David Bernstein Profile picture
Nov 3 3 tweets 1 min read Read on X
There's a noticeable dearth of commentary on the left about Carlson-Fuentes-gate. Shouldn't this be their big moment in the sun? They have been claiming for decades that if you scratch the surface of American right, you will fight racists, white supremacists, and neo-Nazis. 1/
Why aren't they screaming "we were right" from the rooftops? And I'm afraid the answer is, at best, that they are enjoying watching the American conservative movement implode. And at worst, they are happy the antisemites are coming out of woodwork because they think that 2/
it will hurt Israel, and that is their current obsession, and they aren't going to let their "principles" about racism, sexism, nativism, and so on, or even their specific hatred of Naziism, get in the way. /end

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More from @ProfDBernstein

Nov 3
Most notoriously, before the first Gulf War, he wrote that there were only two groups "beating the drums for the war in the Mideast," and that was the Israeli Defense Ministry and its "amen corner" in the United States, and then you went on to say later that "kids with names like McAllister, Murphy, Gonzalez, and Leroy Brown were going to do the fighting."
As William F. Buckley concluded: "There is no way to read that sentence without concluding that Pat Buchanan was suggesting that American Jews manage to avoid personal military exposure even while advancing military policies they uniquely engineered," and, I would add, that those policies would be at the expense, intentionally of non-Jews. 1/
What makes it especially egregious is that it was simply false. Not only was there an obvious precipitating caus for the war that had nothing to do with Israel, Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, but a total of 42 countries joined the US-led coalition against Iraq, and contributed troops. 2/
@MattWalshBlog To think that it was Israel, and its (Jewish) supporters in Congress, that were responsible for the war, you'd have to explain how they managed to get 41 other countries to agree with them, including some Arab and Muslim countries that were very hostile to Israel. 3/
Read 5 tweets
Nov 3
@gracecamille_ If you think Zionism has anything to do with "white supremacy," saying that you are an ignorant fool would be a gross understatement. 1/
@gracecamille_ Like any ideology, Zionism, the idea that Jews should have a modern homeland in part of their ancient homeland, which in turn means simply that Israel should continue to exist, is subject to criticism. 2/
@gracecamille_ I think we are all familiar with many of those criticisms, which can come from a "anti-colonialist," Islamist, anti-nationalist, pan-Arabist, and several other perspectives. 3/
Read 9 tweets
Oct 31
Well, Ron should have rethought the last sentence, but there is an important point here: Christianity has historically defined Judaism by its rejection of Jesus. But Jews don't define themselves that way at all. Jesus just isn't part of Judaism, period. 1/
I've met well-meaning Christians who have asked me, "but Jews think that Jesus was a great rabbi, he just wasn't the messiah or Son of God, right?" Nope. Jesus just isn't part of Judaism. He isn't in our holy books, he isn't part of our rabbinical literature, he is just the 2/
leader of a separate religion--a religion, by the way, that Judaism is generally fine with, except for occasional theological debate over the years over whether certain forms of Catholic iconography cross the line into idol worship. 3/
Read 4 tweets
Oct 31
Again: The rise of identity politics on the right was an entirely predictable reaction to the Great Awokening and its identity politics, including demonizing white people as a class.
That doesn't in any way exonerate the dipsticks who are promoting racism, antisemitism, nativism, and so on. 1/
But again, it was entirely predictable, which I can say because I (among others) predicted it, but any attempts to warn the identitarian left about it were met with one of two objections. 2/
On the more moderate left, we were told not to worry about it because, essentially, "it can't happen here." 3/
Read 4 tweets
Oct 28
It's important to reiterate that Nazi antisemitism is not only not the only form of antisemitism, it's aberrational in that it thought every Jew an enemy warranting extermination. More standard political antisemitism tends to have a conspiratorial tone blaming Jews for everything, 1/
BUT, it exempts the "right kind" of Jews. The right kind may be Jews who convert to Christianity, Jews who adopt the right political ideology, Jews who join antisemites in attacking other Jews, etc. Antisemite @MearsheimerJ exempts "righteous Jews," for example. 2/
So, to be direct about it: the fact that Mamdani has a reasonably large group of Jewish leftists around him doesn't mean he's not an antisemite. It does mean he's not overly prejudiced against individual Jews, and is willing to accept or even embrace them if they agree with his /3
Read 8 tweets
Oct 26
In all seriousness, part of the Mamdani phenomenon, and the related growth of "socialism" in the circles of young, highly educated Democrats is that the traditional jobs you'd get as a humanities major from fancy liberal arts colleges--publishing, media, paralegal--have disappeared. 1/
You are an under-30 graduate in English, Art History, etc from the likes of Vassar, Smith, Oberlin, and move to NYC to make your fortune like prior generations. You aren't likely to get a job at the Times, or Harper & Collins, or Sullivan & Cromwell. 2/
So you find yourself working retail or waiting tables, and you are seething with resentment. You did everything you were supposed to. You were a star high school student, you checked every box to get into an elite college, you won the social justice essay competition in your freshman writing seminar. 3/
Read 6 tweets

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