Thread by @NudderingNudnik

Short thread:

Ok, here goes: i think @Kevin_Maguire's actions today are probably racist.
That's a serious judgement to make about anybody and if untrue could be legally actionable.
So common sense and decency should dictate that anyone making such an allegation can back it up.

@Kevin_Maguire So here goes.

Firstly, this isn't really about Kevin. He's an editor of a leading daily tabloid with close ties to the Labour Party leadership but nonetheless he's only useful here as an exemplar, albeit a high profile one.

@Kevin_Maguire The case against Kevin's actions could be made about literally tens, probably hundreds of thousand of other Labour supporters.

The case rests on one word: exceptionalism.
Probably best defined in this case as the belief that a group is different to all others.

@Kevin_Maguire And that therefore shall be - should be, in fact -treated differently to all others.
And that's what Kevin has done today (again) to British Jews.
Kevin tweets out Michael Rosen approvingly and uses Rosen as an equivalence to the Chief Rabbi of Orthodox Jews (I'm Reform btw).

@Kevin_Maguire Jews have endured years of this at the hands of Kevin's fellow Socialists. One day it's Rosen, next it's Illan Pappe, next it's the Neturei Karta: there's a list of around 100 names that commonly appear.
This Hot 100 is used to refute the values and beliefs of Jews.

@Kevin_Maguire Because someone in this list says anything from Jews are bad, Israel is evil, we control the media, the world, Zionism is racism etc etc etc then for Kevin & the rest the beliefs, values thoughts, feelings, allegiances and politics of around 90-95% of British Jews are nullified.

@Kevin_Maguire At best perhaps they are not nullified - they're just seen as broadly equivalent. They might (on a really good day) matter no more or no less than whatever the Hot 100 is saying at that moment.
On a bad day the Hot 100 are proof that we (the rest) are lying, mendacious & scheming

@Kevin_Maguire Ok - so back to the word of today: exceptionalism.

And for that we need a thought experiment. And this one has a name: Diamond & Silk.

For the uninitiated, D&S are high profile Trump supporters who are black.
Why high profile?
That's easy - because they are black.

@Kevin_Maguire When Trump was elected to power in 2016 he enjoyed the support of just 8% of the Afro-American community.
89% voted for Hilary Clinton.
So D&S got a LOT of attention and were of course presented by the Trump campaign as PROOF that he was not a racist.

@Kevin_Maguire But i literally never saw Kevin or any other Socialist Corbyn supporter tweet out approvingly about D&S or write long pieces about how they represented the real voice of African-Americans, as opposed to ,for example, the NAACP.

Now, why was that?

@Kevin_Maguire The answer is of course easy. Because Kevin & the rest saw through the D&S scenario and could parse the meaning within milliseconds: this was (as @gabrielmilland puts it so well) Minstrelism.
The projection of a racist idealised form of the African-American as subservient.

@Kevin_Maguire @gabrielmilland And Kevin & the rest knew instantly that - whilst D&S undoubtedly do exist & do indeed support Trump - this is not the AUTHENTIC voice & experience of black America.
And so Kevin & the others would never, ever endorse or encourage that narrative.

@Kevin_Maguire @gabrielmilland Because they understood it to be a marginal experience that was instrumentalised by a hostile political force.
Who would endorse or encourage that? Not Kevin.

And so we turn to today. To exceptionalism.
Because for British Jews the same rules do not apply.
We are different.

@Kevin_Maguire @gabrielmilland What @Kevin_Maguire did to British Jews today is easy to describe: he Diamond & Silked us.
Because the normal rules of progressive - hell, of even vaguely liberal decent 21st Century cultural forms - simply do not apply to Jews.

@Kevin_Maguire @gabrielmilland As i said, Kevin isn't special. It's just that as an editor of a mainstream newspaper he's very visible.
But Jews have been on the end of this toxic othering, this exceptionalism for years.

We've been Diamond & Silked so often that almost no one notices or cares anymore.

@Kevin_Maguire @gabrielmilland Why spend time writing this thread?

So that when the history of this collapse into racist populism is finally written, @Kevin_Maguire might (in my dreams at least) be remembered as "the newspaper editor who Diamond & Silk'd the Jews".

Ends.

Concept inspired by @MrsNuddering