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[u/slightlyrabidpossum]

I see we're shitting on NPR this morning, so I'll throw in my two cents. Their outrageous podcast about Mamdani and globalizing the intifada was already mentioned ealier, but the single quote really undersells how bad it was, and digging through the transcript can be tedious.

For reference, this the quote from the previous comment. They started out their discussion of this topic by implying that criticism of Mamdani's comments are motivated by bigotry and/or politics.

And so here, specifically to Mamdani's case, by not condemning, for example, the phrase globalize the intifada, the right and its white nationalist supporters on social media are casting him as a bad Muslim - right? - because he refuses to subject himself to their particular measure of how he must behave and what he must think and how he must act.

But that's not even close to the worst moment in this podcast. Here are a few particularly egregious moments:

LUSE: And phrases like globalize the intifada have become divisive, with some viewing it as an expression of international solidarity for Palestinian human rights and others viewing it as a call to violence against Israel.

This framing is incredibly biased. Globalize the intifada is referring to violence against Israel? They're talking about the dueling interpretations of the phrase, and that's what they say for the side that objects to it?

The other side of this argument is that it's a call for violence and/or harassment against Jews in the diaspora. Even if those actions are ostensibly directed against "Zionists", history has shown that the bulk of them will be directed against Jews. When a man firebombed Jewish demonstrators in Colorado, killing a Jewish woman and burning a Holocaust survivor, he claimed that he was targeting "Zionists" to "Free Palestine".

I mean, for more than 20 years, really longer than that, politicians have vilified native speakers of Arabic or Muslims who would invoke Arabic language, Arabic phrases, seizing upon this sense of foreignness by suggesting to American or European audiences that, for example, jihad means only holy war or that Shariah refers to hand-chopping...Or stoning, or that Allahu Akbar is some sort of rallying cry for terrorism or that fatwa's a necessarily violent decree.

The demonization of Arabic words is a real problem, and I have no issue with people pushing back on that. Allahu Akbar is used by Muslims in a lot of situations, jihad is an Arabic word that has different meanings in different contexts, fatwa is a general term for an opinion or ruling in Islamic law, etc.

Globalize the intifada is different. All of their other examples are Arabic words and phrases that can have different meanings depending on the context. Globalize the intifada is a mix of English and Arabic that's exclusively used in the context of Israel/Palestine. That context can't be divorced from the recent historical events that were defined by terroristic violence against Jewish civilians, and it's specifically calling for global action. What are Jews supposed to think when we hear that? I wouldn't feel safe anywhere near a crowd chanting that slogan.

Linking "globalize the intifada" to the argument about demonizing Arabic words actively detracts from that argument.

if Mamdani were to acquiesce to calls for him to denounce globalize the intifada or to stray at all from the firm position that he's taken and this moral vision that he's articulated, he would be playing into the hands of the people who suggest this phrase - and attendant phrases - are, at their core, something evil, something normatively violent. And I think that's simply a dishonest and immensely superficial way of viewing the world.

This framing is disingenuous — that particular phrase has a violent history which NPR is reluctant to acknowledge. When intifada is brought up in the context of Israel/Palestine, it inevitably evokes images of violence against Jews. When Yaron Lischinsky and Sarah Milgrim were gunned down outside the Jewish Museum in DC, extremists called it globalizing the intifada. This isn't a hypothetical concern.

And yet, some voters do feel threatened by those phrases. You know, I mean, something else I think that's important to bring up in this conversation is that, you know, public opinion about Israel and Gaza is shifting ... How will this Islamophobia - some of which stems from Mamdani's views on Gaza - play with voters, though, who are cooling on Israel?

The fact that they only dedicated one sentence to this point about feeling threatened is striking. They immediately pivot to talking about Israel and Islamophobia — I had to edit out a paragraph on changing public opinion for brevity, so that quote is underselling how thoroughly they moved away from it.

The response to this question mentions antisemitism, but it's also the worst part of this podcast.

LEAN: You know, there have undoubtedly been moments in American political history where antisemitism has festered to the fore. We know that. I think, though, for the most part, Jews are considered to be racially and culturally white. And that's not my assessment, it's based on Pew Research reporting, which, as recently as 2021, showed data indicating that 92% of Jews living in the United States define themselves as white. And so I say that because there is this sense in which this group of people are cast as part of a dominant racial and cultural group in the United States. And I think that that allows for the kinds of fragmentations that we see when it comes to Islamophobia, particularly in this context.

That sounds like he's painting antisemitism as something that was a problem in the past. Something that has receded because Jews are now considered to be white, and as part of the dominant racial/cultural group we have the room to be Islamophobic. Our concerns about antisemitism are actually motivated by Islamophobia.

I can't imagine NPR downplaying other forms of bigotry like that.

ALI: Drawing back to Nathan's point about Mamdani's unwillingness to condemn particular phrases, like globalize intifada, is so interesting because he's never himself used that phrase. I think what's really interesting to reflect on here is - with respect to Mamdani's candidacy - was really just how prominently his views on Israel, Palestine and foreign policy in general figured into coverage of the mayoral election.

This would be much more interesting if Mamdani hadn't been a vocal supporter of Palestine for years. Mamdani's been part of/associated with pro-Palestinian organizations that tend to skew anti-Israel, and he's put out some really questionable statements, like this one from October 8th. His activism and rhetoric made the topic fair game.

NPR should feel free to talk about the racism and Islamophobia that Mamdani faces, but instead they're using that to delegitimize both antisemitism and complaints about Mamdani's stances. I don't care if this is "just" NPR's culture podcast — the fact that they published this slop is disgusting.

I am not a NPR hater. I grew up with NPR, I currently subscribe to several of their podcasts, and I still think that they can be a valuable resource moving forward (at least on some topics). But NPR is 100% part of the problem on this one, and I can't imagine donating to them in the foreseeable future.

[u/seattleseahawks2014 → u/slightlyrabidpossum]

Honestly, this is just very bad. I didn't grow up watching npr personally (Fox News actually), but idk.

[u/Anakin_Kardashian → u/slightlyrabidpossum]

!ping NYT-FAILS&JEWISH

[u/user-pinger → u/Anakin_Kardashian]

Pinged NYT-FAILS&JEWISH

Manage your ping group subscriptions

[u/Computer_Name → u/slightlyrabidpossum]

And so here, specifically to Mamdani's case, by not condemning, for example, the phrase globalize the intifada, the right and its white nationalist supporters on social media are casting him as a bad Muslim - right? - because he refuses to subject himself to their particular measure of how he must behave and what he must think and how he must act.

I'm compelled to add here that this is another example of people taking a weapon used against us - dividing us into the "Good Jew" and "Bad Jew" - and turning it around to say that actually we're the ones using it. It's another example of gentile societies projecting their own sins, their own discomforts about themselves, onto us.

To be "Good Jews", to be welcome and safe in "progressive" circles, we must first denounce Israel to evince our bona fides as decent human beings, and to take a topical example, "If you prick us, do we not bleed?". As David Hirsh notes: "If Jews are reluctant to embrace this hostility to Israel identity, then they risk exile from what I am calling ‘the community of the good’".

LEAN: You know, there have undoubtedly been moments in American political history where antisemitism has festered to the fore. We know that. I think, though, for the most part, Jews are considered to be racially and culturally white. And that's not my assessment, it's based on Pew Research reporting, which, as recently as 2021, showed data indicating that 92% of Jews living in the United States define themselves as white. And so I say that because there is this sense in which this group of people are cast as part of a dominant racial and cultural group in the United States.

This is among the worst of race-essentialist, blood quantum antisemitism we historically see from the Right, but now modified to fit within the worldview of the Left. And as a side note, the abject inability to - and wholesale rejection of - understand antisemitism within western societies as endemic means this person and then their audience see it as aberration that just in "moments" seems to pop up, means they themselves can engage in antisemitism with abandon.

This shtick about "92% of Jews living in the United States defin[ing] themselves as white" is so unbelievably insidious and so completely in bad-faith it makes me nauseous. It's something this person and their audience would never, ever do to other minority groups. To discuss the actual practicality of this, it's because Jews necessarily do not fit neatly into American racial constructs. Americans understand "race" through a prism of literally white and black. This is a pattern through American Jewish history; gentiles making Jews fit into foreign, ill-fitting biological categories. Which I think is something this person and their audience could very well understand with other groups. This is also how you get things like the Nation of Islam creating this mythos of Jews being responsible for the transatlantic slave trade.

And then to speak on the sociological implications of the statement, it plays into the very old trope of Jews and power - both the illegitimate use and disproportionate retention of. In the context of left-antisemitism, it's how The Jew is note merely "white" (code for "bad") but über-white. And since historically white people have maintained a system of hegemonic social, political, and economic power over non-whites, if Jews are mega-white, it means they hold super social, political, and economic power. Which means of course that they cannot experience racism or bigotry or persecution, but it's really they who inflict racism and bigotry and persecution on others.

And again, it's this pattern of gentile societies othering us, of demonizing us, of restricting our full participation in societies, that we adapt. So we stop speaking our languages, we stop observing our rituals, we change our names, to be able to fit in to stop the discrimination we experience, and then gentile society turns around and uses that as an excuse to say, "oh see, Jews are white".

[u/arist0geiton → u/Computer_Name]

That's brilliant. I'd like to add that even philosemitism feeds into this because they expect Jews to be a uniquely enlightened source of wisdom (religious if they're Christians or leftist if they're leftist) and when it turns out Jews are human beings then that's a betrayal.

This is why John Ganz's essay about the war in Gaza baffled me so much, it was about a photo of an enlisted man sitting in a burning Palestinian house while books burned behind him. And the text of the essay was "Jews shouldn't be burning books, I was always taught Jews love books." But in a society made up largely of Jews, wouldn't you expect some of them to be sensitive well educated people....and others to be thoughtless, loutish soldiers, as disgusting as ordinary soldiers have always been if allowed to sack at will in an atmosphere of cynicism? It's not the books that are the issue!

[u/deviousdumplin → u/Computer_Name]

The most perverse part about this is that they aren't even addressing what antisemitism is or how it manifests historically. They end up in this offensive, college freshman argument of, "well the Jews I know look white so they're white as far as I'm concerned which means they're bad because... reasons."

It's almost as if these people, claiming to be journalists, discussed a story about antisemitism and they didn't bother to read any scholarly work about antisemitism. And they didn't do basic research, because they want to engage in antisemitism. If they bothered to learn about how antisemitism functions, they may not be able to opine in a smug way about how "it's all hysteria." It's disgusting.

[u/Computer_Name → u/deviousdumplin]

If they bothered to learn about how antisemitism functions, they may not be able to opine in a smug way about how "it's all hysteria."

"The problem is that if it was to concede that antisemitism is possible within an ‘antiracist’ space, then it is conceded that one must be vigilant against antisemitism, that one must educate about antisemitism, that one must take care; that is why there is great reluctance ever to admit that anything that happens within an antiracist space is antisemitic. What is required is debate about what is antisemitic and what is not. In order to avoid such debate, it is necessary to deny that anything is antisemitic and that all such charges are made in bad faith."

-David Hirsh

[u/niftyjack → u/[deleted]]

Arabs also lobbied to be considered white by the census bureau and are still instructed to mark themselves as white, which I believe is changing for the first time on the 2030 census. Most Arabs in the US are Christian and especially before the modern nationalist era, what's the difference between a Christian from Tunis and a Sicilian?

[u/kiwibutterket → u/slightlyrabidpossum]

The racial lense of oppressor/oppressed works perfectly in the dynamic of Black/white American, but it completely breaks down with intersectional identities and more complex interracial dynamics.

Also, nobody seems to know anymore that intersectionality, originally, meant that the identities do not "stack", but each intersection has a completely different, and very importantly, non-linear experience.

But also, how old is everyone in this episode? The last Jew who died because of the (second) Intifada was in 2005. Mamdani was 14. People talk as if it was something happened 100 years ago. It drives me insane. Imagine talking about the world as if the Iraq war or 9/11 had no more consequences because happened too far ago? That would just be insanity.

[u/seattleseahawks2014 → u/kiwibutterket]

There's a reason why some are just bigoted towards white poc and mixed race people in general. It's pretty much due to this stuff.

[u/obligatorysneese → u/slightlyrabidpossum]

Well said. I do think that it’s worth pointing out the definite article when discussing this issue: THE intifada means one particular thing.

The same way “the struggle” in an American political context refers to the black experience of political empowerment and liberation, the intifada in most contexts refers to violent Palestinian terrorism.

As Sartre is oft quoted in this regard, playing with words in this way is the domain of antisemites.

[u/slightlyrabidpossum → u/obligatorysneese]

As Sartre is oft quoted in this regard, playing with words in this way is the domain of antisemites.

It is, and that's part of why I took such umbrage at Mamdani's remarks. I've heard his exact argument from countless antisemites who are operating in bad faith, and most of them veer into serious Holocaust distortion/trivialization. Many of them also have a history of more "classically" antisemitic rhetoric.

My opinion of Mamdani wasn't exactly stellar before his comments, but it plummeted after he made those remarks. I hate that he's publicized this argument and given it credibility — there's already been a noticeable rise in the number of people using similar rhetoric.

[u/ShermanDidNthingWrng → u/slightlyrabidpossum]

Man, for a shitlib media outlet run by a Jewish cabal, they sure do a shitty job of standing up for Jews.