What's wrong with the world

[james_davis_nicoll]

Commies. Definitely Commies.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

They've been fairly successful in tarring left critics of US foreign policy and Israeli policy with anti-Semitism for many years.

It seems to me that the effectiveness of this attack is starting to decrease, in part because liberal American Jews are calling bullshit on it, and in part because the attack is also associated with the profoundly creepy apocalyptic Christian evangelical fixation on Israel.

(Now, there's a germ of truth there: occasionally you see foreign-policy leftists approvingly citing Buchananite paleocons, who don't even really try hard to hide their motivations. I'm not sure this is the right way to reach across the political divide.)

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

It's not my group, but my sense is that reflex support of Israel has almost no impact on the votes of American Jews younger than forty. Those who vote Republican would vote Republican anyway; those who vote Democratic would vote Democratic anyway.

By the same factor, though, it would take a lot of open anti-Semitism to make Republican Jews under forty shift their vote. But that would be 2% * (1/4) Jewish Republican * (1/3) under-40 Republicans ~ 0.2% of the voting public, and to the extent that they're geographically concentrated, they're completely overwhelmed by Democratic Latina women, to choose a not-entirely random example.

So there won't be much of an internal check to the slow bubbling up of money-grubbing Christ-killer rhetoric. I saw a dedicated mainline Protestant Republican from a Southern state that went blue make an half-step beyond questionable anti-Semitic Soros joke on the FB.

But I guess it's not really anti-Semitic if you don't use the word "kike."

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think the post-9/11 distortion of American politics gave reflex support of Israel and foreign-policy neoconservatism some extra life. I also think that distortion is getting close to its sell-by date, though obviously Americans weren't pacifists or anti-imperialists to begin with and aren't going to become such now.

[carloshasanax.livejournal.com]

I've been watching Turkey ease into the role of local Great Power again. Turkey has three times the GDP as Israel on what's looking like a transition curve -- per capita, it's roughly where Israel was in the 1970s. Turkey spends 2% of its GDP on the military. Israel spends 7%.

Don't have to be a genius to figure that one out.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Thank goodness from Israel's point of view that Israel and Turkey have generally been amicable and that there are no inherent reasons Israel should want to piss Turkey off. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel%E2%80%93Turkey_relations#2010_Gaza_flotilla_raid)

[avram]

I doubt any national-level Republican politicians care much about Jewish votes, but they do care about wealthy Jewish political contributors.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Not named George Soros.

[agent-mimi.livejournal.com]

That's what is so confusing about this anti-Semitic streak. They will slam all Jewish people for being Commies and Socialists and Stalinists, then sound almost sympathetic with Jewish people for being bamboozled by the leftists who obviously all hate Israel. At least I've seen a few people lately point out that the evangelicals are basically co-opting Israel for Apocalypse Porn.

When I started noticing the anti-Semitic junk applied so heavily to the Benghazi situation, I was surprised. Today on Twitter, though, now that Cantor is pretending he put security over politics, I'm seeing crazy tweets that make me think the mere presence of a Jew (Cantor) in the Petraeus stuff triggered the usual anti-Semitic suspects. So perhaps the Benghazi "reasoning" was just crazy-thought: "Benghazi is in the Middle East, so is Israel, ergo this is all about Jews."

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The American right desperately wanted Benghazi to be the Iran hostage crisis, but what it really appears to be is this year's Whitewater.

It's already been agglomerated with a sex scandal ahead of schedule; unfortunately it was connected with one of the previous administration's god-heroes instead of to Obama himself, which just means that extra crazy-thought has to be applied.