As I'm typing this I'm hearing NPR covering a march in New York City protesting the rise in antisemitism in the wake of the most recent attack during Hanukkah. They're wondering if its due to Trump ramping up bigotry and, it being goddamned NPR they pretend that there is balance in pretending that Democrats passing criminal justice reform has something to do with it. From everything I've read, the "liberal" Republican Nelson Rockefeller dumping the mentally ill on the streets had quite a lot to do with it. The attacker had no serious criminal record but he was seriously mentally ill. I hate NPR and wish to hell we had let the Republicans shut it down in the 1980s when they tried to. It is dishonest to the core.
In the United States, it starts with having laws that allow hate to flourish and propagate, "free speech-free press" absolutism. Those court rulings and laws allow commerical dispersal of hate speech, targeted for maximum profit for the companies by sending more of what those prone to the mental illness will compulsively focus on. Lies and hatred are certainly among the primary beneficiaries of the definitions of "free-speech-free press", today, just as they were all through our history.
Racism and the maintenance of slavery, in its legal form before Lincoln and after in the Jim Crow period depended on hate speech freely permitted. What the recent free-speech-press rulings and the ACLU style cult of free speech-press did was to generalize what hate-speech was never suppressed for some groups, Black people, Native Americans, Latinos, never had much of a period in which that was suppressed other than for a brief period in which the media felt inhibited from broadcasting it.* Slavery is more than intrinsically linked to violence, violence is the thing that made it possible, that violence was as connected to expressions of racism. Lynchings, the very real and most pervasive forms of hate-violence in American culture were a product of hate speech, hate press as was the form of it that became extinct,to a large extent, the 18th and early 19th century violence against Catholics**.
There is no huge secret as to why antisemitism is rising, IT'S AS OBVIOUS AS THE SCREEN IN FRONT OF YOUR FACE WHILE YOU'RE READING THIS. And antisemitism isn't the only kind of violent hatred that is rising in the same way. Youtube, Facebook, Twitter, other venues of online hate talk and organization of neo-Nazis, the indigenous forms of that in white-supremacy, other, smaller rashes of antisemtic hatred. Their algorithms that feed even the latent tendencies they pick up on in their commercial surveillance which feed more of the same to people who make searches that might imply they would be like more hate.
I would point to the great increase in expressed hatred for the Jewish religious tradition in atheism and academic culture as a possible contributing factor - a lot of that coming from atheists. Some of the most viciously antisemtic content I've seen online is anti-religious and some of that comes from atheists who are ethnically identified as Jewish. When you insist that nothing is sacred, you might not like how far that goes. You might just find the one you desacralize, is YOU. When morality is inverted or debunked, all forms of hate are allowable, anything is allowable, the only thing inhibiting you is what you figure you can't get away with.
There is, certainly, anti-Zionism that turns to antisemitism and that is directly related, in many cases, to the actions of the Israeli government. And you can't separate that from what the United States does which aids or permits their actions in that regard. To leave out the part that the Likud fascists who rule Israel and what they have done in Lebanon, the West Bank, Gaza, etc. not to mention the expulsion policies of the Israeli government is grossly dishonest. Anyone who pretends that such actions don't provoke a response which will include either the generation or magnification of antisemitism is lying and are not interested in finding out how to fight it. And related to that there is the effort to blur the distinction between anti-Zionism or even just criticism of Israel for the kind of actions that have that result and what is really antisemitism.
The real question is whether or not we really want to suppress antisemitism and antisemitic violence. If you REALLY want to stop that, it comes with a cost and a risk. Though the risk in this case has been grotesquely and dishonestly magnified. Whether those who will, no doubt, talk about it in the media really want to address the part that "free hate speech-free hate press" the stuff that those pious, free speechy, bluestocking (of both genders) ACLU types will piously declare we MUST allow or talk of equality and love and allowing people to follow whatever religion they wish to will be fatally imperiled. That is, of course a huge pile of smelly primate shit. What endangers equality and love speech is hate speech. What endangers true speech are lies, propaganda. And as "free press-free speech" absolutism has replaced any kind of real morality, as it becomes a required scruple, it results in de-facto bans on telling even the hardest truths, of speaking that inconvenient speech. With the free-speech-press absolutism came an increase in hate speech, bigoted speech. Anyone wants to know what inspires the attacks, it's hate talk freely allowed.
* I'll have to look for the link to that piece about All In The Family by Laura Z. Hobson mentioned below. I think the part that that show had in permitting the reintroduction of overt racism in the media cannot be overestimated, no matter what the intentions of those who produced it were. It backfired, disastrously.
** The attacks on Synagogues today have their equivalent in attacks on Catholic churches, schools and other institutions in the 18th and 19th centuries, less so, today.
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