisemitic for partaking in a Jewish political stance that predates the modern nation of Israel.
We absolutely need to be fighting antisemitism, I’m very scared for my Jewish friends and loved ones. But we can’t do it by conflating anti-Zionism with antisemitism. And we especially can’t do it by conflating calls for Israel to display military restraint with antisemitism. Israel is not Judaism, it is not the international community of Jewish people, and it doesn’t hold authority over either group.
And I also worry about Arabic and Muslim students and citizens. Much like our Jewish neighbors they too don’t have a say in this conflict and deserve and need protection. And I’m not seeing any similar fights from the government for them and that concerns me.
ETA: this position was influenced by some recent conversations with Jewish friends who are very concerned with the silencing of Jewish calls for peace.
The ultimate irony: zionism was the product of antisemitism.
See: "Der Judenstaat" and the life of Theodor Herzl.
That doesn’t sound fun, and I imagine I’d be pretty pissed off at Zionists right now.
saw video of an IDF troop or Israeli cop (not sure which) choke-slamming an anti-Zionist Orthodox Jewish man for holding a Palestinian flag.
when I say Zionism is antisemitic, it's based on what I've seen and what I've heard from Jewish people.
the guy got right back up, put his kippah back on, picked up the flag and got in the aggressor's face. Braver than I'd be.
If you can’t protest in support of innocent civilians going through an humanitarian crisis then how is the US different from the authoritarian police state fantasy that so many Americans love to project onto places like China or North Korea? What good is your freedom if you can only exercise it when it doesn’t inconvenience the state?
There is no argument that supporting innocent people is hate speech. If there’s no avenue to publicly support Palestinian victims of war then this is literally oppression of political speech by the state. It’s the only thing that the first amendment is supposed to protect and no one in power can even be bothered to pretend that this is a problem.
This is going to radicalize some folks and I am here for it.
There is much conflation going on, much of it intentional and sinister, but antisemitism does have a specific meaning & etymology pertaining to Jews, according to Wikipedia:
Due to the root word Semite, the term is prone to being invoked as a misnomer by those who interpret it as referring to racist hatred directed at all "Semitic people" (i.e., those who speak Semitic languages, such as Arabs, Assyrians, and Arameans). This usage is erroneous; the compound word antisemitismus (lit. 'antisemitism') was first used in print in Germany in 1879 as a "scientific-sounding term" for Judenhass (lit. 'Jew-hatred'), and it has since been used to refer to anti-Jewish sentiment alone.
I mean, if we're being pedantic Semite is an ethnic group and since Israel opens citizenship to anyone who is just religiously Jewish and very few people choose to immigrate to Palestine...
It's hard to look at the two countries and say that the Antisemitic group isn't the one committing human rights abuses and war crimes against the country overwhelming made up of Sematic people.
Israel just constantly tries to conflate religion and ethnic groups. I tried to find the racial breakdown of Israel, all I could find was it broken down by religion
Like, if someone with 0% Jewish heritage converts and move to Israel, they're recorded as ethnically Jewish. And supporters of Israel say that justifies them seizing land from the people whose families have lived there for centuries
No, the term was adopted by Jew-haters in Germany because it sounded more "scientific" than the older term Judenhass (Jewhate). Recall, many people once believed that the idea of "race" was a scientific explanation for differences among peoples. They believed that anthropology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology would back up their local cultural prejudices.
However, the German antisemites never cared about Arabs, Ethiopians, or other Semitic-speaking peoples. It was always about Jews: they wanted support for the political position that Europe's Jews were a foreign corrupting influence who should be expelled or killed. "Antisemitismus" was a thin façade of bad social science over a continuation of the same Jewhate that Martin Luther and medieval passion-plays had expressed.
I'm pretty sure that using the term "Semite" in any other context than the modern interpretation of "antisemitic", meaining prejudice against Jews, stopped being a thing roughly around the same time that we stopped treating the bible as an authority on the classification of human races. Same with Hamites and Japhetites.
"Semitic languages" are a language family that includes Hebrew, Arabic, Aramaic, and Amharic.
However the notion of a "Semitic race" is pseudoscience.
This is an intellectually disingenuous argument that tries to sound like a clever gotcha, instead it's just antisemitic in and of itself.
The departments of Justice and Homeland Security are partnering with campus law enforcement to track hate-related threats and provide federal resources to schools, according to the plan, which was shared exclusively with NBC News.
So pretty much doing what they were already doing. Just being more proactive against people that were considering violence.
I don't think this is a wrong measure. We are not ruled by lynch mobs, hunting witches.
People should be logical and rational against such hurtful opinions, but I think death against such individual crosses a line of morals that just hurts any productive solutions we could come up with.
Israelites and appropriating semitic cultures as their own, name a more iconic duo.
No, the term "antisemitism" was not coined by Israelis. It was adopted by Jew-haters in Germany because it sounded more "scientific" than the older term Judenhass (Jewhate). Recall, many people once believed that the idea of "race" was a scientific explanation for differences among peoples. They believed that anthropology, linguistics, and evolutionary biology would back up their local cultural prejudices.
However, the German antisemites never cared about Arabs, Ethiopians, or other Semitic-speaking peoples. It was always about Jews: they wanted support for the political position that Europe's Jews were a foreign corrupting influence who should be expelled or killed. "Antisemitismus" was a thin façade of bad social science over a continuation of the same Jewhate that Martin Luther and medieval passion-plays had expressed.
Thanks for the clarification!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
WASHINGTON — The Biden administration is unveiling new actions Monday to combat antisemitism on college campuses after an “alarming” uptick in incidents since the Israel-Hamas war started in early October.
The departments of Justice and Homeland Security are partnering with campus law enforcement to track hate-related threats and provide federal resources to schools, according to the plan, which was shared exclusively with NBC News.
Second gentleman Doug Emhoff and Education Secretary Miguel Cardona will meet with leading Jewish organizations to discuss the issue of growing antisemitism at colleges Monday, the official said.
Later this week, Cardona and White House domestic policy adviser Neera Tanden will visit a college campus and hold a roundtable with Jewish students.
Just last month, two weeks before the Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the administration rolled out additional actions to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia more broadly across several federal agencies, citing Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
The White House has also gone after former President Donald Trump — who is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — over his push for an expanded travel ban that would affect many people in Muslim nations, calling it “revolting and disgusting.”
The original article contains 864 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!
Theyre also ignoring the very real hate crimes being perpetrated against Palestinian-Americans, like the little boy that was stabbed to death by his racist landlord.
BUT DO YOU CONDEMN HAMAS???
This condemnation thing is super dumb. How does terror, murder and using civilians as shields need to be explicitly comdenmed?! That's one of the things where condemnation is a given until stated otherwise. But to create a nice and clean-cut narrative, someone who is against Israel's campaign against civilians hast to be explicitly against Hamas or they must be pro Hamas... Which is bullshit. I talk about Hamas less because there is nothing to discuss, no opinions to share. No sane person can be on the side of fucking Hamas.
They didn't ignore that, in fact Biden gave a speech condemning it.
Turns out stabbing children is already illegal, so what else needs to be done other than throw the murderer in prison for life.
Uh huh, and hate-related antisemitic threats were also already illegal, so why does Biden need to pledge additional action? It certainly seems like one is taking precedence over the other.
I'm not saying both forms of hate here are getting the exact same amount of attention, but do read the article please:
"In recent days, White House officials have increased their outreach. Biden called the family of a 6-year-old Palestinian American boy who was murdered in what authorities are calling a hate crime, and White House aides have reached out to Muslim, Arab and Palestinian American elected officials across the country."
Palestinian-Americans get thoughts and prayers, Jewish Americans get extra protection from the god damn FBI.
I want to see some fucking action. Words are words, and until Biden does literally anything I'll assume he's ignoring it.