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Ukraine Open Thread 2022-201
Only for news & views directly related to the Ukraine conflict.
The current open thread for other issues is here.
Please stick to the topic. Contribute facts. Do not attack other commentators.
Zelensky's lies about the Ukrainian missile strike in Poland have damaged his credibility.
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We can hope that the media will now be more careful when they report of all the other lies Zelensky and his team are uttering on a daily base.
Posted by: sean the leprechaun | Nov 18 2022 13:37 utc | 311
Thanks for splitting hairs…I appreciate the attention to detail. Your post reminded me of Kristofferson’s prolific songwriting for himself and others, and I didn’t know that he wrote “Me and Bobby McGee”.
Re: Antisemitism
Tough call for b to make as a free speech advocate. Where is the line drawn? I might draw the line differently were I in charge of my own blog with posters from around the world commenting widely, but that’s not happening. Below is a long quotation from a recent essay, “The Cudgel of Antisemitism”, by Sam Kriss that was just posted on Greenwald’s Substack – the entire article (linked below) is worth reading:
“Here is a story about antisemitism on the British left. Last May, Israel fought a brief war in the Gaza strip: over ten days they destroyed forty schools, four hospitals, and nearly a thousand buildings; they also snuffed out around 250 human lives. I went to a protest against the war in central London, not because I really thought it could change anything, but out of the usual obscure sense of duty and guilt. It was a fun day out. There were thousands of us there, filling up the streets; I kept running into people I knew. Most of them were—like me—Jewish. Afterwards, I discovered that the protest had actually, according to much of the press, been an orgy of antisemitic hate. Mostly, this hate took the form of placards comparing Netanyahu to Hitler: these protesters didn’t get the memo that there is a list of political leaders it’s acceptable to compare to Hitler, and while it’s fairly long, Netanyahu’s name isn’t on it.
Probably the most revealing spark of outrage that day concerned a large inflatable puppet that appeared behind the former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn as he gave a speech. The effigy depicted a man wearing an Arab headdress, with curly devil horns, glowing red eyes, and a large, prominent, hooked nose. This was Khalifa bin Zayed bin Sultan al Nahyan, Sheikh of Abu Dhabi and President of the United Arab Emirates: the previous year, Sheikh Khalifa had normalised relations between the UAE and Israel, so now the protesters were clearly depicting him as a monstrous Jew, using all the classic tropes of age-old antisemitism.
The horns: for centuries Jews were depicted as something not quite human, as animals or demons. Michelangelo’s sculpture of Moses gave him a pair of goatish horns; in 1262 an ecclesiastical synod in Vienna ordered all Jews to wear a horned hat. The bloodstained hands: all those libels about Jews drinking Christian blood, kidnapping children to consume their blood, baking the blood into our matzos. The nose hardly needs explaining. Antisemitism was on the march in London, and once again Corbyn was associating himself with it; he had plopped himself in front of “the world’s most racist 10 foot tall inflatable” and said nothing. “He should be expelled from the Labour Party immediately. Not suspended. Expelled. As should any other Labour MP or member who attended.”
The truth was a little more prosaic, but nobody bothered correcting themselves. The effigy had actually been made for a much earlier protest against the UAE’s involvement in the Saudi war in Yemen. They had given Sheikh Khalifa bloodstained hands because his forces were killing Yemeni civilians. They’d given him devil horns because they didn’t like him and devils are generally considered to be bad. And as for the nose—well, Jews and Arabs are brothers, and Khalifa bin Zayed happened to have a large, prominent, hooked nose. That was all. As it turns out, most people are more concerned with the reality of the present than the symbols of the thirteenth century.
This doesn’t mean that there was no antisemitism at the march. In fact, there was: I witnessed it myself. Near the Israeli embassy, a group of young men had jumped up onto the wall around the Royal Garden Hotel, and one of them was screaming into a megaphone. “Fuck Israel!” he yelled, and a portion of the crowd chanted “fuck Israel!”in response. “Fuck the Zionists!” he yelled, and the crowd repeated that too. And then, hoarser than ever: “Fuck the Jews!”
And there it was. There is, famously, a line between anti-Zionism and antisemitism. People have argued about exactly where that line is, but this man hadn’t just crossed it; he’d sped right over the thing as if it wasn’t even there. As statements of prejudice go, ‘fuck the Jews’ is pretty unambiguous. How did this make me feel? Not great! I was there in solidarity, and nothing wounds your narcissism more than having a nice gift thrown back in your face. For a moment, I felt very, very exposed. So maybe I should have done something about it. Maybe I should have edged my way through the crowd, got up close to the man with the megaphone, and snapped a photo of him. Spread it online: let’s find out his name, let’s find out his address. Does he have a job? Not any more! Or maybe he’s a student. We can change that. I could have dedicated myself to getting this man arrested and thrown in prison. The necessary laws are on the books. I could have made the whole thing about me, and my hurt feelings, rather than the people being bombed hundreds of miles away. But it’s hard to imagine how any this would have convinced the man with the megaphone that he was actually wrong about the Jews, that we’re not so bad after all.
It’s possible I’m being cowardly here; maybe I’m one of those Jews who would have walked meekly into the gas chambers. Luckily, there are braver people out there, people who will fiercely stand up to racism whenever they encounter it. Stephen Pollard is one of the leading figures in the British Jewish community: a kind of slimy, sentient ball of gefilte fish who was editor-in-chief of the Jewish Chronicle for over a decade and is still a frequent columnist across the British media. Around the same time I had my run-in with racism, he was writing about his own upsetting discovery: he had found that there was someone on Twitter who didn’t particularly like him. This, obviously, was antisemitism: nobody could dislike Stephen Pollard without being a bigot. His response was a stunning show of courage in the face of hatred: he found out where this person worked and “wrote to the company’s chairman, alerting him to his employee’s behaviour.” A few weeks later, the CEO phoned Pollard up to tell him that the employee was no longer working under his roof. “A man I believe to be a Jew hater,” Pollard concluded, “has suffered the consequences of his bigotry. That is what matters.”
Mr Pollard is, of course, an outspoken critic of cancel culture.”
The Cudgel of Antisemitism
Posted by: Objective Observer | Nov 18 2022 14:56 utc | 331
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