David Badiel - Jews Don't Count. Shocked

[Everanewbie]

AIBU to be disappointed and upset at the blindspot for antisemitism that was highlighted in last night's excellent documentary? The Leigh Francis part was especially revealing to me. The (quite correct) groveling apologies for the Michael Jackson, Craig David and Mel B characters were a contrast to the defining silence on the David Badiel character.

What is more, the reaction from the left-wing commentators (Owen Jones, et al) on twitter seem to suggest that Badiel says other racism doesn't exist, which feels like a deliberate and willful misrepresentation.

@FloresApparuerunt Thank you :) It's really stressful seeing it all laid bare here.

The Left really has quite a history of antisemitism. I don't believe that antisemitism and anti-Zionism are synonyms, but anti-Zionism has been a very convenient cloak for it, for some people. There's also sometimes what I feel is a very peculiarly British slant to it, very condescending I think in light of British colonial history. Very "you people should know better." I've encountered North American leftists who can slide into antisemitism but there's a different tone to it that I can't quite explain.

He is absolutely right! I remember as a kid that El Al check-in/airline counters had several extra layers of protection which only now is slowly becoming the norm in air travel. My DM said to me that sooner or later this would be a thing of the past. Nope! It got worse for Jewish people in Europe recently with for example bloody deadly attacks in France. I actually feel a lot safer now I have taken on DH's surname, ditto for my kids, as my maiden name was such a giveaway. My parents were refugees as children. We grew up with having our travel documents and emergency cash always in reach. As small kids, we also had some coats with jewellery and cash sewn into them. The legacy of third generation after the Holocaust. It has become almost cool to be anti-Semitic in liberal and Labour circles. Some of the stuff bandied about on social media could be a remake of Goebbels' Jud Süß!

@antelopevalley i think it’s this

www.thejc.com/news/news/david-baddiel-apologises-after-being-accused-of-hypocrisy-after-footage-of-gypsy-joke-surfaces-6SP2fVvPmzyjCyahghPOuq?reloadTime=1668556800011

@knitnerd90 Yes, "the Zionists" the "Zios" or words to that effect. We know who they mean. And we also know when they genuinely mean the Israeli govt. I first encountered decades ago when I was a member of the Scottish Socialist Party, but to be honest it wasn't too prevalent then and was just the odd individual, and certainly not to the extent it is now. It's mainstream in Britain now.

The 'you people should know better' has actually been used on this thread (paraphrased).

This is actually NOT true. There has been a lot of media reporting of this outrage.

It's true that some 'anti-racist' people seem to downplay racism against Jews; but I don't think this is happening in this case.

I would add, that the slogan 'it is anti-Zionism not anti-Semitism' was invented in Soviet Union, and used extensively for antisemitic campaigns.
So, they were so ani Zionist that they made Jews to emigrate to Israel.
Yet, the very same sentiments can be observed in sections of Labour Party....

@Grumpusaurus Yes, I actually noticed there's a post further up this thread where the poster said they were surprised at first when someone had mentioned the 'having the suitcases packed' thing. But it just makes sense to so many Jews. Because what happened to their families and the aftermath is still in living memory of the older generation, and they also know how it all started, in the beginning, before Hitler really got going with his plans!

My dad (a fervent leftwinger all his life, and someone who is extremely careful about passing judgement without strong evidence) was very resistant to acknowledging that Corbyn was personally antisemitic, until the moment when he made his sneering little 'joke' about the 'Zionists who don't understand English irony, despite living here all their lives'.

That was the moment for my dad, and I suspect many many other British Jews, where we recognised a sneer of slight disgust, condescension, contempt, racial othering, that we've all encountered so many times in our lives. That was where the mask really slipped and the underlying disgust, that disgust that's baked into European history, showed. Regardless of all the political arguments and the factions, there is this white middle-class British distaste for Jews - we are just a bit dirty, a bit coarse, a bit comical, a bit gross, a bit 'not quite the ticket'.

My ex's stepmother, a white British Christian, who would call him up to ask "can BloodandFire eat ham?" every time we went to visit them and she would make lunch.

Another ex's mother, same background, who would get my name wrong every time I phoned or visited - she would mix up my real first name (fairly Jewish but also used by non Jews) with a name far more commonly thought of as 'a Jewish name'.

Yes I agree with you and I've seen it reported quite a bit actually, right across the media. What I would say though, is some of the responses on social media to the reports have been along the lines of 'the jews/zios deserved it'.

Oh yes. It's a common euphemism when people obviously really mean the you-know-whats, yes, you've guessed it, the JOOOOOOOS! I think it was a term popularized in the Soviet Union. A successor to the term 'Rootless cosmopolitans', which also meant the guess-whos. And 'Zionists' in this sense is very common among conspiracy theorists of all sorts.

Strange post of Mamacattiva... Baddiel has never said or implied any such thing...

We have all grown up in the shadow of the Holocaust, knowing that we are the bits of the family that survived because we had the sense to 'get out in time'.

My grandparents left many relatives behind them in Poland and Ukraine - none of them survived the war.

We have all grown up knowing that the only reason we were able to be born was because our ancestors were sufficiently alert to recognise when Jew-hatred, always bubbling away beneath the surface, reaches a critical mass, and it's time to GTFO.

In 2018 I went with my dad to visit the town that his dad came from in eastern Poland, and I also visited Polin museum in Warsaw, which is the history of the Jews in Poland (amazing place). The 19th century antisemitic materials I saw there gave me a real shock -they were in many cases almost indistinguishable from the cartoons and tropes that were being shared in 2018 on Twitter and Facebook.

In 1906 there was a pogrom in my grandfather's home town - we saw the bullet holes in the walls of the houses, and photographs of the piles of corpses in a book that has been published about it. My family left shortly after that. And glad they did because during the war the family home was one of the houses that marked the edge of the ghetto in that town. The majority of the Jews remaining there were shot dead in the town cemetery - 3000 men, women and children were shot dead in one day. This is one of many thousands of similar stories.

Those that survived that massacre ended up in Madjanek and Treblinka, and died there. The town was at one point more than half Jewish. There are no Jews left there at all now.

It happened in Britain in the 12th century, in Spain and Portugal in the 15th, in Poland in the 19th, in Germany in the 20th, et cetera et cetera et bloody cetera. If we weren't on alert to look out for the signs that tell us it's time to pack our bags, none of us would be here. Which would clearly be preferable for a large number of non-Jews.

If Corbyn had become PM I know of many Jewish friends who were thinking very seriously about leaving the UK.

Michael Rosen (who actually knows Jeremy Corbyn well) has defended him many times, and has pointed out that Jeremy Corbyn was really only attacked because he supported Palestinians.

twitter.com/michaelrosenyes/status/1032638690194063360

Michael Rosen is spot on. He’s not the right kind of Jew though!

That is simply not true. How much antisemitism does Corbyn have to endorse for it to acknowledge?

Don't feed them @antelopevalley

Look up 'sealioning'

Xx

Good advice.

it blows my mind, really. I can't imagine going on to a thread in Black Mumsnetters, or Neurodiverse Mumsnetters, and telling a group of Black people, or ND people, over and over again, that they were wrong/lying/deliberately misleading about their own first-hand experiences that they were sharing.

I also can't imagine being so obsessed and so full of hatred for another minority group that I would pursue this for days on end, and in the face of so much objective, public established evidence to the contrary, that they were 'making it all up'.

In a way I suppose this is a good thing. I am glad not to be motivated and preoccupied by my dislike of a group of people to this extent. At the same time, the behaviour is so alien to me that it frankly scares the shit out of me.

I hadn't heard of 'sealioning' but I recognised it as soon as I read the description! No amount of evidence is ever enough and any exasperation is seized upon as unreasonableness, rudeness and a sign of an invalid argument.

This.

I imagine “sealioning” as akin to the old adages about never playing Chess with a pigeon or wrestling with a pig?

Yes, pretty much 👍

The thing for me (well, one of the things for me) is that someone who is British and Jewish, perhaps for many generations, is expected to be more responsible for the conduct of the government of Israel than we are for our own Parliament, who we actually vote for.

I don't think Simon Weisenthal has been mentioned on this thread. He spoke out for the Roma and the Sinti and recognised that what happened to them was the same as had happened to him and his family during the Holocaust. It was genocide, as it was for the Jews. The genocide of one group does not diminish the horror of the genocide of the other. Most of us can see that and do not need whataboutery to do so.

If this thread does one thing I hope that Jewish members and those of other persecuted races understand that some-lots-of us do understand and are with you and will stay with you.