Quote of the Day

by

David Harsanyi:

Though Jews are by far the most targeted religious minority in the United States, we have yet to have a big national conversation about the problem. No one in major media dares even bring it up.

There are lots of “conversations” we’re supposed to have, meaning mob actions where leftist cadres will abuse isolated non-leftists who are dumb enough to take the bait. Media and top Democrats are all-in. Maybe it’s time to go Alinsky on the Left and hold struggle sessions about antisemitism? It’s a nice thought.

16 thoughts on “Quote of the Day”

  1. I think the Jews at the gun stores and ranges have a better idea. Israeli’s let the government disarm them and trusted they’d be protected.

  5. The pictures of those Koreans on rooftops during the 1992 LA riots left quite the impression on many of us in AZ. Over the years I had the opportunity to talk with several people from that neighborhood at the time and one thing stuck with me; that many of the guys on the rooftops were not only immigrants but were former ROK (i.e. major-league hard-a**). They hadn’t bought into any sympathies for racial grievances of the rioters like many native-born Americans did, they just saw people coming to burn their stores and homes.

    I find that many American Jews are conflicted when it comes to issues of bigotry. On one hand their history has shown them the effect of such antisemitism , the Holocaust of course is one example but also various discriminatory practices in this country. On the other hand their politics, skewing generally left, forces them to judge any bigotry according to a hierarchy with various groups deemed more virtuous than others based on their level of “oppression” This has created a servile attitude so that we no longer judge bigotry by a common standard but rather who is doing what to whom. I have a feeling that for many Jews, their initial gut instinct when viewing the various antisemitic protests in this country was that they deserve it. Hopefully that will change.

    Not only do their leftist politics creates a gravitational pull, but the active political strategy is to keep them contained by making the alternative repellent. Getting on the rooftops to protect property or taking to the streets to demand social justice for Jews has been painted as supremacist and MAGA and that’s something no respectable person wants a part of right?

    I saw Bari Weiss’s piece in the Free Press that https://www.thefp.com/p/the-day-the-delusions-died> where she quoted approvingly Chamath Palihapitiya who said “I am left yet again with an appreciation, despite the messenger, of the message of the Trump administration because what those guys did was pretty incredible in hindsight.”

    The problem with Weiss’ normalization of Trump is she is an outlier; she made her escape several years ago and has been ostracized for it as a warning for others. For Jews to demand their recompense for antisemitism or go to the rooftops means escaping that gravitational pull of their leftist politics that even now is reasserting itself. What will it take? Maybe like with the Koreans on the rooftops, it will take some people with a harder edge, some IDF reservists returning from the Gazan War, to lead the way.

    Related a disturbing piece from Liel Leibovitz regarding he terms the “American Banlieue” https://www.city-journal.org/article/american-banlieue. He notes that many of those of Middle Eastern descent involved in these antisemitic protests, as with those in their Paris equivalents, are not immigrants but rather second-generation. Not assimilating immigrants does not create the wonders and benefits of diversity, but rather imports the world’s problems.

  6. I have a feeling that for many Jews, their initial gut instinct when viewing the various antisemitic protests in this country was that they deserve it. Hopefully that will change.

    It is already changing as religious Jews out-reproduce non-religious Jews. The religious will be the majority soon and they tend to be more politically conservative and more culturally confident than the non-religious. This demographic shift is palpable if you look around. Also the older generations that venerated FDR and supported the Democrats are dying out and the Democrats are increasingly hostile to Jews.

    The Jewish demographic trend is analogous to trends in Christianity, such as with the growth of evangelicals and LDS vs. mainline Protestantism in the USA or vs. Roman Catholicism in Central America.

  7. I’ll take up the Alinsky part of Jonathan’s challenge

    The main thrust of Alinky’s strategy is t use public actions to expose the target’s hypocrisy, (the difference between their stated values and actual actions), personalize it to give the blowback a focus, and then leverage it all into some form of lasting change,

    For our purposes universities are a near-perfect target. The spread between values and reality is a short-sellers dream. Also university leadership is not geared toward handling crisis, but rather toward placating internal factions and external donors. Any action would look to get inside their OODA loop and force them to address the crisis not through their values, but rather through their internal stakeholders. Also campuses are loaded with a lot of self-important, easily-aggrieved hotheads; just the type we want

    So I would have two teams of students. The first I would have them conduct a protest through a campus or launch a counter-protest against some Hamas-symp event. The goal is to provoke a (hopefully not too) violent reaction, say our protesters pushed to the grounds, signs ripped up, various antisemitic remarks made. Too add some spice, I would have some of the signs say “Israel Provides a Safe Haven for Jews” just so it looks that much better on video when our group gets assaulted. Yes, everything in our operation must be videoed, in fact given the way Antifa attacks people taking video I would have people videoing our videoers.

    The first team is the bait, the predicate for the next team. 24, no more than 48, hours later after the university administration issues no or some mealy-mouthed denunciation the second team should occupy the university administration building in good ole 1960s style. The team would demand the administration take active steps toward curbing antisemitism on campus (as evidenced by the first team being attacked) through mandatory training sessions by all students and employees. Call out the university president by name. Do the whole rigmarole with teach-ins in front of the building and the like. If they are attacked by groups or the campus police so much the better because that’s the predicate for the next two actions.

    Third action is to send a large, in the thousands, group of outside people through the campus, denouncing the rise of antisemitism, liken it to the situation with Hitler in the 1930s, and supporting the occupiers’ agenda. They in turn plunk themselves down in the middle of campus and Freedom Convoy style shut down the university, creating a media spectacle that will last for days I would then have outside groups, donors, various organizations, prominent individuals issue statements of support. While I’m generally against protesting outside of people’s homes if the university president is especially weaselly send a group over there and keep him up all night with infernal honking, bouncy castles, ad dance parties

    Total time span? A week. The key is to provoke a situation (assault by little neo-Nazis) and demand the university to take a strong stance which it won’t be able to do. Then make sure you keep the pace of events going fast enough that the university officials are always one step behind. That protest that got assaulted at the beginning of the week will be long-forgotten and by the end of the week things will spun out of control in your favor, What are they going to do? Send in the cops and clear people out? Cops beating up Jews protesting Nazis is not a great look.

    The problem? You need people to start thinking like protesters, like the Left, which is something we cannot do. You need those two teams, say 50 people, who not only are willing to get beat up in the first action but quite possibly get convicted on the second. In either case they will end up with FBI/DHS files and probably no-fly lists. You also need to be organized in order to provide the proper degree of coordination across different actors. The Left can do it, which is what their non-profit network does, can we?

  8. You need people to start thinking like protesters, like the Left, which is something we cannot do.

    There’s this “we” again.

    I recall General Sherman who said something to the effect of war is the remedy our adversaries have chosen, so let’s give it to them.

    I think the left is teaching its enemies thoroughly and well what it will take to defeat them and how to do it.

    I note the murderer-loving scum of Harvard are now backpedaling about their endorsement of Hamas terrorism, once people started using the leftist tactic of cancellation against them.

    I also note that these folks have apparently started getting significant numbers of death threats. I’m not a fan of that but turnabout is fair play, and I still recall years ago listening to a pair of leftists discuss how evil Republicans were because Ilhan Omer got a death threat on her congressional phone. Meanwhile, death threats from leftists against dissenters never stop and that is simply accepted as normal by non-leftists in public life.

    The Gee Ohhh Peeee is of course no where to be seen and has nothing to say on this topic, at all, ever.

    That’s the actual problem- the putative leadership of the non-leftist political party has no interest in fighting back and so far has been able to prevent its replacement by people who will.

  9. I ran into a podcast of the book, The Origins of Totalitarianism. Written in 1951. Do a contrast and comparison with today’s world and one would be hard pressed to not see the path we are already far down the road to.

  10. Any modern day pop-media leftist (marxist really) that is today ‘shocked’ by the anti-Semitism that seems to have suddenly sprung up all around them will revert back to type; voting democrat, ignoring their allies’ prejudices against right-leaning figures in public and again accept BLM-Antifa types looting and burning once a Trump-Giuliani type again restores order so they can safely walk their streets, leaving them to freely demonize the law & order right as they always have.

    Not too long ago, Louis Farrakhan speeches used to be considered ‘out there’ by normal Americans. Now, Calypso Louie represents mainstream democrat talking points in media on the DNC stage and college campuses.

  13. Before he left the Internet and his wonderful blog – Seraphic Secret – (due to the passing of his wife which devastated him), Robert Avrech had a wonderful multipart post about the event that convinced him that he should be armed – the LA Rodney King riots.

    If nothing else it was a harbinger for showing the average citizen that the police won’t be there to help you.

  16. David – I’ll have to check it out! We really lost something when his website went down – so many wonderful stories of classic Hollywood.

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