The Women’s March is thankfully imploding

Fox

Mon, Dec 31 2018, 3:02 pm

I'm disappointed, though somewhat unsurprised, that the serious problems with anti-Semitism among Women's March organizers are going unremarked by Imamothers, many of whom were very supportive and at least one of whom attended a local march.

While everyone knew that Linda Sarsour had a history of problematic tweets, she had attempted to remake her image somewhat. Or at least that was what we were led to believe.

In fact, anti-Semitism appears to have been a feature, not a bug, from the initial organizing of the March.

Tablet did the in-depth investigative journalism on this, based on initial reporting from Alex Van Ness and Laura Loomer:

Tablet: Is the Women's March Melting Down?

Quote:

According to several sources, it was there—in the first hours of the first meeting for what would become the Women’s March—that something happened that was so shameful to many of those who witnessed it, they chose to bury it like a family secret. Almost two years would pass before anyone present would speak about it.

It was there that, as the women were opening up about their backgrounds and personal investments in creating a resistance movement to Trump, Perez and Mallory allegedly first asserted that Jewish people bore a special collective responsibility as exploiters of black and brown people—and even, according to a close secondhand source, claimed that Jews were proven to have been leaders of the American slave trade. These are canards popularized by The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, a book published by Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam—“the bible of the new anti-Semitism,” according to Henry Louis Gates Jr., who noted in 1992: “Among significant sectors of the black community, this brief has become a credo of a new philosophy of black self-affirmation.”

It's a long read, but it lays out not only how overt anti-Semitism was present in the Women's March from the very beginning, but also how muddled the finances are and how millions of dollars raised from merchandise sales, etc., are essentially unaccounted for.

The California Women's March attempted to disassociate itself when this story broke -- not when they figured out it was "too white." In fact, they are essentially lying about the reasons for the cancellation in order to whitewash their previous easy acquiesence to anti-Semitism.

I would actually have more respect if the local organizers simply said, "We were caught up in the moment and didn't adequately investigate the people we allowed to represent us."

Linda Sarsour is now claiming that Jewish women were excluded from the Women's March leadership because the organizers wished to focus on women whose identities were under threat from the Trump administration. Yet, as we know, hate crimes against Jews significantly number those against "marginalized" groups by many factors -- and there is no link between Trump supporters and such attacks.

A recent statement from the Women's March reads:

Quote:

Women’s March models intersectional leadership through our organizing work . . .

Yes, yes, they do. And the entire sordid affair and the women deceived by it demonstrate where Jews are left when intersectionality is being "modeled."

FranticFrummie

Mon, Dec 31 2018, 3:15 pm

I can't remember if I commented on the earlier threat about the march, but I did post the article from the NYT on my FB last week, and I was widely denounced and shared across FB. Friend of friends of friends were commenting about how horrible the march organizers were.

Looking at their FB pages, I was surprised to see that they were basically very liberal, millennial folks. I guess they are finally waking up to smell the coffee, at least a few of them.

One thing that was not discussed here, is that the same year the first Women's March happened, was also the Chicago Dykes March. Gay women were carrying a rainbow flag with a star of David on it, and they were assaulted, boo'd, and physically shoved out of the march. They were told that the organizers supported Palestine, and that there was no room in the march for an oppressive regime.

So much for intersectionality*.

*I'm always amused when spellcheck tells me that's not a real word. LOL

Fox

Mon, Dec 31 2018, 4:16 pm

FranticFrummie wrote:

One thing that was not discussed here, is that the same year the first Women's March happened, was also the Chicago Dykes March. Gay women were carrying a rainbow flag with a star of David on it, and they were assaulted, boo'd, and physically shoved out of the march. They were told that the organizers supported Palestine, and that there was no room in the march for an oppressive regime.

I guess they weren't attempting to perform in Boro Park. Smile

Seriously, though, not only did this happen, but the Windy City Times, the primary LGBT news outlet in Chicago, demoted the reporter who covered the story until she voluntarily left. Interestingly, she got a job with Tablet.

I've forgotten how she fit into the intersectional matrix -- if I recall, she was Jewish and transgender, and the Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminists (TERFs) were outraged that she'd been assigned to cover the story in the first place.

Anyway, the poor dear made the mistake of thinking that it was questionable to exclude people from your dyke march because of their stand on a completely unrelated issue.

Windy City Times almost immediately closed all comments on their website and declined to publish letters or follow-up in their print version.

Granted, there was a plausible reason for closing on-line comments, since some of them were pretty rabidly anti-Semitic. But they moderate comments anyway, so a lot of people saw it as disingenous move to kill the story.

I'm really just a lurker on Twitter; I almost never tweet. But the one time I got a bunch retweets and "likes" from relatively big names was when I observed that this episode was more evidence that LGBT activists weren't concerned about LGBT people. They were concerned about people who shared their political ideology and just happened t be LGBT.

Of course, catnip is apparently detectable via ethernet cables, so I immediately got followed and got DMs from guys wanting me to be their mother, their sister, their aunt, or their best friend. I was polite, but if they'd really wanted to be my friend, they would have asked where to send their offerings of luxury handbags. Very Happy

Fox

Wed, Jan 02 2019, 4:25 pm

So I'm driving around doing errands today, listening to my local NPR station. They're broadcasting Here and Now, a program produced by WBUR of Boston.

Today's interview, conducted by Robin Young, is with Vanessa Wruble, one of the original participants in organizing the Women's March but who subsequently left the organization as described in the Tablet article I linked upthread.

Wruble, who is Jewish, attempted to defend the importance of Louis Farrakhan to the black community; defended the Fruit of Islam providing security; and ultimately claimed that the biggest problem with Farrakhan's links to the March was that "the optics were really bad."

Yes, dear, but the reason for the "optics" being really bad is because progressive tolerance for anti-Semitism is really bad.

Yet even Wruble, who was arguably forced out of a leadership role because she's Jewish, couldn't seem to clearly and resolutely denounce Louis Farrakhan. Tomorrow's interview is with Tamika Mallory, one of the organizers who has attended NOI events and appears to echo Farrakhan's views regarding Jews.

WBUR's blurb says that "Robin Young talks with women on both sides of the divide in a two-part conversation . . . " Which "sides" would those be? The side that is okay with someone comparing Jews to termites and the side that thinks it just looks bad?

I probably shouldn't listen to Mallory's interview. More depressing than her actual anti-Semitism will likely be the fact that the producers and interviewer at WBUR seem to view it as a legitimate "side."

Fox

Wed, Jan 02 2019, 6:01 pm

simcha2 wrote:

I'll agree more insidious, but more dangerous is a difficult claim to make. Only one form has resulted in multiple deaths (in the us this year).

I would define the threat in terms of short-term and long-term.

The threat of neo-Nazis and white supremacists should never be overlooked. As we see, it can turn deadly very quickly. The only silver lining is that there aren't actually a lot of neo-Nazis/white supremacists out there. They don't have a political party of their own, and they don't have a strong allegiance to existing parties. Fortunately, the vast majority are keyboard warriors.

The long-term threat is definitely on the left. As we see in the UK, once anti-Semitism infects a respected political party and gains a level of political power, it can no longer be easily contained. The U.S. is even more susceptible to this problem since we have large swathes of college graduates who've never met a Jew and have no personal experience. When there's a BDS or SJP event, there is no one to correct their impressions, and those who rise to levels of national or even local leadership will have been primed to see Jews in a negative light.

And it can get very bad, very fast. A few years ago, it was inconceivable that the UK's Jewish communities would feel vulnerable. Today, 40 percent of British Jews are considering emigrating.

simcha2

Wed, Jan 02 2019, 6:16 pm

Fox wrote:

This is a huge mischaracterization. When I moved to the US, one of the frequent questions I got was about the anti- semitism in the uk. My frequent answer was along the lines that in the uk it was more likely that would come up to you, calling you an f-ing Jew and punch you in the face. In the US I was surprised by the huge amount of quiet anti semitism (those who assumed Jews owned media, banks politicans etc). I actually thought then (and still think) there is more anti semitism in the US than the UK. And this is as someone who well remembers the bomb threats of the 90s in the UK (akin to being punched in the face).

The difference with the anti semitism in the uk now is its root in anti- Zionism (as opposed to vice versa, which is what you see in the US more).

Now, many of my relatives and friends in the uk are scared of Corbyn. But I don't think they are realistically any more likely to leave than they were when jewish institutions required armed guards (incredibly rare in the Uk) in the 90s.

Fox

Wed, Jan 02 2019, 6:35 pm

simcha2 wrote:

Thanks for offering a closer perspective than I have. I love these conversations!

Truthfully, I've been a little suspicious of the polls claiming that 40 percent of British Jews are considering emigration. "Considering" could mean anything from someone making immediate plans all the way to someone who's once thought about it. Your experiences make me think that perhaps that is indeed the case, since it doesn't seem like many people are literally packing up and leaving.

That said, it definitely seems to me that the distance between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism gets shorter and shorter all the time within Labour while the will to denounce it gets weaker and weaker.

I recently downloaded The Tribe: The Liberal Left and the System of Diversity by Ben Cobley, a long-time hard-left Labour activist. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but it was reviewed very favorably in Quillette. My iimpression from the review is that Cobley probably sees anti-Semitism in Labour as simply one of many examples of flawed ideology within the party. Once I've read it, I'll try to remember to check back with you for your thoughts.