You can read about the making of this video here.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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What charmers!
(BTW: shergald posted this in the afternoon)
I was surprised at how drunk people were at 10pm. Do the bars close early in Jerusalem?
I made it about 1/3 of the way through that piece of shit before stopping. That’s some pretty fucked up shit.
you missed the amusing part at the end.
Chabad rabbi aims to clarify remarks on killing civilians
Galilee communities: We’re not racist, we just don’t want Arabs:
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090527.html
Shulamit Aloni / Israel is controlled by religious fanaticism
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1090366.html
To be fair, it wouldn’t be hard to find a bunch of drunk college-age kids anywhere in the world and assemble a short video full of highly offensive speech about any group you like. I’m pretty sure I could assemble a similar video that depicts the “American street” as hating [insert political leader here] and wanting to oppress [insert “them” du jour here]. That most of the people in the video are, in fact, Americans, says more about the American right than it does about the Israeli right. That they are mostly very young people is even less compelling: the narcissism, shallowness, and lack of empathy among the young is why they are used preferentially as soldiers and concentration camp guards.
I’d go on at length about the obvious, loathsome dishonesty involved in trolling dive bars for less than ideal specimens of humanity and implying that the represent the larger society from which they come, but I can only assume that everyone here has already seen The Eternal Jew and recognizes the technique.
I’m no friend of Israel — I do not accept its purported right to exist and think that the European colonists should be expelled from Palestine — but this kind of base, transparent, and frankly unethical propaganda piece makes me ashamed to be a member of the American left audience it is aimed at. The only thing missing is the Prague cemetery.
Let’s please try, as we battle monsters, not to become monsters, shall we?
Frankly, I think we all know the limitations of such sampling techniques. Jay Leno’s man on the street interviews are a case in point. The video is instructive for a simple reason. That type of sentiment towards our president is not something you would see in this country wherever you might find Jews gathered together to have a few beers. It’s surprising to see any kind of collective contempt for Obama from college students.
It shows that there is some kind of disconnect and demonstrates that achieving peace will be extremely difficult.
Ever heard of the College Republicans? About the only thing they haven’t done in recent years is burn crosses. At least not as an official function; I can’t vouch for what their members do on their own time. And given their obnoxiousness, I’d be willing to bet that if you walk into a bar with more than a handful of College Republicans, you’ll find a bunch of them and not much of anyone else.
Would you likely find a bunch of young right-wing American Jews inside the United States having a few beers and being willing to say things like that on camera? Probably not, but that almost certainly has a lot more to do with social norms and their minority status than it does with sentiment.
Look, I’m not saying that there aren’t a lot of bigots in Israel — Zionism is inherently racist. All I’m saying is that the people who produced this video had a point to prove, and they specifically and selectively sought out evidence to support it and presented it in such a way to create the impression that it was a representative sample of Israelis as a whole when by its very nature it cannot be. The same technique could be applied to make it look like everyone in Israel is in full agreement with Uri Avnery. It doesn’t show anything; it’s pure propaganda.
I don’t think they presented it as a representative sample at all.
How interesting thought that that one bimbo didn’t even know who Netanyahu was.
I think she repeated it as “Benjamin Yahoo”…
a political science major who really knows her shit…
Oh yeah – I forgot that she presented herself as a political science major.
Well you could look at the bigger picture of the racist discrimination Ethiopian Jews face and draw a fair conclusion from that.
If this video is indicative of anything it’s indicative of a comfort level with public racism that I doubt they’d have if they were in Manhattan or Chicago.
Or the rich history of racism against “Oriental” Jews that dates all the way back to the beginning of Zionism. And this despite the fact that Arab Jews, particularly Iraqi Jews, have a far more credible claim to descent from the Hebrews than most European Jews do.
Oh yes, the Khazar myth. You do know, don’t you, that genetic sequence studies over the past decade have conclusively disproven that and equally conclusively established the genetic relationship of the Ashkenazim to middle eastern Jews and other ME gene pools?
The Jewish claim to Palestine is illegitimate because there is no ancestral right to land, not because the ancestry is fabricated. I have absolutely no right to steal land from the current inhabitants of Denmark just because I have Viking ancestors — even if my Viking ancestors probably would have considered such an action entirely legitimate, unlike them, I am not an iron age savage. Nowadays, we just buy land from people who are willing to sell it.
(To my great surprise, when my mother had her mitochondrial DNA sequenced this year, we discovered that we, too, have Ashkenazi ancestry, along with the expected English, Irish, Scots, and Scandinavians. I remain completely uninterested in settling in Palestine, however.)
Don’t make assumptions, Crow. I was not referring to the Khazar business, nor do I give a damn about it whether it is factual or not. It has never held so much as a scintilla of interest for me. A decent study of Zionism shows that it is utterly irrelevant in the Zionist context whether a given Jew, or any of the Jews for that matter has a genealogical connection to the Hebrews, and even if one could prove that Ashkenazi Jews originally came from Mars rather than the Middle East it would not be useful to delegitimize their claim to Palestine. The Zionist claim to Palestine is illegitimate, as you pointed out, whether or not they have real ancestral ties to the Hebrews. And in any case do adherents to the Khazar theory seriously believe that if their lack of ancestral connection could be proven Ashkenazi Jews would pack their bags and leave Israel? The Khazar bit is, at best, a waste of time.
The Iraqi Jewish population are descended from the Hebrews who were taken as slaves to the region during Babylonian times, and their bloodline is relatively pure. Their ancestral connection is virtually undeniable. European Jews, on the other hand, can make no such claims. Therefore, it is very ironic that European Jews are so racist toward Iraqi and other “Oriental” Jews.
If you recreated a Viking ship and sailed there with a crew clothed in animal hides and bearing large axes in an attempt to take Denmark I would back you 100% just for the lolz!
Heh. I think the real challenge would be convincing the locals that we were indeed serious and not just another bunch of Viking reenactors. Then we would march over their prone, belly-laughing bodies to victory!
Not only is the racism shocking, but it is amazing that what are obviously young Americans are so willing to have it put on film. Apparently, travel beyond our borders has emboldened them to such an extent that they feel free to say things that likely would not be verbalized here.
You know, they’re so far from home that video or other media can’t make it back…or something.
Out of the mouth of babes.
And I wonder of American non-profits paid for those trips [Aliyah], when that tax money could have stayed here.
I’m guessing that they were on one of those “birthright Israel” free trips provided to young Americans in the hope of luring them into moving to Israel. They sure are attracting high quality potential new Israelis!
Maybe they are attracting exactly what they want.
Witnessing the unfettered hostility & aggressiveness I can’t help but wonder if similar actions in years past is what bred Arab hostility towards Jews prior to the founding of Israel.
It is not difficult to picture these ignorant thugs being part of the Irgun.
I think the Irgun spread hostility through their actions more than their attitude. Mainstream Zionists certainly shared an attitude of entitlement that Arabs would find naturally distasteful. But mainstream Zionists also shared with the Arabs a distaste for the tactics of the Irgun.
But the leaders of Irgun ended up becoming the leaders of Likud.
The the terrorist acts of Irgun DID get the Brits out of Palestine.
As someone who’s spent a ridiculously punishing time reading posts and comments om anti-Obama blogs of the wingnut/PUMA variety, I can’t say I find this all that shocking.
Max Blumenthal answers his critics.
A ‘must read’.
Thanks for that link Hurria.
What I don’t get is the lame defense that “alcohol lowers inhibitions”, which is the exact same lame defense Bay Buchannon is offering for Marcus Epstein physically assaulting a black woman while spewing racial epithets.
I’m pretty sure we’ve all been drunk once or twice in our lifetimes, and I’m equally sure that the vast majority of us haven’t been turned into klan members by the magical powers of demon rum. It doesn’t work like that, and it’s pretty sad that people use something that is a damn near universal experience as a nonsensical defense for the indefensible.