The perils of an increasingly popular antiracist concept
Here’s a development of subtle but considerable importance: At a student activist’s behest, Merriam-Webster will revise its definition of “racism”.
Let’s not freak out. They’re not “redefining racism” wholesale. The dictionary already has a three-part definition, nodding at the idea of “systemic racism”.
The editor-at-large quoted in the story says Merriam-Webster is simply going to clarify the second part of the definition.
Annotated Selections from the New School Panel on Anti-Semitism with Jewish Voice for Peace and Linda Sarsour
It’s hard to imagine a mise en scène more evocative of Jewish intellectual life than Greenwich Village in the 1930s, where a University in Exile emerged at the progressive New School for Social Research to rescue important thinkers from European fascism. These scholars, many of them Jews, established in asylum a seedbed of social thought that university president Alvin Johnson hoped would grow to confront “the problems that harass mankind.”
His expectations were copiously surpassed. Safe from persecution, Exile scholars enlarged social science, influenced New Deal policy, and cultivated a creative academy that would welcome Hannah Arendt three decades later…
A few screen caps of Michael Chikindas’ anti-Semitic Facebook posts have followed his story around as it develops. I trawled his account before Chikindas deep-sixed it, grabbing many to prepare my own take. I published a couple of them with my analysis in Tablet Magazine and many others to Twitter.
Chikindas has made absurd claims in his defense — that he’s not an anti-Semite, that he’s merely pointing out Jewish racism and Israeli crimes — and has even gone so far as to announce that his Facebook account was hacked. …
The anti-Semitic “anti-Zionist” posts her favorite excerpts from a breakout session of the Palestine Expo in London.
There are few types creepier than the U.K. far-Left partisan of the Palestinians.
This weekend many of these people will assemble in London at Palestine Expo, a two-day platform to mark the tragedy of Israel’s founding — “100 years of the Balfour Declaration”— and the occupation of the West Bank and “siege” of Gaza. Prime specimens are scheduled to appear, including professional apologists for anti-Semitism Ben White and The Electronic Intifada’s ginger journeyman, Asa Winstanley.
Yet among the rank-and-file roaming the convention hall, perhaps the most egregious of all is Momentum agitator Jackie Walker, who became notorious last year for…
Andrew Sullivan and Public Debate
The mountain of words and pictures last week mirrored the piles of rubble in New York. Like the rescue workers there, one waded in trying to find something that was alive, that would illuminate and explain what had happened. Noticeable was the reluctance throughout the media to contemplate the Israeli factor — the undeniable and central fact behind the disaster that Israel is now and has been for some time an American colony, sustained by billions of American dollars and armed with American missiles, helicopters and tanks.
Such has been the pressure from the Israeli lobby in this country that…
John-Paul Pagano
I'm a writer who focuses on utopian and totalitarian ideas, mostly as they find expression in antisemitic reaction to Israel and modernity.
