People with what now?
The Labour MP Rosie Duffield is being investigated by her party for liking a tweet which it claims is antisemitic, but allies fear she is being targeted because of her views on transgender issues.
Allies can see she’s being targeted. The “antisemitic tweet” claim is utterly ludicrous. But also – the Times? Even the Times??
She was branded transphobic for “knowing that only women have a cervix” and campaign[ing] against people with male genitalia who identify as women being allowed to enter female-only spaces such as changing rooms.
Excuse me? Since when does the Times say “people with male genitalia” when it means “men”? Since when does the Times substitute the ridiculous “”people with male genitalia” for the quick easy and simple word “men”? And if it’s going to do that why doesn’t it say “people with male genitalia who identify as people with female genitalia”? In short has it lost its fucking mind?
Insiders claim that an investigation was launched into her conduct at the end of March after she liked a tweet by the Father Ted comedy writer Graham Linehan.
Labour investigated her for liking a tweet. Nothing is too petty to punish and abuse women for.
He was responding to a tweet by the comedian Eddie Izzard who wrote: “I’m a trans superhero — but if I’d lived in Nazi Germany I’d have been murdered for it.”
Linehan responded: “Ah, yes, the Nazis, famously bigoted against straight white men with blonde hair.” Duffield liked Linehan’s response, which immediately triggered a furious backlash led by LGBT Labour, a campaign group, and Ash Sarkar, a contributing editor at the left-wing media platform Novara Media.
Sarkar tweeted to her 400,000-plus followers: “This is Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP, liking a tweet that contains Holocaust revisionism. Trans people and gay people were sent to die in concentration camps by the Nazis. This is a historical fact, and it is disgusting that a sitting Labour MP would approve of its denial.”
It definitely makes sense to trust Ash Sarkar on this subject when she’s confusing concentration camps with death camps.
Within days of liking the tweet, Duffield, who is a vice-chairwoman of the all-party parliamentary group on antisemitism, was asked to “unlike” it by her whip, Chris Elmore.
She is understood to have agreed to the request, while continuing to deny the tweet was antisemitic, explaining that Linehan had been sarcastically mocking Izzard’s comment identifying with the victims of the genocide of Jews, despite belonging to none of the identities targeted by the Nazis.
That kind of thing is normally condemned as “appropriation” by trendies like Sarkar, but I guess when an opportunistic “trans” person does it it’s brave n stunning. Also of course the Jews. I mean…you know…were they really the victims here? Shouldn’t we be centering all the martyred trans women instead?
I read that article in The Times this morning, baffled as to how the Tweet could be construed as “antisemitic”, except by reading into it what isn’t there.
I think the revealing sentence in the article is: “One source said: “They have made a cynical calculation that complaints of antisemitism are more likely to result in action being taken against her than complaints about her gender-critical views, …”.”.
The complaint is purely tactical.
I recall the recent brouhaha when a prominent “tech bro” similarly liked a Tweet. Again, the reading into it of what wasn’t there to construe it as “antisemitic”. Again, the complaint was tactical. Again it was: “a cynical calculation that complaints of antisemitism are more likely to result in …” damage.
When is the next shuttle to Alpha Centauri scheduled to arrive? I’m ready to GTFO of here.
Well, since “male” or “female” depends on declared identity, I suppose male genitalia are genitalia that identify as male? But they don’t (usually) talk, so how to figure that out, is anybody’s guess. I don’t know that I will ever get to the bottom of this.
At the risk of rehashing things that have been hashed several times already, this not quite the same thing. Seems to me it was more than just a “like.” The Tweet he was calling “the absolute truth” was saying:
I don’t think you have to do any “reading into” that comment to “construe” anti-semitism. It’s right there on the surface; no digging required. It was a comment about ‘Jewish communities” allegedly working against the interests of the countries they live in, complaining about how the tactics they allegedly use against their own “white” countries are now being used against them. No, that doesn’t sound anti-semetic at all /s It bears no resemblance whatsoever to “enemy within” tropes used against Jews for centuries. No sireee. Nothing to see here.
Musk’s calling this “the absolute truth” was at best extremely sloppy and careless. It was a lot more than a “like.” It was an endorsement and amplification of toxic ideas, right from the owner of the entire platform.
Again, my aplogies for re-rehashing this, but I think characterizing this as a “like” is disingenuous. I couldn’t let that go.
P.S. I would expect readers here to similarly point out anything I have mischaracterized, glossed over, or elided in any of my posts or comments. If I need correction, I want correction. I think it’s good to hold each other to the same standards we demand of those with whom we disagree.
I have extended family who survived the camps, I have Jewish family, I went to Hebrew School, I’ve been to the Holocaust Museum in DC, I’ve read at least some and seen several documentaries, and to this moment I don’t think I’ve ever heard someone say that the extermination camps should not be called concentration camps. (Yes, I just looked it up and I see that there is reason to use “concentration camp” differently, but I had not heard of this before.) I think I’d give Sarkar a pass on this one, at least this single aspect.
What I find most alarming about this incident is the easy slide (in the accuser’s rhetoric) from disagreement over a very specific claim about the Holocaust (having nothing to do with Jewish people), to disagreement over the Holocaust in general, to Holocaust revisionism, to antisemitism. The beginning of that chain bears no resemblance to the end; it’s like a children’s game of Telephone.
Yes. To be fair I didn’t realize there was a difference until quite recently myself – reading a book about Dachau. Extermination camps were concentration camps but not all concentration camps were extermination camps; that’s the distinction I hadn’t been aware of.
But Sarkar in particular should either know what she’s talking about on this subject or shut up, because there was that BBC series The Rise of the Nazis that had her on as an expert, right there next to the historian Richard Evans who really IS an expert and who provided the vital testimony that nailed David Irving in court. She added absolutely nothing to the series, she simply uttered some platitudes.
No need to apologize YNnB. “Liking a tweet” in this context means clicking the “like” button; it does NOT mean giving an extended justification of the tweet or an extended anti-Semitic rant. The phrase “for liking a tweet” in the article means just clicking the “like” button. It does not mean conspiratorial rants about “Jewish communities.”
Concentration Camps vs Death Camps:
Ethnic Japanese in the US and Canada were sent to concentration camps during WWII. Not something I would like to have done to me. However, at least they mostly came out of the those camps alive and reasonably healthy, unlike the Jews & Roma of Nazi occupied Europe.
A bit of somewhat related family history:
My father grew up in a Mennonite community in Alberta, but never joined the church. The Mennonites are a pacifist sect so my father’s older brother who did join the church was sent to a conscientious objector camp during WWII to do various sorts of labour. (Probably not much more onerous than the farm work he had been doing before, but it did separate him from his family, including his wife.)
My father joined the Royal Canadian Air Force, with the understanding that it meant his brother would now be needed for important farm work & get out of that camp. My uncle did rejoin his family for a while, but a few months later when my father was in Britain keeping aircraft instruments in working order, my uncle went back into the work camp.
My father joining the armed forces might be seen as sinful by a pacifist sect, but since it was seen by his family as doing something unpleasant to help his brother, he stayed on good terms with his family despite different religious beliefs.
That. The Nazi ones of course were highly lethal, just not the kind of obligate lethal the extermination camps were.
I recently read a hair-raising account by a woman who was interned by the Japanese during the war. The prisoners were basically starved, but some of them did survive.
“Appropriation” is another one of those terms that started out very useful, and then became so flagrantly misused that now it’s almost impossible to talk about the thing it originally meant to critique–the outright theft of African-American music by white artists, the genuinely offensive use of Native American regalia by white folks who think that it somehow made them more ‘spiritual’ to do so, etc. And you’re right–the “Nazis were all about killing the trans” concept would actually qualify for the original use of the term.
@Your Name’s not Bruce?:
No, you’ve re-phrased it. There was nothing about “countries” or “interests of the countries” in it.
Rather, it was a comment about *some* Jewish organisations** going along with CRT/DEI rhetoric demonising white people.
And that’s true. It’s not “antisemitic” if it is fair comment. As one example, the ADL*** had defined “racism” saying:
racism can be defined as “The marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.”
No, again, the tweet was not about “countries” (read your own quote, the word “countries” is not there, and “rephrasing” to make it about countries changes the meaning!), it was about woke CRT/DEI rhetoric!
Read that ADL definition of “racism”. That is the same rhetoric now being used against Israel and Jews, who are now being labelled as “white” and as “oppressors” of “people of color”.
The Tweet is saying that the rhetoric now being used against Jews (“white”, “colonialists”, “oppressors”), had previously been promoted by Jewish organisation such as the ADL.
I don’t see that saying that is antisemitic. It is a fair comment to make about some organisations such as the ADL, which have gone along with “woke” ideas demonising “whiteness”.
And that is very different from the idea that Jews have been working to undermine the countries they live in, which the Tweet did not say! Woke people do not regard themselves as undermining their countries, they regard themselves as making their countries better and more equal.
[**The Tweet was badly phrased in using a sloppy “Jewish communities” rather than a more precise “some Jewish organisations”, though this was clarified in subsequent Tweets by the poster. ]
[***Musk has been in a long feud with the ADL over their trying to scare advertisers away from Twitter.]
Or, if that exegesis is too lengthy, here is the tl;dr version.
Tweet: “Jewish communties have been pushing the exact kind of dialectical hatred against whites that they claim to want people to stop using against them.”
Fair re-phrase: “Jewish communties have been pushing the same woke rhetoric demonising whites as “oppressors/colonialists/racists” that they now want woke people to stop using against them.”
(By the way, it’s not only some Jews who have been pushing that rhetoric demonising whites, it’s large swathes of society.)
I don’t Twit, but I do use the “Like” button on YouTube. Sometimes I “Like” something because it’s interesting, not because I agree with it. Or I do it on FB so I can find the post again, not necessarily because I agree with it. It’s ridiculous to punish people for tapping the “Like” button.
Yes, there was. “Countries” is there; it’s in the second sentence of the original post (which I did not quote in my own post.*) The “interests of countries” I have derived from the poster’s vocabulary. Not an exact quote, no. You’ve got me there, Coel. But am I stretching? On “countries” ? No. It’s there. On the “interests”, I would argue that it’s not “stretching” to come to that conclusion.
The source I found most quickly for my post above had only a part of the original post Musk was praising, the first sentence that I quoted. Here’s the the whole thing, via Holms’ summary in the “Attempted damage control” thread ( https://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2023/attempted-damage-control/ ) :
My bolding. There’s the mention of “countries.” Right there. Not added, not imagined, but there from the beginning. Remember it now?
Let’s see how I get to my assertion that he’s talking about the “interests of countries,” and how it too is already present in what was posted, rather than added by me in my capsulization of it. Let’s go.
Someone describing immigrants as “hordes of minorities flooding” a country must not think that any such “flood” is helpful to the country in question. A more neutral, less inflammatory word choice would have done a better job of hiding his contempt and disdain of both the immigrants and the Jewish communities he’s commenting on. But he chose the words he chose; I didn’t. It is thus not unreasonable to conclude from his word choice that the “Jewish communities” who assisted these “hordes” to “flood” “their country” were working against the interests of the country being thus “flooded.” The author is essentially saying “What goes around, comes around,” and showing how these “Jewish communities” being bitten by the people whose entry they were aiding represents some kind of karmic retribution. They had it coming.
So, if “countries” is there in the tweet (which, as you can see in the complete passage, is indeed the case), then making it look like it’s not about countries also changes the meaning. The “dialectical hatred against whites” he’s accusing these unnamed “Jewish communities” of spreading must be happening somewhere, within some context. Indeed, it’s happening in “western” countries. Obviously the writer disapproves of the support that the “Jewish communities” have provided to the “hordes of minorities” “flooding” in to these “western” countries. Could this disapproval be because he believes the arrival of these immigrants is against the interests of these countries? It sure sounds like. I don’t think he likes the idea of all those Jewish-assisted minorities showing up, or that their presence is a net benefit to the host countries in question. Therefore, he must think that it is not in their interests, and that the help of Jewish communities was against the interests of their own countries.
So my “interests of countries” is not a stretch. It’s a logical conclusion to what he said and how he said it. To suggest otherwise is at best naive. But I’m all out of naive. The original poster mentions “countries” in his second sentence; the fact that I didn’t quote that second sentence in my precis of it doesn’t absolve him of responsibility for bringing countries into the picture. I wasn’t making it up in my “rephrasing.” It was there to start with. Given how adamant you were about seeing the entire thread in context, in order to give Musk the benefit of the doubt, I find it hard to believe you would have forgotten the second half of the post that caused all of this to blow up in the first place. And I maintain that Formerly Eric is plainly suggesting that Jewish communities in the west are working against the interests of the countries in which they live. You don’t have to connect many dots at all to make that picture, and all of the dots are there in what he wrote, when you look at both sentences.
See above. Quite apart from the issues of rhetoric, he sure doesn’t sound like he’s pleased with Jews helping “hordes” of “minorites” “flooding” their countries.
Certainly “woke” people don’t see themselves as undermining their countries but their opponents do. That’s how they characterise assisting “floods” of immigrants. See above. See below.
Here’s a definition of The Great Replacement Theory:
Found here: https://globalextremism.org/the-great-replacement/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMI0cmZqt7iggMVQvHICh3aTQESEAAYASAAEgIT__D_BwE )
How does the statement by the The Artist Formerly Known as Eric fit?
Anti-immigrant? Check. (c.f. “hordes”)
Whites being replaced? Maybe. Probably? (“flooding” certainly sounds threateningly voluminous, overwheming even)
Replaced by “immigrants, Muslims, and other people of colour?” Check. Minorities in “western” countries.
Orchestrated by “elites” and Jews? Check. “Jewish communities” pushing…, dialectical hatred against whites while helping “hordes of minorities” “flood” their countries.
Add all of this together, and it’s very….duck-like.
Certainly part of what he was saying was about rhetoric used by Jewish communities. I don’t deny that. But that’s not all he was saying. You seem to be denying that what he said had anything to do with countries, and that I had introduced that myself in my rephrasing what he wrote. That is not the case. He’s pretty much paraphrasing the main points of The Great Replacement Theory, or at least enough of it to suggest that that’s what he’s got in mind. So when Musk calls this statement “the absolute truth,” he’s approving the whole thing, not just the part that’s against woke rhetoric.
Yes, and Musk approved of the original, sloppy wording, without caveat or qualification.
If he can’t read carefully when he’s taking the time to respond, then maybe he should not respond at all, or be much more qualified and circumspect about it. This is why I couldn’t let your equating Rosie Duffield’s simple “liking” of a tweet with Musk’s bullhorning of the entire, toxic message.
* Really, this is like creationists quoting the first sentence of Darwin’s famous comment in which he declares the absurdity of the eye’s formation by natural selection, without continuing on to the second sentence, in which he offers the solution to the very obstacle he’s pointed out.
Thank you, YNNB, for standing up against Coel’s risible and dishonest rewriting of the original tweet. in order to pretend that is was really quite harmless and all about Critical Race Theory and Diversity Equity Inclusion. ‘Jewish communities’, ‘Jewish populations’, who are pushing ‘dialectical hatred against whites’, etc. It seems that in Coel’s world words don’t mean what they patently say, but only what he wants them to say, particularly where Elon Musk is concerned.
Musk has also recently caused trouble for a Jewish student by his irresponsible tweeting . See this CNN piece on Youtube:
‘He had just finished college. Then Elon Musk’s tweets turned his life upside down.’
‘Ben Brody says his life was going fine. He had just finished college, stayed out of trouble, and was prepping for law school. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, Elon Musk used his considerable social media clout to amplify an online mob’s misguided rants accusing the 22-year-old from California of being an undercover agent in a neo-Nazi group. #CNN #News.’
Link to the video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XEipFEsYmXk
Yikes! It’s one thing to destroy one’s own reputation through hasty, ill-considered tweets, but to do that to somebody else?! When you’re the RICHEST GUY IN THE WORLD?!! Holy imbalance of power, Batman!
I am also amused by Coel’s response to the anti-immigrant riots in Dublin, in which he basically says they were understandable in the circumstances – an understanding he does not appear to extend to riots mounted by other groups of people. His idea of law and order, which he purports to believe in, seems to be very flexible. Perhaps he has been taking lessons from Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty.
No, you rotten turnip, you probably wouldn’t have been.
The Nazis targeted homosexuals. The category “trans” hadn’t been invented.
As a straight man, you’d likely have been fine. If you’d cross-dressed publicly you might have gotten in trouble with the police, but as an “Aryan” you would not have been subject to anything like the persecution of Jews or other groups targeted by the Nazis.
Oh, and thank you, Ophelia, for providing the link.
Tired old tropes that are repeated down the ages. Here’s T.S. Eliot in his Page-Barbour Lecture delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933 (and afterwards published in a book of essays, ‘After Strange Gods’):
“The population should be homogeneous; where two or more cultures exist in the same place they are likely either to be fiercely self-conscious or both to become adulterate. What is still more important is unity of religious background, and reasons of race and religion combine to make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable . . a spirit of excessive tolerance is to be deprecated.”
And here he is again in a letter to the (very anti-semitic) critic Herbert Read in 1925:
“I am always inclined to suspect the racial envy and jealousy which makes that people [Jews] inclined to bolshevism in some form (not always political).”
‘If you’d cross-dressed publicly you might have gotten in trouble with the police’ Well if he’d been in the army or the Party he’d probably have been fine.
https://www.hatjecantz.com/products/45741-soldier-studies
Oh look, Tim wants to accuse me of hypocrisy:
… in a Tweet that is just a personal attack and which doesn’t include any quotes and which “rephrases” what I said.
Clumpty Dumpty’s back!
@Your Name’s not Bruce?:
Previously we discussed the bit you quoted. OK, now let’s discuss the next bit:
The Tweeter is opposed to mass migration. He’s also saying that Jews have supported mass migration. Well, that’s a generalisation, of course, but it is true that Jews tend to be left-leaning politically, and left-wing politics generally supports mass migration (about 7-out-of-10 American Jews vote Democrat). Some organisations such as Soros’s Open Society Foundation have been strong advocates of migration.
The Tweeter is then pointing out that such setiments are often not reciprocated. Post, Oct 7, a lot of racial-minority groups in the West have demonised Jews. A good example is the New York school where a Jewish teacher who had posted support for Israel on Facebook, was then hounded out of the school as “hundreds of high school students rioted” and demanded that she be fired and “dozens of police had to be called to quell the riot”.
So, both parts of the quoted remark have basis in reality, though it is coarsely phrased and over-general in wording.
Why sure, of course! But hold on, it’s normal to think that the opposition’s politics are harmful to the country. Democrats think that Republican policies are harmful to the country, Republicans think that Democratic policies are harmful to the country. That’s just normal. That isn’t a “conspiracy theory”.
The “conspiracy theory” idea, the “antisemitism”, would be the claim that Jewish people are knowingly and deliberately acting to subvert the country they live in, the claim the they think that their actions are harmful, and that they are doing them deliberately because they want to harm the country.
Now that claim would be an “antisemitic conspiracy theory”. But the statement “I regard your politics as harmful” is not, because everyone thinks the opposition’s politics are harmful and their own politics beneficial.
The people supporting mass migration and/or open borders consider that it would benefit everyone; those opposed consider that it would not be. That’s just politics.
@Your Name’s not Bruce?:
Also, about this “great replacement theory” stuff, with your quote:
Well, US government projections are that non-Hispanic whites are likely to cease being a majority of the US around 2045 (example link).
Everyone seems to agree that that’s a fair projection.
So, if a Democrat says: “non-Hispanic whites will cease being a majority by 2050, and that’s fine or good”, then that’s taken as an ok thing to say.
But if a Republican says: “non-Hispanic whites will cease being a majority by 2050, and I’d prefer that this were not the case”, then suddenly the suggestion that this demographic change is occuring becomes a “conspiracy theory”.
And yet, everyone seems to agree on the underlying facts, and how can agreed facts be a “conspiracy theory”?
The answer to that is that such labelling is just another of the vast, vast number of ways in which the left tries to declare “no debate” about whether their policies are good or not.
The conspiracy theory to insist that this is an intentional plot to replace legacy Americans with compliant non-white immigrants, and as the person that fool Musk is elevating is clearly a white identarian it’s not really a leap. And yes, complaining about the country becoming non-white (whatever that means) is racist. Considering we don’t consider miscegenation a bad thing in this country and that’s the main source of the long term racial shift…
Coel; can see that we’re going to disagree about whether or not Formerly Eric is espousing The Great Replacement Theory. That’s fine. We get to disagree about stuff. I’ve stated my case and I’ll leave it at that. But there is something I’d like to pick up on. One might consider it a point of order or courtesy.
I’m really disappointed that you seem to have skated past the whole part where a) you claimed that
and b) where I then quoted the very next sentence of his original tweet where he mentions countries.
I would have thought that you might have taken the time to correct your statement saying that my “rephrasing” introduced the idea of “countries” to a statement in which it was not originally present, thereby changing its meaning, and misrepresenting his point. I granted that my “interests of countries” was, I believe, a logical conclusion which, while not explicitly stated in the original post, might reasonably be argued for. But you have not similarly conceded that the original post mentioned countries, and that this was not something I added or made up, or misrepresented, through my rephrasing of the original statement. I wouldn’t mind being told my comments were incorrect, inaccurate, or distorted if they wereany of those things, but I do mind when that suggestion is made when I have not added error, inaccuracy or distortion in my paraphrasing of another’s thoughts. I would thank you for the correction. We’re not here to just score points off each other, or “win,” we’re here to ascertain the true, factual state of things, learning together, sometimes challenging each other. That’s a lot harder to do if we’re not willing to admit to our errors; it’s also hard to do if you’re accused of errors you have not made. I’ll say no more on this at this time, but leave my thoughts here. Do with them what you will.
@Your Name’s not Bruce?:
Yes, I got confused between “the Tweet” (the whole of it) and your quote from it (half of it). Being a while since I had read the actual Tweet, I presumed your quote was all of it.
After quoting that one sentence you then said that “that comment” (presumably the quoted sentence), had antisemitism “right there on the surface” and that that sentence was about Jews “working against the interests of the countries they live in”. So I (wrongly) said that the Tweet did not contain mention of countries when I should have said that the quoted sentence (“that comment”) did not.
Why not go into all this into my reply? Well, it’s a side issue, and it seemed much more substantive to give the reply that I actually did. (And one always has to pick and choose things to reply to, else one would be commenting way too much, which I likely do as it is.)
So I confused the Tweet with the quote of half of it, but presumably you can see that quoting only half of it and then bringing into your analysis stuff from the unquoted half was confusing.
And a note on so-called “great replacement theory”:
According to the New York Times, over 6 million migrants have crossed into the US through the Southern border in the last 3 years.
Since hardly any of them are non-Hispanic whites, that rate of migration will alter the demographics. Non-Hispanic whites will no longer be the majority in coming decades.
Lots of Americans signal support for migrants, for example lots of places have declared themselves “sanctuary cities”. Some openly advocate open borders.
All of the above seem to be facts, so the above cannot be a “conspiracy theory”.
So then one has to argue that the “conspiracy theory” is about whether someone might like or not like the fact that migrants would be more likely to vote Democrat, and whether their liking or disliking of that might factor into their tolerance of migration.
It does seem to me that the label “conspiracy theory” here is just an attempt to dismiss anyone who has a different view on the desirability of mass migration.
Actual and proper conspiracy theories involve faked moon landings or assassinated presidents or such … not just a liking or disliking of mass migration, which is more properly labelled “politics”.
Thank you for your clarification Coel; I appreciate it.
The conspiracy theory is ascribing intent to a pattern; it’s also dumb… Even the Catholic integralists have figured out that mass immigration is good for rightoids’ long term electoral prospects because these brown hordes flooding in hate gays, hate women, hate abortion, and hate atheists just like them.