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A new low for the New Republic

Via Daniel Sugarman, I found this article by Talia Jane in the New Republic.

Before I quote from it, I must apologise for quoting myself. Over the last few days, I, like many other people, have talked about several instances of blatant Jew-hatred in New York. So that this post will stand alone, I am going to repeat part of what I said then:

The video [posted by “KosherCockney”] shows a bunch of supporters of the Palestinians, their faces hidden by keffiyehs or black ski masks, who have evidently just poured into a New York subway carriage. The ordinary travellers stand rigid or sit hunched with their eyes down, trying to avoid being selected.

The leader of the pro-Palestinians says, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”

Activists: “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist.”

Leader: “This is your chance to get out.”

Activists: “This is your chance to get out.”

Understandably, none of the travellers raise their hands.

The progressive says with satisfaction, “OK, no Zionists. We’re good.”

I do not think it is an exaggeration to hear in that sentiment an echo of the Nazi term “Judenfrei”.

I urge you to watch the video if you have not yet seen it. Now read how Talia Jane describes it:

The fourth incident Biden references is perhaps the most disingenuous: Protesters filled subway cars while commuting from Union Square to Wall Street during Within Our Lifetime’s protest. As the car filled with pro-Palestine demonstrators, one protester jokingly remarked to the car, “Raise your hand if you’re a Zionist. This is your chance to get out,” a nod to the density of pro-Palestine protesters on the subway train. This remark was reinterpreted by the mayor as a threat, with calls to identify the protester and a spokesperson for the mayor stating, “Threatening New Yorkers based on their beliefs is not only vile, it’s illegal and will not be tolerated.”

“I was just kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” Bullies learn to say that in the school playground. Antifa activists and other racist persecutors quickly graduate to the the group version: “Can’t you people take a joke?” As a line to use while intimidating members of the public, it is effective in several ways. It both shields the racists from being punished for threatening behaviour, and torments their victims a second time, by forcing them to either deny that it was all a joke and admit how afraid they were, or to pretend to laugh along for fear of worse, and thus become complicit in their own humiliation. Both of these responses give the fanboys and fangirls like Talia Jane a good laugh.

12 comments to A new low for the New Republic

  • bobby b

    In this day and age, (here in the non-woke US at least), if you overuse that “I was just kidding. Can’t you take a joke?” line, you might be uttering it as you bleed out.

    You never know who’s armed these days! (And that’s a good thing. An armed society IS a polite society.)

  • Fraser Orr

    There few greater advocates of free speech than I, but I have to say that whenever people are saying things with their face covered I think they are cowards and don’t have to guts to stand up for what they believe in. And when I hear that thing where the Leader says this and the bleating sheep repeat it, I just roll my eyes. It is so pathetic that they evidently can’t think for themselves, can’t think of something that expresses their views. They just have to bleat along like sheep. I can honestly say that I have never done that, ever, one time in my life. (FWIW, it reminds me of the speak and response stuff you see in Catholic masses, which also makes me roll my eyes.)

    It is like claiming to be oh so edgy, but they aren’t, they are just fitting in with the crowd. Like the loser students walking around with Che t-shirts with no idea who Che Guevara was and how he’d have rounded up the whole bunch of them and put them in a concentration camp if they were lucky and he was short of bullets.

    Don’t get me wrong, I think that was a threatening situation, but when I listened to it it just struck me how pathetic the participants were, not just because of their ridiculous views, but because of the loser way they expressed them.

  • John

    Siri, What is misinformation?

    last year, the BBC claimed that “racial slurs about Muslims” could be heard coming from inside the bus.

    However, the audio was disputed. The phrase which the BBC had interpreted as “dirty Muslims”, said in English, was identified by others as a Hebrew phrase which translated as: “Call someone, it’s urgent.”

    The BBC received complaints about its interpretation and, in a report obtained on December 9, the BBC’s own translators disagreed on which phrase was used.

    Yet the broadcaster did not update its online news article for almost eight weeks. Ofcom criticised the BBC for failing to respond despite its reporting “causing significant distress and anxiety to the victims of the attack and the wider Jewish community

  • Paul Marks

    It was not “jokingly” – it was a chant and, yes, it was an implied threat.

    The “New Republic” is lying – but then, like the rest of the “mainstream media” (and academia and basically every other institution), it lies about everything – from historic temperature figures, to election results, to civil and criminal trials.

    We have reached a stage where State Bar Associations threaten (yes threaten) any lawyer who opposes obviously rigged elections, or even tries to expose obviously rigged civil and criminal trials before Kangaroo Courts.

    As many people have pointed out before – the left have murdered the institutions, but walk around wearing the skins of the institutions they have murdered, pretending to be academic scientists, judges, journalists, and so on.

    So all this is not “just about the Jews” (although Jews having to leave New York City is a tragedy) – it is about everyone.

  • Paul Marks

    The Mayor of New York City is not an evil man – and, by Democrat standards, he is a moderate. But he is in an impossible position – where both the finances and the culture (the society) of the city are collapsing.

    Get out of New York City and the other big Democrat controlled cities – and get out now (whether you are Jewish or not), sell up, for whatever you can get, and leave.

  • jgh

    The worst thing is they *are* cowards, snivvling pathetic cowards, as demonstrated by the refusal to reveal their faces while bullying people.

    COWARD COWARD COWARD COWARD COWARD COWARD

    It should be thrown back at them.

    SHOW. YOUR. FACE. YOU. FUCKING. COWARD.

  • Sigivald

    “See, this wasn’t a threat that the Other should LEAVE OR FACE VIOLENCE.

    No, no, it was only about crowding, you see. Just a little too densely packed, tee hee.”

  • It sounds like they think it’s funny. They are in a good mood, celebrating their power as a group. It is not exactly a micro-aggression though is it? It is at least a medium sized aggression by comparison.

  • It sounds like they think it’s funny.

    Listening to the video, I have to agree with Simon. I didn’t comment earlier because I’m usually bad at reading emotions & subtext, so there’s a good chance I was wrong anyway.

    However, Simon’s also right about it not mattering, even if none of the chanters hated ‘Zionists’. Activists set the threshold for harassment at ‘If the person feels threatened, regardless of intent’. If you think it’s unreasonable for someone to feel threatened by what you said/did? Well, that just shows how privileged you are, to have lived a life where you can assume that your threats would automatically be recognized as jokes.

    Of course, it is reasonable for Jews to think those chants were threats. Since credentialed professors assured us that ‘[People parachuting into a peaceful crowd to murder them, and take captives for rape and torture] is what decolonialism looks like’, there’s reason for Jews to see threats in a lot of places they would have overlooked in the past.

  • JB

    So threats can only be threats if the person making the threat isn’t laughing? Here in the real world, some of us have seen one person beat the living sh*t out of another while they laughed.

  • JB

    How about if your 80 year old Jewish parent was on that train and heard that? Don’t worry, they’re laughing, no need to have a stroke or heart attack. How about if the threat was simply waving a gun around – WHILE LAUGHING. Clearly no threat, after all, he’s fucking laughing.

  • JB

    We have truly entered the Clown Age

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