Again, I’d suggest you take the time to review the report’s methodology when it comes to this issue. Beyond the pull quote I provided they give many examples from the corpus. The ADL seems to be making a distinction between criticisms of the policies of the State of Israel or the base ideology of Zionism on the one hand and overtly anti-Semitic sentiments on the other. I’m sure the tech companies who use the corpus will be taking that into account – good machine-learning takes stated human goals into account, and the ADL makes this clear. As a result…
Probably not, unless your criticism also incorporates overtly anti-Semitic canards or hatred. From the examples given in the report that’s what the ADL considers anti-Semitic, for obvious reasons.
Put another way: I’d worry more about Twitter screwing up a detection algorithm based on this corpus than I would about the ADL acting in bad faith by conflating anti-Semitism with anti-Zionism.
Was just talking to a friend in Crown Heights. Seems theres been a few more incidents of Jews there being attacked on the streets, swastikas painted on apartment doors or doorknobs. Its been happening for a while lately even before the recent flare up of kinetic conflict in Gaza.
Another friend of mine told me last week that his wife was followed in the metro in Paris and had insults shouted at her until she got near some patrolling soldiers.
And twitter. And facebook. etc.
And every one of these discussions where the ADL gets pilloried over unrelated matters.
And every one of these discussions which devolves into uniformed discussion of conflict since 1948.
And the whataboutism that always comes up.
Or “why dont you just get off the internet/that internet service” which quite honestly reads as “the world would be better without your kind”
You have my sympathy and support (yeah I know, fat lot of good but hey). If its any consolation, were it to come to a fight I would be in your corner.
For what little its worth I remember the 70s in London. Things were pretty nasty and it got tiring being perpetually on guard. Being to slow in assessing the situation could easily result in a bad beating or worse.
It occurs to me it would be interested to compare a (hypothetical) comparison study carried out by the NAACP results in a similar study. It’s a bit weird that concepts like “Jew” or “Colored” push some people’s buttons, and incidentally I know that at least one of these terms is “outdated and antiquated” (I wonder, a bit, about the other one).
What seems even more weird, though, is how little I know about the demography of the people who “see red” when thinking about these minorities. Are they united on religious, economic, or ethnic lines? If they hate, e.g., Jewish people, what do they like? Maybe there’s a way to study hate ideologies with a degree of compassion, with the goal not just of countering “hate speech” but ultimately bringing about change in the underlying premises on which the speech is based. What would that look like?
Could be a local thing I suppose… not sure if I should find that more or less disturbing.
According to dictionary.com, it goes back to 1848 with “jew” meaning to cheat to drive a hard bargain itself going back to 1824. Both Webser’s an OED’s American edition have it listed.
The tropes deployed against African-Americans are as well understood and documented as the tiresome canards against Jewish people found in this report, which is more focused on pointing out the uptick in anti-Semitic rhetoric in social media and providing a dataset and rubric that can be used by social media companies to reverse that trend.
In the U.S. they’re united by various combinations of privilege based on skin colour (white), religious heritage (Christian) and, in the case of sexists, gender (male) and sexual orientation (cisgender).
People like themselves.
It’s difficult to have compassion for entitled people who think their ambitions have been thwarted not by their own shortcomings or by an economy that they’ve been repeatedly told is rigged against them but by conspiracies promoting “(((alien))) ideas” that allow “undeserving” people to get what they can’t. We can approach it from understanding rather than compassion, but either way the bigots themselves are going to take it as condescension.
The only effective approach is to make bigoted and sexist speech unacceptable as a matter of policy on any non-governmental public rostrum that wants to be considered reputable. This limits the number of people (especially young people, especially young men) who will be exposed to this discredited but persistent garbage for the first time, and pushes it back to the fringes where it resided in the West for 60 years. There are a number of ways to achieve this goal, and the ADL report suggests one approach.
Nobody believes themselves to be a bad person, ergo simple logic dictates that those who are not like them (the “others”) must be bad.
A study was done some time ago about how racism develops in children quite naturally when parents avoid the topic and the children are in a racially homogeneous environment. I.e. non-racist parents can have racist children, simply by not making an overt effort to counter such thinking!
In summary, when people have problems, and they themselves are “good”, then the problems must be the fault of people who are “bad”.
The answer is education. Most extremists who have turned away from their past have the same story in common, they became exposed to the “other” and learned they weren’t so different (or bad) after all.
I grew up with that term as part of my adolescent vocabulary in that very context and had to work to remove it (and the idea of using “gay” as a pejorative for something “bad”) pretty aggressively as a twenty-something. Both terms are still used pervasively in this way, and that can’t stop quickly enough.
For us, we get it from the left and the right, the rich and the poor and from every religious orientation. The well educated and unschooled, white collar, blue collar and so on. Even the voiciverious anti-racists can agree with the KKK on this one.
It is quite real I assure you. For some its just another excuse, for some its a dog whistle and for some its a red line between “jews are acceptable as long as they are weak and pitiable” and something like “how dare those Jews stand up for themselves and not know their place”. This one comes up very frequently in times of kinetic conflict.
For some its a misunderstanding that we are “white” and not a unique people. Most folks in the west have never met a dark skinned Jew much less a black Jew. Part of that misunderstanding is rooted in the idea that being a Jew is “only” about religious practice. People have said to me that the idea of a Jewish homeland makes no sense because there is no Christian homeland.
Lots of the catalog of anti-semitic tropes are used equally as anti-zionist tropes. Blood libels, Jews/zionists control X and so on. Sometimes these are done “humorously” like a recent thing in The Onion which even non Jewish friends of mine commented was blood libel. The “Israel is trying to start WW3 and Zionists control the US” is just a recycled concept from Protocols.
Also if you see me as a bastard then so be it. We deserve our homeland and the need that Theodore Herzl expanded upon 100 years ago is just as real today. If I’m a bastard Jew because I stand up instead of grovel (i.e. I dont know my proper place) then I wear the label proudly.
There is a classic line of argument putting the opposing view…
…and that’s where it gets problematic.
I’m more accustomed to considering these issues from an analysis of white supremacy rather than antisemitism. In that context, one of the key points is that education is not the answer, because ignorance is not the problem.
Racism = prejudice + power.
The liberal “solve racism by education” approach (ineffectively) addresses the prejudice while completely ignoring the power aspect. White supremacy didn’t happen by accident, and it is not sustained without reason. The injustice and inequality it produces create the society we live in.
Yeah, I know. But the difference is something that I’m still trying to get my head around.
There is a convincing class/imperialism/capitalism explanation for white supremacy: it’s profitable. Western capitalism is built upon a foundation of exploiting the global south.
Antisemitism, OTOH, is not obviously beneficial to the ruling class in the current day. Which makes it more difficult to understand.
I think it is obviously beneficial. “The more a lot of people think it’s ‘da Jews!’ who are really running things and hoarding all the money, the fewer there are who see that it’s us doing that!”
