Friday, June 07, 2019
From Ian:
John Podhoretz: De Blasio’s whitewashing on anti-Semitism
John Podhoretz: De Blasio’s whitewashing on anti-Semitism
According to a recent report by the New York Police Department, the city has seen an 82-percent increase in anti-Semitic hate crimes—which make up more than half of all hate crimes— since last year, despite a reduction in violent crime overall. Most of the violent incidents are attacks on Orthodox Jews by African-American men. But in a press conference this week, New York’s Mayor Bill de Blasio emphasized that, regarding attacks on Jews, “the violent threat, the threat that is ideological, is very much from the right.” John Podhoretz comments:David Collier: The day YouTube banned (and restored) my channel
No rational person would argue that Jew-hatred has not been and does not continue to be a feature of the extreme right. It is, as the lone monsters who staged the assaults on Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Synagogue and the Chabad House in Poway, California made clear in their Internet postings. But no person other than a fool . . . would simply erase left-wing anti-Semitism and Muslim anti-Semitism and act as if they didn’t and don’t exist.
The Soviet Union was an institutionally anti-Semitic regime, as were most of its satellites and puppets before the fall of the Berlin Wall. . . . The earliest and most dedicated Palestinian nationalists, who vowed to throw the Jewish people into the sea, were not Islamists but secular radicals like Yasir Arafat and George Habash, a Marxist-Leninist whose particular specialty was hijacking planes. The 2015 anti-Semitic attacks in Paris, to which de Blasio bizarrely alluded, weren’t staged by right-wing Europeans following in the footsteps of the Nazis. They were attacks by Muslims who had aligned themselves with the Islamic State. . . .
[I]n New York City, there have been 110 anti-Semitic hate crimes this year out of 164 such crimes in total. Not a one of them, so far as I can tell, was committed by a man in a MAGA hat.
De Blasio spoke commendably at the same press conference about how the present hatred of Jews makes the existence of the Jewish state a matter of vital importance. But to speak as though the progressivism he claims to represent has nothing for which it needs to account when it comes to the rise of anti-Semitic acts is, quite simply, an act of shameful ideological whitewashing.
But Holocaust denial is okayMelanie Phillips: Jewish dismay increases after the Peterborough by-election
In it’s statement, YouTube said that it was banning Holocaust denial. Yet a simple search for ‘H-o-l-o-h-o-a-x’, the most basic way to find such material, still returns material. Here is David Irving, ‘debunking the Holocaust in 3 minutes‘. Elsewhere, you can learn about how ‘wonderful’ the treatment of the camp inmates was in this Holocaust denial video. The channel behind it has been freely peddling hate on the platform for four years.
Speeches by Jew-hating Holocaust denier Eustace Mullins are widely available, but if his American accent puts you off and you seek a more authentic Nazi accent, there is always Ernst Zundel. You can even watch him giving a ‘stark warning‘ to Jewish people. The channel that uploaded the Zundel video appears to have spreading anti-Jewish hate on YouTube for over six years.
There is little point linking to hundreds of such videos that I quickly found, and this isn’t even the tip of the iceberg. Brother Nathaneal isn’t a hate-preacher? He is okay – but I am not? And Rothschild Conspiracy? The very pillars of Rothschild Conspiracy rewrite history in order to place the blame for WW1 & WW2 at the feet of the Jewish people. What is that, if not an attempt to cleanse the Nazis, turning the Germans into innocent people that the evil Jews provoked. There are 1000s if not 10000s of such videos on the platform.
I went back to my 2018 Palestine Live report, which listed dozens of hard-core videos spreading hate, to see how many have been removed. Sadly, far too many of these videos are still live, years after they were originally uploaded.
Generally speaking, those trying to avoid capture, frequently change names and locations in order to continue doing whatever they are doing for as long as they can. That does not seem neccessary on YouTube. There are channels who have been openly peddling hate for a decade. YouTube may talk about fighting Holocaust denial and Jew-hatred but it still seems as if only antisemitism campaigners and historians really have to be concerned by the new crackdown.
Even worse, however, than the Labour party’s indifference towards or connivance with the Jewish-conspiracy ravings in its ranks is the attitude of the British public. For the by-election result shows that the stench of antisemitism is failing to repel the voters. Either they don’t care or, worse, they may actually be sympathetic – perhaps because they don’t like what they perceive as people ganging up on someone. That’s a very British thing.
And heaven help us, too many do view the antisemitism furore as the Jews ganging up on Jeremy Corbyn. How can they possibly believe that, you may ask, given the unambiguous hatred, fear and loathing of the Jews that party members are either directly expressing or, in their supposed myopia or absent-mindedness, appearing to endorse?
The answer is probably that, in addition to those who actually do believe this poison, there are many who don’t notice it to be poison. And that’s because too many don’t think antisemitism is unambiguously bad.
They know nothing about the Jewish people or their history, nothing about the unique characteristics and historic reach of anti-Jewish hatred, nothing about the moral sickness of any society that fails to stamp it out. They don’t understand why the Jews always seem be going on and on about it. Doesn’t this mean, they ask themselves, that they must be doing something bad to attract so much dislike?
To them, these antisemitic remarks are just background noise, no different from all the other insults and aggression and vile outbursts that have now come to define public debate and which they mainly just tune out. Many have never even met a Jew. So why should they care about them any more than anyone else?
Before yesterday, British Jews could hardly have been in any greater dismay about the toleration of Jew-bashing on the left. The Peterborough by-election will have increased it, however, still further.
