One of the artefacts resulting from the rise of the smartphone and social media is the phenomenon of abusive racists caught on camera. One such episode took place recently on the London Underground. A man stood over a seated Jewish family with children, ranting at them for about twenty minutes, ignoring the father’s repeated requests to leave them alone. Another man tried to intervene and was threatened with violence. Reportedly, at least three people filmed the episode, and a clip from one of these videos went viral on Twitter and then appeared in the media. The abuser was later identified and arrested. The unpleasant story had a feel good ending, when a hijab-wearing Muslim woman intervened on the Jewish family’s behalf. She was later identified as Asma Shuweikh, and the father met her to personally thank her for her support. What began as a tirade of hatred ended as a story of cross-faith solidarity.
What made many commentators surprised and uncomfortable was that the attacker was a black man. His ideas seemed outlandish, especially the remark that, “These people are impostors, trying to claim my heritage and they’re trying to tell me that’s cool.” He also mentioned the slave trade. He was clearly angry, not just in general but towards the Jewish family in particular. Many Twitter commentators concluded that he must simply be mentally ill—which is possible. However, the strange ideas he mentioned were not simply his own warped inventions, but myths with deep roots in American black nationalist ideology. As a Jewish Londoner with a broad, racially mixed social circle, I have encountered these ideas frequently. I have watched them evolve and become popularised over the past few decades, and, in recent years, fuelled by social media and WhatsApp, they have reached a far broader audience.
The Tube attack may have been seen as an outlier, but, two days later, black men boarded a bus in East London and assaulted a group of Jewish schoolchildren. And a few days after that, two black men beat up a rabbi, while shouting “Kill the Jews,” again in East London. Something was stirring, but this something was not new.
Anti-Semitism does not have a long history in black populations because there have been few deep historic ties between black and Jewish people. Ethiopia has an ancient Jewish population, but Ethiopia is an exception. In the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and the mostly West African diaspora in the Americas and Europe, there have been few sustained contacts between black and Jewish communities.
The Nation of Islam
But anti-Semitism did appear on the fringes of black American politics, particularly within a hateful cult called the Nation of Islam, which was founded in 1930. While claiming to be Islamic, the Nation of Islam was in reality a black supremacist organisation, deeply hateful of whites and Jews, incorporating a bizarre set of beliefs, including the claim that white people were the creation of a black scientist named Yakub, who lived 6,600 years ago. Perhaps the NoI would never have become the large, wealthy organisation it is today if it had not recruited Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X and then El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz) while he was in prison. Malcolm’s rhetorical skill, charismatic good looks and genius-level intellect helped drive the NoI to mass recognition. His intellect was also his downfall. As he began to travel widely outside the United States, he began to doubt the race hate of the NoI, and questioned whether its faith was genuinely Islamic. He left the Nation and openly challenged the views and corruption of its leader, Elijah Muhammed. For this, the NoI had him shot dead in 1965. Malcolm was possibly the great liberal leader America never had, though, sadly, he is best remembered for violent and bigoted views that he renounced in the last part of his life. The iconic picture of him holding a rifle while peeking through curtains is often presented as a black nationalist call to arms; but he was, in fact, watching out for NoI assassins.
Jews and the Civil Rights Movement
However, until the post-civil rights era, the NoI’s racist attitudes remained on the very fringes of American politics. Jews were especially active in the civil rights movement, which was hardly surprising given their own experience of white supremacism in Europe in the 1940s, under which the majority of European Jews were slaughtered (over 100 of my own paternal relatives died in concentration camps). American Jews had also been targeted by the Ku Klux Klan, which attacked synagogues and black churches alike. Black and Jewish Americans therefore had some common experience of historic injustice and some commonality of purpose.
Once the civil rights cause had been won, however, the civil rights and anti-racist organisations began to be hijacked by more militant black nationalists, and Jews were side-lined. By 1978, this article claims, “Louis Harris found that while anti-Semitism was declining slightly in America ‘blacks tend to be more anti-Jewish than any other group.’”
But the racism of black American communities continued to be largely ignored, both by blacks and by liberal white Americans (who often avoided contact with black people, even while declaring their opposition to racism). By the 1980s, the civil rights movement had morphed into a grievance industry, in which every incident involving black people was labelled racist and provided an opportunity to make money. The new, post-Martin Luther King black leaders, such as Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, were glory chasers, taking advantage of every alleged racist incident to appear in front of the TV cameras, berating white supremacy and stuffing their wallets with the dollars of black anger and white guilt. This new profit-from-racism industry is parodied in the 1987 novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, in which Reverend Bacon (an Al Sharpton-like figure) turns the accidental death of a black boy into an opportunity for a media circus.
In a case of life copying art, in 1991 a black child was run over and killed in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, by a Jewish leader. The resulting race riot offered perhaps the first real window into the extent of black anti-Semitism. A number of Jews were attacked and one killed (as was a non-Jew, who may have been mistaken for Jewish).
The accusation (hinted at during the Tube attack) that Jewish people were heavily involved in the slave trade appears to be an invention of the Nation of Islam, and appears in a 1991 book published by them, called The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews: Volume One (reviewed and challenged in the Atlantic in 1995). This idea lurked in the shadows for many years, until the rise of social media and dumbed-down meme politics. In recent years, I have seen it shared repeatedly and unquestioningly by black friends on Facebook and WhatsApp. This is potent stuff, linking the greatest trauma of black westerners with Europe’s oldest hatred.
Did Whites Steal the Middle East from Blacks?
The idea that Caucasians, and especially Jews, have stolen the culture and history of black people is older and more potent still, dating back to the Afrocentric and pan-Africanist movements that surfaced in America a century or so ago. At that time, black people were accustomed to being presented as culturally (and even biologically) inferior. In order to increase black pride and consciousness, the Afrocentrics created a fictionalised Africa: a wealthy, highly developed place of mighty kingdoms and great cities (one hears the echo of this thinking in Wakanda). Given the extremes of racism suffered by black Americans at that time, the creation of such stories was understandable, and even useful.
But this mythology had a flaw: beyond Ethiopia, there is little evidence of this legacy in sub-Saharan Africa. So the Afrocentrics stretched the truth a little, and pointed out that Egypt (undoubtedly African, at least in geological terms) possessed an ancient and world leading civilisation dating back thousands of years. While this was certainly true, it has long been known that the Egyptians (and other north Africans) were Caucasians who migrated to Africa from the Middle East thousands of years earlier, following the invention of farming in Syria/Iraq around 11,000 years ago. Egypt’s early development had been triggered by its proximity to the Middle East. The people usually referred to as black had different origins: a separate farming revolution in West Africa, around 2,500 years ago, which led to a migration of black people across Africa from west to east. These ideas are backed by archaeological evidence, and supported by DNA taken from Egyptian mummies and other ancient sources.
So the Afrocentrics had, in effect, appropriated North African history and woven it into the culture of black America. As it was retold, this story became ever more elaborate and fantastical. If ancient Egyptians could be black, why not stretch the narrative a few hundred miles further to the north-east and make all of the Middle East black? Now the birthplace of Judaism, Christianity and Islam was, in fact, black. The Hebrews were black. The Bible was therefore written by black men. Jesus was black. And, if the land of Judea was black, why not throw in Persia and Babylon as well? The internet is littered with such claims, none of which are backed by the tiniest shred of solid evidence.
From the mid-70s to the early-80s, I attended a school that was mostly black, and heard these Afrocentric claims repeated often. I clearly remember one teacher’s discomfort, faced with a student’s claim that black people had built the pyramids. Although I didn’t have any grounding in Egyptian history, I could see that the teacher was in possession of facts that he did not want to say out loud in front of thirty black teenagers, many of whom had grown up with Afrocentric and Rastafarian ideas of black supremacy.
But if the ancient Egyptians (Hebrews, Persians, etc.) were black, this poses another problem. Where have all the black people gone? Anyone visiting Egypt, Israel or Morocco can see for themselves that the locals have Caucasian features (even if they are a little darker skinned than Europeans). Before the internet, global news coverage and cheap package holidays, this did not pose a problem for the black supremacist narrative, but now it does. I witnessed this question unfold on a Facebook thread in 2011 when a black friend, having watched TV coverage of the uprising in Tahrir Square, asked in confusion: “But where are the real black Egyptians?” Nobody on the thread offered the obvious explanation (“Those are the original Egyptians”), so instead a long discussion ensued about how, and when, all the original black Egyptians had been cleansed from the region. One man told me vaguely that they had been replaced by Greeks, Arabs and Turks. But when? Surely this great event would have been documented? Another theory (PDF document) suggests that the Yoruba of West Africa originated in ancient Egypt, but abandoned their homeland and migrated thousands of miles to the south-west, for reasons unknown.
This was the inevitable end logic of Afrocentrism: if one is certain that the ancient Egyptians were black, and can see that modern Egyptians are not black, then the modern Egyptians must be the descendants of imposters, who not only stole the land of black Egyptians, but their languages, religions and symbols, too. This also applies to other Middle Eastern groups, including the Jews who wrote the Old Testament.
The Rise of Wokeness
These myths are too deeply rooted to easily refute. There are countless examples of the appropriation of Egyptian symbolism by woke black Americans: for example, the use of the Egyptian ankh by the soul singer Erykah Badu. Refutation of the myth is dismissed as racism. If white people deny that the Egyptians were once black, this is merely more proof of the depth of white hatred towards blacks. Yet, if this appropriation is merely puzzling or annoying to Egyptians, it is a hundred times more dangerous when turned against Jews. This is why a black man on the Tube felt entitled to shout in the faces of a Jewish family. He truly believed that they had stolen his culture. The fact that they dared to sit there on the train, the Jewish father openly wearing a kippah, was just rubbing the black man’s face in the loss of his (imaginary) history. No wonder he was angry. Anyone would be angry if they believed their entire culture had been stolen by another race of people.
Looking back to the 70s and 80s, I recall a certain level of racism, but never serious anti-Semitism among my black friends. The black British experience was very different from the black American one, and black British consciousness was also different, with a greater sense of racial solidarity and less anti-white feeling than in America. Black and white cultures blended freely in ways that were unknown in the United States.
When first I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X, I began to see how differently race was treated in America. And then, in the late 80s, I began visiting the US, where I saw it for myself. In Harlem, I learned what it was to be invisible. In Brooklyn, I made eye contact with, and then nodded at a black man on the subway, who screamed at me “Who the fuck you looking at, you white bastard?” (the other people on the train just looked at their feet). In Boston, I strolled into a black street party, and again was invisible. In San Diego, I tried to talk to the bass player of a reggae band, who glared at me and turned his back. I was glad I lived in London, but I began to fear this form of hatred could spill over into black British society, and change my own city and life.
American Black Nationalism Comes to Britain
The Nation of Islam arrived in the UK in the wake of the 1993 murder of a young black man, Stephen Lawrence, in order to use the incident to stir up racial tension and recruit British members. By 1998, they had recruited some local members, and announced a 10,000 Man March (a reference to a Million Man March that the NoI organised in Washington DC in 1995). I began to encounter people selling the Final Call, the NoI’s paper. The first time, in Brixton, I tried to buy a copy out of interest, but the vendor pretended I didn’t exist, so I came away empty-handed. A couple of other times in the 90s, I passed Final Call vendors with my then girlfriend (who was black). They would acknowledge her existence, though not mine, hissing “Yo sista,” hatred in their eyes.
Around the same time, I was shocked to see a Nation of Islam float taking part in the Notting Hill Carnival, a West London celebration of racial unity. Here was an openly anti-Semitic group being allowed to take part in a multicultural festival. No white nationalist would have been allowed anywhere near the celebrations —an illustration that, among the politically correct worthies of London politics, black racists were not regarded in the same way as white racists. They were either deemed harmless, or their racism was regarded as having some merit. I have never heard a coherent explanation of how this was allowed to happen
This is how anti-Semitism has become so deeply embedded in black politics. Nobody—neither black leaders nor left-wing anti-racists—deems it their business to challenge it. While we on the left once fought the ideas of racist groups like the National Front and the British National Party, nobody openly challenges black nationalism. A few black Facebook friends tried to challenge racist attitudes around 2011–12, but they were attacked as race traitors and Uncle Toms, and eventually stopped trying. In the back-to-front world of intersectional identity politics, privileged white people are told to shut up and listen to black people, even if the black people happen to be promoting racist or fascist ideologies.
The Black Hebrew Israelites
While the Nation of Islam merely attacks Jewish people (Farrakhan has recently suggested on Twitter that Jews are termites, which hints at a need for eradication), even more hateful groups have been growing in popularity. The Black Hebrew Israelites emerged in America in the late nineteenth century, evangelising the belief that black people are directly descended from the Hebrews of the Bible. These groups have grown rapidly, and have now hopped the Atlantic. I first saw them outside a hip-hop concert in London a couple of years ago, where I was surprised by the sight of some West African-looking men wearing Jewish tallits (prayer shawls). The sister of a Ghanaian friend joined a church linked to the Hebrew Israelites (as did her children). This old friend is now learning to hate the very idea of my existence, and teaching her children the same thing. Black nationalism is tearing apart social links forged over decades.
I have little doubt that the Tube incident, and the recent attacks in East London, are linked to the Black Hebrew Israelites. Earlier this year, Hebrew Israelites were reported to be conducting aggressive street preaching exercises in Stamford Hill, an Orthodox Jewish area in London. And yet there has been no notable outcry, beyond the pages of the Jewish press. There have been no counter-protests. Antifa has not shown up to defend the Jewish people. There has been no broader response from the left. The Jews of Stamford Hill feel alone and isolated.
The shooting of three people in a kosher supermarket in New Jersey on 10th December was also reportedly carried out by a supporter of the Black Hebrew Israelites. In the past couple of years, there have been repeated reports of attacks on synagogues in Brooklyn by black people, suggesting that the racism exposed in the Crown Heights riots almost 30 years ago is still as strong as ever.
Anti-Semitism and Intersectionality
All this comes at a time when anti-Semitism is rising steeply among the British left. The British progressive anti-racist coalition, which stood up for Jewish people in the 1930s and 40s, black people in the 50s and 60s, Asians in the 70s and 80s and Muslims after 9/11, no longer exists. In its place is the new, intersectional identity politics, a toxic and divisive movement of the middle classes, which is tugging at the threads of multiracial British society—threads that generations of British natives and immigrants, working together, stitched so carefully. Intersectionality creates racism, by rejecting equality and trying to replace it with something it calls equity, which really means treating people differently based on race or gender. Intersectionality is a segregationist movement.
The solutions to this are simple, in theory. First, we need a rejection of identity politics, and a return to the liberal I Have a Dream and One Love ideals that were prevalent half a century ago. Second, black communities need to step up. It would look awful if all-white anti-racists were to protest against black racists in the streets of Jewish areas. Black people need to acknowledge the racist and nationalist ideas in their communities, and start working to dismantle them, just as white people mobilised in their hundreds of thousands to smash the British Union of Fascists, the National Front, the British National Party and the English Defence League. Black people need to stop ignoring black racism, and work against it in the same way as white people have against white racism. We should remember that, like Jews, black people are a minority (albeit far more numerous than the Jewish minority). We should remember Martin Niemöller’s famous words:
First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.
51 comments
“Anyone would be angry if they believed their entire culture had been stolen by another race of people” if and only if that “anyone” blamed his personal sorry state on a bunch of people who lived a few thousand years ago and thinks he can make things right by attacking their distant descendants.
900,000 people voted BNP in the 2009 Euro elections.
They weren’t smashed but morphed into UKIP and the Brexit Party with more moderate voters and helped break down the Red Wall of Labour.
That indeed was smashed.
Remember how the media responded to the ‘Black Israelites’ racially abusing a group of white schoolboys at the Lincoln Memorial a year ago? They mostly blamed it on the boys. In particular, one of the boys was photographed trying to suppress laughter as an old Native American banged a drum in his face. But much worse was the behavior of the black guys, using racial, homophobic, and other obscene words toward minors. The evidence was easy to find on Youtube – the Black Israelites proudly posted their obscene rant. But the media blamed the white students.
Contrast this with how the media deals with attacks on Jews by Black Israelites. It correctly blames the latter. In effect, its racial hierarchy goes Jews – Blacks – Whites.
I agree with your article, but I encourage you to stop using the term Caucasian for Eurasian people. The term was originally coined by a man who perceived Georgian skulls to be the most perfect and beautiful and hence the Caucasus as the birthplace of white people (And according to his reasoning this was the reason why black people were inferior, since they were living farther away from the Cacasus).
Eurasians also don’t have necessarily to be pale skinned. European hunter and gatherers were probably dark skinned and had blue eyes https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25885519
Then they mixed slowly with neolithic farmers who came from the Middle East. They “brought” the white skin to Europe (So of course you’re right, ancient people from the Middle East weren’t dark skinned, otherwise they couldn’t have whitened the skin of European western and gatherers).
The last largest group who basically invaded Europe were the Yamnaya tribes who mostly lived in West Asia (Around Ukraine and the Cacasus). Those were the people who domesticated the horse and conquered almost entire Eurasia. They mixed with natives populations (the Yamnaya had white skind and very dark hair) and also brought the Indo-Euoprean languages (Non Indo-European languages that were in Europe before Indo-European languages don’t exist anymore, except Basque between Spain and France) to Europe, and also other places like Northern India. Modern Europeans are more or less a mixture of these three groups.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yamnaya_culture
And some links to old European languages that were replaced by Indo-European languages from the East: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etruscan_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minoan_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iberian_language
There are also exceptions like the Sardinians, who trace their ancestry almost entirely back to the Middle East (And surprise, they have pink to light brown skin). Here is a link who shows the admixture of these three groups of different European populations. On it one can clearly see that Sardinians are very “Middle Eastern”.
The analysis of ancient Egyptian DNA also shows that ancient Egyptians were most closely related to other ancient Middle Eastern populations and to ancient South European populations (who as I’ve mentioned before have inherited a lot of their DNA from the Middle East). Modern Copts are probably the closest modern ethnic group that could claim to be direct descendants of the ancient Egyptians, whereas Egyptian Arabs are more mixed. North Africans became more African in the last 1000 years due to the Arab slave trade that brought many Central Africans to the north and the local population started to mix with them. Studies show clearly that ancient Northern Africans were less similiar to Central Africans than today. There are also some very interesting groups like Somalians and Ethiopians who are a mixture of Middle Eastern and Central African populations.
I hope you might find some interest in what I’ve written here 🙂
Maybe you know all (or most) of it already, but I see again and again that people are still not really up to date on modern understanding of ancient groups and how they’ve changed over time.
An interesting article but one which sadly suggests an ignorance of the history of sub-saharan Africa and the many positive, sustained interfaces that Jews have had with Africa over hundreds of years. If one begins in the South and Central part of the continent, Jewish immigrant workers arriving in South Africa, then SW Africa, N and S Rhodesia and Mozambique came in immigrant waves and became involved as small traders, garment textile workers and involved in the mining industry. These immigrants and their children were involved directly in the formation of almost every single nationalist and radical trade union, liberation movement, political party in these countries. They played a leading anti-imperialist role in both the white (Boer) and black (ANC/SWAPO etc) resistance to the colonial powers, during the Anglo Boer war there were at least two Jewish Boer Generals and President Kruger bought in Dutch Jews to manage the running of the Transvaal Republic. From the early days of the SANC and the process that led to the Congress of the People and the establishment of an anti-Apartheid front, South Africans of Jewish origin were central. The South African Communist Party entered the 1994 democratic elections with a white Jewish Secretary General and the Mandela cabinet included many people of Jewish descent. They nurtured African culture and the arts and the emergence of many of the celebrity cultural icons of resistance in the twentieth century are closely associated with the Jewish immigrants in these countries. African religions are also heavily influenced by Judaism with many African Churches including the Shembe church, the enormous Zionist CC Movement and Apostolics movement ,all closely tied in their origins to the mysticism of the Ethiopian church and Judaism. Zimbabwe also has its own genuine Jewish African community – the Lemba tribe. Across non-Muslim Africa Jewish settlers, doctors and businessmen, often themselves marginalised by the colonial elites, were closely associated with the post liberation governments and well represented in the social and political circles of the post liberation leaders. The anti-Zionist narative in post-colonial Africa fostered in large part by the Soviets and linked to solidarity movements with Middle Eastern leaders and organisations was never translated into anti- Semitism largely because many of the prominent Jewish figures in Africa were themselves anti-Zionist. Furthermore across those regions of Africa which were predominantly Christian, the judeo element of judeo-christianity is extremely strong and reflected in the much greater emphasis on the Old Testament than is characteristic of modern Western Christianity. This article needs to take these complexities into account……
That should be worked up into a book. It’s the sort of thing that that history can overlook because it suits no one’s narrative to mention it.
I’m aware of much of that history – I personally know a leading Jewish ANC figure. However all this is pretty recent in history – within the past century, and anyway doesn’t represent an example of deep links between Jewish and black communities. Rather, it provides an example of Jewish progressives working with African liberation struggles. The point stands: European antisemitism has festered for almost 2000 years. Jewish communities have long lived among Europeans, Arab and north Africans. That depth of history doesn’t apply in sub-saharan Africa or black communities anywhere
“They were either deemed harmless, or their racism was regarded as having some merit. I have never heard a coherent explanation of how this was allowed to happen”
I’ve got some good news for you: here’s the explanation. To the Londoners, the blacks are in their ingroup, so it’s not a problem. That the ingroup solidarity is not reciprocated isn’t considered. Read on: http://archive.is/QRJ6m
Unfortunately it does look as though the US is exporting its obsession with race to the rest of the world.
As noted here before, Identity Politics looks to be largely American Cultural Imperialism.
Quite timely. And take a look at a video of bystanders outside the New Jersey shop, blaming the Jews for being shot, telling them to ‘get the f out of here’, and other goodies: https://twitter.com/HikindDov/status/1204806510762741760?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1204806510762741760&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ynetnews.com%2Farticle%2FYML9HG6EQ
I’d expect that video to receive a bit more attention if it was white people talking about black people or Muslims, or white boys with MAGA hats talking about native Americans…
“Intersectionality creates racism, by rejecting equality and trying to replace it with something it calls equity, which really means treating people differently based on race or gender. Intersectionality is a segregationist movement.”
(A nitpick: Maybe the terms are interchangeable, but I’d say the social justice movement is what creates racism. Intersectionality seems like a concept the social justice movement uses to justify some of its positions. It may not make much difference, though. Not sure.)
This is off the topic of your larger point, but I worked for a public school that changed the name of the Human Resources Department to The Department of Diversity, Equity, and Human Resources. We were trained that PoC deserved preferential treatment because of their collective hardship and white people’s collective privilege.
Given my experience at my workplace, “equity,” as it is defined by the social justice movement, really does sound like a racist concept. I’m not sure what to say to that. Is it justified racism? Or, as the social justice advocates would argue, not true racism at all? I don’t know for sure. But, what I do know, is that my former workplace is definitely worse-off due to equity policies. Performance has decreased; and, by and large, the PoC new-hires performed so poorly that they were not the role models for the students they were supposed to be.
I wouldn’t object to hiring more PoC if evidence showed significant gains in student performance as a direct result. The problem is that this initiative moved with such urgency that HR and the admins were not able to choose competent PoC. If the admins had slowed down and ensured that the PoC were competent it might have worked. The admins could have measured their PoC applicants against the same benchmarks they used for white applicants–but they didn’t. They wanted to move the cause of justice along as fast as possible and just moved people through.
So, in my particular experience, social justice equity was exactly what you said it was–treating people differently based on race. The way that played out was a zero-sum contest: take from one group of individuals and give to another. That’s bad enough on its own, but the students of color were also hurt because their educations were worsened just as much as the white students’ educations. On top of that, the students of color were seeing PoC role models fail at their jobs, which would have caused the opposite of the intended effect. It was painful to watch.
Yeah, affirmative action (we call it positive discrimination in the UK) doesn’t tend to work out well. It’s good for checking diversity boxes on forms, but not for genuinely tackling inequality
It was weird for me as an American reading of your surprise at American racism and then it reminded me of how ingrained racial attitudes are in our culture; we take it for granted. And being from Minnesota originally, the racism that exists borders on bizarre for non-Americans and even non-Minnesotans.
In Minnesota, we have the highest percentage of Somalian Americans living in the country (hence why Ilhan Omar managed to find such success, adding also a bunch of enamored white lefties living in her district). But this population of black people has often come into conflict with our traditionally West African diaspora descended minority (I’ve never heard that term before, but I like it). I witnessed multiple gang fights between them growing up. I was jumped by a Somalian gang and mugged and had visible injuries on my face, and was on the bus a day or two later and was chatting with a black guy about what happened and when he asked me if they were black or something else I explained that they were Somalian, he darkly shouted out “Man, fuck those motherfuckers” and gave me a brief tirade about how I couldn’t trust them.
This is all while Minnesota has had a LONG history of antisemitism, predominantly from its white majority outside of the main city centers of Minneapolis and St. Paul (doesn’t help that we also had the infamous Eugenics Society, founded originally by Charles Fremont Dight, a correspondent of Hitler). But that’s starting to change, as I’m sure you’ve heard, regarding Ilhan Omar’s election, to bring her up again, and the various comments she’s made that border on, shall we say, some dicey ground. The scary thing is that she’s essentially weaponizing her wokeness to provide cover for what is likely pretty rank Jew hatred under the surface and most white liberals in Minnesota fell for and continue to fall for it. This probably all sounds painfully familiar to someone from Britain given what I’ve seen happening with Labour lately. I worry that Minnesota’s record on antisemitism kind of speaks to an idea I’ve been playing with: that right wingers kill Jews and left wingers let Jews die. Regardless, America is still a relatively safe place for Jews, but I think when you continue to see hatred, distrust, or even loose talk about Jews coming from BOTH sides of the aisle–whether it’s Donald Trump or Ilhan Omar–you know something is wrong.
The black/Somali conflict also happened in the UK (in this case, black meaning earlier migrants from the West Indies). There as a TV documentary about it
I always feel vaguely embarrassed whenever East Africans, particularly Somalis and Ethiopians, are just sort of embraced as oppressed allied victims of white supremacy. It betrays such a shamefully shallow – dare I say, racist – lack of historical perspective. The 400 years and 13 million slaves of the Atlantic Slave Trade pale in comparison to the millennia of traffic in Bantu slaves in that region, which really kicked into high gear with the Arab expansions in the 8th century and continued well into the 20th.
I’m not a person who believes that children must atone for the sins of their fathers, but if you’re someone who does believe that all descendants of Europeans must atone for the expansionist, colonialist foreign policies of aristocrats from centuries ago, then how is it possible that Ethiopians and Somalis get a pass? There is no non-shameful answer to that.
Oh my holy hell. The tube incident made no sense to me – until reading this. Thanks for the education, but now the world seems even sadder. Sometimes I prefer the happy ignorance.
“threads that generations of British natives and immigrants, working together, stitched so carefully”
Perhaps it was a bad idea from the very start, no so much because some mixing of races and cultures is a bad idea ab ovo, but because multicult never had any idea of limits — there was never going to be a point at which the replacement of whites was ‘enough’. The goal is the complete replacement of whitey and as we see above, Jews are now white.
I think mixing is just an inevitable and ongoing process, and racial “purity” is always going to become more diluted over time. Ironically, the black supremacists see the world much as white supremacists do. They don’t believe in mixing either
“I think mixing is just an inevitable and ongoing process”
Sure, nevertheless regulation is possible. As with so many things, a little can be good, but a lot will kill you. The woke Swedes want to Islamize as quickly as possible, the rotten Hungarians don’t want to Islamize at all, and I think most western countries are somewhere between. My own view is that you should not accept people who’s culture is incompatible with the natives, and any immigration should proceed no faster than the migrants can be assimilated.
“the woke Swedes want to Islamize as quickly as possible”
They’re not flying in Muslims for the purpose of making the country more Islamic, they just still think multi-culturalism can be made to work. For me in Britain that’s an experiment that hasn’t finished yet but so far isn’t proving to be an easy road.
“They’re not flying in Muslims for the purpose of making the country more Islamic, they just still think multi-culturalism can be made to work.”
Probably. I was speaking to outcome not intent, but your point is good.
lol if there is one group that have codified a conduct to evade mixing those are jews thenselfs
Thanks for tracing this history. I knew the Malcom X story, but the Black Hebrew Israelites are new to me. I am sad and confused. Who can think that these divisions are good for anyone? Why should ancient history, whether real or fictitious, be the basis for contemporary grievances. Ugh. But we can’t ignore what’s happening.
These groups are small. The main problem is that we choose not to regard them as we regard white racists. I think the left has forgotten that equality is a two-edged sword. I suspect these London attacks are the work of a handful of people, and the police can resolve this easily. But I feel for that community, which has always existed in a state of isolation (most Jews aren’t Orthodox or that isolated from society).
Like so many liberals, you imagine that progressives are brothers in arms, believing in the same things you do, if only a little more passionately. But your idea of equality and theirs are different animals. Yours comes from reform: social programs, education, and the defeat of prejudice. Their equality comes from the overthrow of the bourgeois order—from the Revolution that will set all things right once and for all time. You want a better world; they want a new one.
So when you say the left has forgotten equality is a two-edged sword, you’re projecting your fair-minded liberalism onto them. They don’t care about reform or fairness or fighting inequality within your system—they want to overthrow your system. They don’t want coalitions for reform that work toward mutually beneficial goals; they want to radicalize factions against the current order to accelerate its destruction.
Of course, you won’t entertain what I’ve just yet. But a few more experiences of the sort you describe in your piece and you might change your mind—like other liberals, you’ll have to be personally bitten by the progressive beast before you come around.
“Like so many liberals, you imagine that progressives are brothers in arms, believing in the same things you do, if only a little more passionately.”
There’s nothing in the article that indicates he thinks that. On the contrary, the fact he talks about an intersectional segregationist movement replacing the universalism of the early civil rights movement should tell you he clearly sees an ideological divide.
“Like so many liberals, you imagine that progressives are brothers in arms”
How charitable, X. The normal thing is to vituperate everyone who still retains some sense of the common good — everyone who is not either a TFM fundamentalist or a Trump voter — as a ravening commie. The reasonable person on the other hand can concede that some of us centrists and even classical lefties want the world to be a better place and either see, or should see, that SJ is a evil corruption that only pretends –as you say — to want a better world. They do not. Their utopia would rival the utopia of PolPot in its horror. Well … that might be a bit of an exaggeration, but perhaps Romania under Ceausescu.
There seems to be some confusion in the social media about antisemitism and antizionism. It is perfectly possible to be strongly anti-Semitic while also opposing Zionism as this interesting pamphlet explains https://www.worldsocialism.org/spgb/pamphlet/why-socialists-oppose-zionism-and-anti-semitism/
I think you meant “NOT be anti-Semitic while also opposing Zionism”. Yeah, kind of, but it isn’t that simple. Neo-Nazis and other antisemitic groups see the destruction of Israel as a necessary step to finishing the elimination of the Jewish people. The two are different, but linked
Yes you are correct, my (careless) mistake.. I dont think anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism are necessarily linked though. Zionism is a form of nationalism. Anti-Semitism is a form of racism. Socialists oppose both nationalism and racism
Socialist Zionism was a thing in the 1940s. Many European socialists hoped Israel might become a socialist utopia in the middle east. Obviously that hasn’t happened, yet…
“Socialist Zionism” is a contradiction in terms. You cannot be a nationalist and a socialist unless talking about socialism in the Leninist sense referring to some kind of state regulated capitalist economy.
“You cannot be a nationalist and a socialist”
I can think of one little man with a moustache that managed it…
Dont be ridiculous. That little man with moustache had socialists and trade unionists butchered by the truckload, enjoyed the support of big business and was himself a fanatical supporter of the principal of private property. But I guess you would be the type to assert that the North Korean quasi monarchy must be a democracy because its got “democratic” in the title of the country
Perhaps Jake was referring to Stalin? He also had socialists and trade unionists butchered by the truckload. But I guess you’d be the type to assert that a socialist state has never existed because none of the prior dictators ever implemented it the waay that you’d implement it if you were in charge.
Then you would be misinformed. I dont advocate for a “socialist state” – a contradiction in terms in my book – let alone have any hankering to be “in charge” of one. Stalin presided over a system state-administered capitalism by virtue of the fact that you had a great majority alienated from the means of production and dependent on waged employment for a living, the core feature that defines capitalism whatever form it takes.
Ah, the old “the USSR wasn’t REAL socialism” defence, just like Italy, Germany and Japan didn’t have ‘REAL’ fascism.
No True Scotsman, me old China.
The no true Scotsman fallacy is intellectually lazy way of evading an argument. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter what label you put on a bottle; it the contents of the bottle that count. Which is what people like you never seem to want to talk about
“Ah, the old “the USSR wasn’t REAL socialism” defence, just like Italy, Germany and Japan didn’t have ‘REAL’ fascism.”
Yup. All badness will be tagged with their label, all goodness with my label. If you’re a socialist, then Stalin wasn’t a real socialist. If you’re a plutocrat/capitalist then Denmark isn’t even slightly socialist, it’s robber baron capitalist, red in tooth and claw. And the Great Depression and the crash of ’08 had nothing to do with capitalism, it was the commies done it. All failure this their fault, all success to our credit.
There was also a man with a big moustache, in Russia. But the idea that “you can’t be socialist and nationalist” is over-simplified. Zionism was a unique form of nationalism – it was specifically the idea of creating a Jewish homeland in the Middle East. So it wasn’t necessarily exclusive or militaristic. Israel became more fearful and nationalistic after having to repel Arab invasions
At least from an orthodox Marxist point of view Russia in the Soviet era was emphatically a state capitalist regime. Even Lenin argued that state capitalism would be a “step forward” for Russia but then changed the definition of socialism to refer to a form of “state capitalist monopoly” administered in the interests of the “whole people”. I wish people would do some basic research before spouting such obvious nonsense. Here’s a good place to start https://libcom.org/library/paresh-chattopadhyay-marxian-concept-capital-soviet-experience/
“The Communists are further reproached with desiring to abolish countries and nationality. The working men have no country. We cannot take from them what they have not got.” (Communist Manifesto) So much for the claim that you can be a socialist and a nationalist!
Most socialists don’t adhere to Marxist internationalism
Most “socialists” aren’t really socialists. Their vision for the future extends no further than trying to reform and humanise the system of wage labour aka capitalism Its like to operate the abattoir in the interests of the cattle
“Most “socialists” aren’t really socialists.”
Words mean what people use them to mean. Socialist as folks use the word means something like what Bernie wants — not the end of capitalism but a toning down of it’s mad-dog excesses and a public sphere as well.
You prove my point. You cant mix socialism and capitalism anymore than you can mix oil and water. Common ownership of the means of production cannot coexist with private or sectional ownership (including state ownership) of those means. The one by definition excludes the other. You agree that Bernie Sanders does not want to get rid of capitalism. It therefore follows he is not a socialist, merely a social democrat with good intentions. My definition of socialism which is what used to be the general or common definition of socialism before Lenin twisted its meaning may not be the one most people use but I would argue it makes much sense than what most people today mean by “socialism”
“My definition of socialism which is what used to be the general or common definition”
That’s honest, but I disagree. We don’t need an exact synonym for communism but we do need a sort of ‘modifier’. Social democratic or democratic socialist are ‘positions’ but I use ‘socialist’ to indicate a ‘direction’, that is, one might become a bit more socialist. In that respect one can indeed mix capitalism and socialism in that, say, the government handles all natural monopolies and the rest is left to capitalism. Thus folks refer to Bernie as a socialist knowing full well that he’s not a commie, he just wants to move several steps to the left. I favor a mixed economy myself.
Robin, of course you can be a socialist and a nationalist. National Socialism was a very real form of socialism. The Czech National Socialists ultimately decided to break with the German National Socialists and ally with the Soviet international socialists. They supported the pro-Soviet coup d’etat in 1949 and became part of the government. Unfortunately they were purged by the Stalinists in ’52 and their leader, a female doctor, was hanged.
Observer, if you are going to argue along those lines then you would also have to agree that North Korea or East Germany is/was a democratic state because they included the term “democratic” in their titles. Is this your view of them? Do you consider that they were/are democratic states? Yes or no? Anyone with two brain cells to rub together would understand that the Nazis simply appropriated the term “socialism” for their own cynical opportunist reasons. At the time the German SDP was the largest party of it is kind in the world but it had drifted away more or less completely from the goal of a socialist society which prior to Lenin meant a moneyless, wageless, class and stateless alternative to capitalism. The term, socialism , however. still elicited positive connotations among the German working class because of its association with state welfarism. That is why the Nazis used the term – simply to attract more support for themselves. There was also a racist anti Semitic reason because capitalism was strongly associated with finance capital – and hence, allegedly, Jewish bankers. So naturally the Nazis had to present themselves as being opposed to capitalism. But they were nothing of the sort. The Nazis were supported to the hilt by German big business. and Hitler himself was a fanatical supported of the principle of private property. What sort of so called socialist regime is that would butcher trade unionists and genuine socialists by the truckload for their beliefs. You dont judge a person by what they say they are but by what they do. Very clearly, the Nazi regime was a corporate capitalism regime
“Pure” Marxism was internationlist in its thinking, but nationalist forms of socialism have existed since Lenin. True, internationalist socialism barely exists any more