Dehumanizing Nature of False Accusations of Anti-Semitism

[BrandonD]

That's because they're the "chosen" people. Which is racist in itself.

Similar to the phrase "God bless America" which literally means that the rest of the world can go to hell.

I prefer Tiny Tim's "God bless us, every one".

I always hear that phrase about the chosen people, with regards to Judaism. What exactly does it mean? What are the perks to this chosen-ness?

And when you get down to it, don't most religions think their own people are the chosen people? At least my southern baptist family certainly seems to think so of themselves. They love this book series called "Left Behind" where all the fundamentalist christians get raptured away, leaving the rest of humanity to be tortured. That seems pretty "chosen peopley" to me.

[Searcher08]

That's because they're the "chosen" people. Which is racist in itself.

Similar to the phrase "God bless America" which literally means that the rest of the world can go to hell.

I prefer Tiny Tim's "God bless us, every one".

I always hear that phrase about the chosen people, with regards to Judaism. What exactly does it mean? What are the perks to this chosen-ness?

And when you get down to it, don't most religions think their own people are the chosen people? At least my southern baptist family certainly seems to think so of themselves. They love this book series called "Left Behind" where all the fundamentalist christians get raptured away, leaving the rest of humanity to be tortured. That seems pretty "chosen peopley" to me.

Sorry, Brandon but as an Irish Catholic, you need to know that that heaven is reserved for us.
I'll see if I can have a word with St Peter to get you guys on the guest list. :)

Funny that is an attitude that would have been pretty prevalent a few decades back, but nowadays much less so. In Ireland and the UK, this degree of "chosen peopleyness" in Christian circles seems to have gone down dramatically. There are loads more mixed relationships over here in Northern Ireland (which is quite surprising given how things were) and similarly in the UK, particularly in the Indian community.

I think it is also important to distinguish what *sort* of chosenness is being talked about as Israeli culture on the whole (across political divides) seems to exhibit exceptionalism as a foundational trait and has quite a different flavour than the "I'm gettin inta upstairs and you aint" - and one that seems to come out as an undercurrent of seeing Palestinians as fundamentally dumb asses, who need to be guided and taught how to free themselves from Israeli domination, a sort of 'liberation on OUR terms' attitude.

My experience has been that confronting this even obliquely produces reactions bordering on meltdown: letting an Israel-firster or pseudo-Progressive know that he/she is REALLY REALLY no different than anyone else, that we are all equal... Try it, just be prepared for hysteria.

[BrandonD]

My experience has been that confronting this even obliquely produces reactions bordering on meltdown: letting an Israel-firster or pseudo-Progressive know that he/she is REALLY REALLY no different than anyone else, that we are all equal... Try it, just be prepared for hysteria.

I have tried it, here in the states it is particularly difficult. Americans seem to desperately need an evil or lower thing to place beneath themselves. I guess that sort of projection is to be expected from those on the receiving side of social injustice. People who are being treated like dogs are much more eager to agree that we are all exactly equal.

[Nordic]

I can't get chosen. I'm the wrong race. Shit out of luck.

[seemslikeadream]

Lawmakers blast ‘anti-Semitic’ EU over settlement labeling

[guruilla]

Since this thread got bumped I actually dipped into it. Normally a subject I steer clear off because there's really no way to argue about it coherently without falling into The Trap. When ideology becomes pathogenic. I did recently get accused of anti-semitism by a friend (I won't name him, it was a private chat), for referring to Marx as "another over-intellectualizing Jew." By the terms defined by Marxists (and Zionists, and I am sure quite a few other groups), I probably am anti-semitic, at least some of the time. (I think the Jews, or rather Jewish ideology, has a lot of to be held accountable for; I just don't want to be the one doing it, and anyway, who and which ideology doesn't have a lot to be held accountable for?).

So, when I accused my friend of dehumanizing me by calling me anti-semitic (not literally, but close enough), he sent me this description of Zizek's definition of anti-semitism (apologies if this has already been raised at the forum), i.e., the kind of anti-Semite he was accusing me of being:

From an online review of the Zizek film: "[Zizek] reads Jaws as a condensation of all the “foreign invaders” that privileged societies like upper-middle-class America worry will disrupt their peaceful communities.

The formal structure of anti-semitism has nothing to do with Jews per se. It is a way of thinking rather than a thought about something.

This line from your email is a good example of anti-semitism, and would be if you replaced the word Jew with German:

"Over-intellectualizing Jewish culture makers shaping western perception of reality."

The thinking here is that Western perception (which is in crisis) has been corrupted by [FILL IN THE BLANK] culture makers. What this presumes is that there is a culture without crisis, a perception without contradiction, a world that is right and just, and that it is only due to aliens, to others, to foreigners, to Jews or Germans, that we have a problem.

This is the structure of antisemitic thinking.

Now, to me, this is the structure of ideological thinking, period, of scapegoating (in the deeper Girardian sense), and of disowning the shadow, which is an individual thing as well as a collective thing. I have no idea why Zizek feels the need to bring antisemitism into it and thereby turn any sort of irrational condemnation of anyone into an expression of prejudice against Jews (or is that Jaws?). I guess I would have to read the book. But I do find it interesting, the whole subject, because I think it shows how ideologies sabotage not only reasonable discussion but even thought itself. I am pretty sure that my friend & I would be able to reach agreement if we were able to talk about our feelings cogently and without getting triggered. But when a subject is too charged, this simply does not happen. That's The Trap. If, for example, I am not allowed to speak critically of something without being accused of hate crime, there's a good chance that my criticism will become increasingly more severe, not because I actually hate whoever I was criticizing but because I hate having my expression policed and controlled. So when I say I am probably antisemitic some of the time, what I really mean is, I can be antisemitic, if you really want me to. But why would you want that? (Not a rhetorical question, BTW) I can also be calm, rational, and compassionate, which is my own preferred setting.

Anyway; I hope this doesn't start another flame war. I think the thread title is a good basis for looking at antisemitism, both the reality and the idea of it (and of anti-antisemitism, which is as much an ideology as antisemitism), in that dehumanization of the other is a viral phenomena (as Red Ice is amply demonstrating), i.e., mimetic. We may not be able to trace it back to an original "Protocol," but we can certainly see how it passes itself on and how, the more it changes form, the more it stays the same.

[norton ash]

Zizek dovetails nicely with the career-ending Twitter typo: "I used to love swimming in the ocean until Jews ruined it for me."

[guruilla]

or should that be:

[tapitsbo]

An awful lot of worldviews look like that structure of anti-semitism. Hesitating to say this, but, it's tough to not wonder at the implications of conflating belief in a "world without crisis" with "anti-semitism"

[seemslikeadream]

The Abrams Attack on Kerry

by Ali Gharib

Elliott Abrams is a liar and, it turns out, a coward. Abrams penned the latest installment in a string of articles by right-wing pro-Israel hacks calling Secretary of State John Kerry an anti-Semite. Abrams’s headline was entirely appropriate: “Unspeakable Kerry.” What turned out to be unspeakable, however, was Abrams’s accusation. And yet it is there, just beneath the surface, ready for the most delicate of scratches to bring it forth. I challenge anyone to read the piece and proffer an understanding of it that differs substantially from the obvious takeaway that Kerry hates Jews.

As Jim Lobe has noted, the Abrams piece comes on the heels of an advertisement taken out in The New York Times where another right-wing hack, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, is much more forthright. Say what you will about Boteach, at least he doesn’t dance around his slanders. Abrams, on the other hand, cannot just out and say what he means.

Maybe Abrams was chastened by having accused defense secretary designate Chuck Hagel an anti-Semite, only to have virtually all of his talking points rebutted. In case you don’t recall that kerfuffle, Abrams said that Hagel was an anti-Semite because a right-wing Jewish newspaper had said so, citing local Nebraska Jewish opposition to Hagel’s candidacy for the post. Abrams went on to say that none of Nebraska’s Jewish community had come out to defend Hagel against this charge. It turned out that some Nebraskan Jews were willing to rebut the slander—and even the Nebraskan cited by the right-wing Jewish paper disagreed with Abrams’s interpretation of his opposition to Hagel becoming defense secretary.

In other words, Abrams’s accusations against Hagel weren’t the product of the Nebraska Jewish community that he claimed to speak for, but his own fevered fantasies. This is a pattern: Abrams loves to speak for American Jewish communities in such a way that it bolsters his neoconservative worldview, but his claims never hold up to scrutiny.

Next Target: Kerry

So now we have the Kerry episode. Let’s recap that one: John Kerry made some comments comparing the recent attacks in Paris by the Islamic State (ISIS or IS) to the Charlie Hebdo attack in January. The crux of Kerry’s comments were these words:

There’s something different about what happened from Charlie Hebdo, and I think everybody would feel that. There was a sort of particularized focus and perhaps even a legitimacy in terms of—not a legitimacy, but a rationale that you could attach yourself to somehow and say, okay, they’re really angry because of this and that. This Friday was absolutely indiscriminate. It wasn’t to aggrieve one particular sense of wrong. It was to terrorize people.
Now I happen to agree somewhat with Kerry: the Charlie Hebdo attack, for all its condemnable horror, at least had some kind of rationale. By the twisted worldview of the extremists, Charlie Hebdo’s mocking portrayals of the prophet Mohammed warranted a bloody attack. It goes without saying that this is a ridiculous perspective—one that, as a believer in non-violence, I totally abhor—but a perspective nonetheless. One need not justify the attacks to point this out. That such a risk was inherent in what Charlie Hebdo was doing must have been obvious to the staff: the magazine had been firebombed in 2011 in response to its Mohammed cartoons. The attackers reportedly called out the names of the particular staffers they sought during the assault.

The attacks in Paris last month, on the other hand, were of a completely indiscriminate nature. They targeted a football stadium, cafes and restaurants, and a concert hall. None of the victims—either at an institutional or individual level—had made any discernible affront to Islam, even in the eyes of the vile extremists of IS.

I, too, had same reaction as Kerry to the latest Paris attacks. They were more frightening because, like many of the mass shootings we have here in the US, it’s obvious that this could happen anywhere. (An apt comparison might be between movie theater shootings and the Planned Parenthood attack last week.) The reaction seems natural. Growing up in Washington and living in New York, I don’t find the notion that some places make for more likely targets at all strange: you see heavier security all the time at particular places. But having heavy security everywhere is anathema to our way of life—and that’s why these latest attacks stung so bad. That, to me, was Kerry’s message.

This is a point on which reasonable people can differ. I had a discussion with a friend who thought Kerry’s comments were inappropriate. He felt the “rationale” for the two attacks were equally difficult to understand, and the distinction was bogus: both attacks were intended to terrorize people. That last point is indisputably correct, and Kerry should perhaps have not said what he did on that topic. In fact, Kerry should probably have avoided the comparison entirely: there’s just not much to gain from making the nuanced points that he so inartfutly made, because the comparison just doesn’t matter that much. The attacks were more similar than different. They were distinct mostly in the scale of the killings, not in the subtle differences between the motivations and the intended and actual effects of the killings.

Abrams Overreaches

What Abrams does, however, goes beyond disagreeing, or even criticizing and pointing out problems with Kerry’s remarks. Instead, Abrams goes for the low blow. Watch the misdirection here, in Abrams’s Weekly Standard piece:

The more shocking message he delivered was that the November killings in Paris are more terrible than those of January. Why? Because the earlier killings, of cartoonists and Jews, were .??.??. were what? First he said the previous attacks “had a legitimacy in terms of” and then stopped himself. Even Kerry realized that what he was about to say was indefensible: that they had a legitimacy in terms of the beliefs of the attackers, who were offended after all by nasty cartoons of Muhammad. And as to the Jews, well, perhaps the attackers were offended by the mere existence of Jews, or perhaps in Kerry’s misguided view they were deeply moved by the real or imagined plight of Palestinians.
Kerry didn’t quite say that the attacks last month were “more terrible” than Charlie Hebdo. He said that they were different, that the attackers targeted the broader society, seemingly at random, not a particular target that had drawn their ire. As for attacking Jews, Kerry didn’t mention the attack on the Hypercacher kosher market, where Amedy Coulibaly murdered four French Jews. (After the attacks, Kerry laid a wreath at the Hyper Cacher.) That anti-Semitic follow-up to the Charlie Hebdo attack, of course, was less indiscriminate than last month’s Paris attacks as well, so the dynamic Kerry was speaking about still applies. (Again, that Jewish institutions make for more reasonable targets comes as no surprise to Jewish Europeans, who have come under targeted attack several times in recent years and beefed up security, though not across the board, in response.)

I was struck by Abrams’s line that “perhaps in Kerry’s misguided view [the attackers] were deeply moved by the real or imagined plight of Palestinians.” One doesn’t need to look to Kerry’s view at all in this case: the assailants were very clear. Coulibaly had called into a French television station and told them so: “[H]e explained also why he did this: to defend oppressed Muslims, he said, notably in Palestine,” a journalist at the television station recounted. “And finally he explained that he’d chosen the kosher store “because he was targeting Jews.” The logic there is terribly anti-Semitic and reprehensible to its core, but that was indeed the logic. To entirely ignore how the gunmen themselves described the attacks in order to make nasty imputations about a politician with whom he disagrees on a reasonable rhetorical point, even if many of us might find that point incorrect, is misguided to say the least.

Ultimate Target: Islam

There’s one more point worth making about Abrams’s piece that shows his true intent. Consider this paragraph, and forgive the long quote (the emphasis is in the original):

Before getting to the major problem with what Kerry said, note that he repeated the ludicrous line that what ISIS is doing “has nothing to do with Islam.” We are dealing with a group that calls itself the Islamic State and recruits Sunnis from Muslim communities across the world. The group then imposes its version of sharia on territory it conquers. Its every statement and its entire raison d’être are permeated with its view of what true Islam requires. So Kerry’s statement that this “has nothing to do with Islam” is devoid of meaning. Presumably he is trying to say that their version is not “real” Islam, but of course he has absolutely no authority, as an American politician and a Christian, to make such a judgment. Those who have traveled to Syria and Iraq to join ISIS are obviously motivated in whole or in part by their understanding of their religion, Islam. Unless Kerry understands that all this terror does have something to do with Islam, the policies he advocates and implements are doomed from the start.
It’s hilarious that Abrams thinks Kerry has no standing to make a judgment of whether IS practices “‘real’ Islam,” because he is “an American politician and a Christian.” But Abrams himself does have this standing, as a neoconservative sometime government official? The utter lack of self-awareness of a man looking to score a point knows no bounds. But then, Abrams’s ideological and political allies are quite fond of making just such a point.

However, there are good reasons for sitting government officials not to use this language. Moreover, as Brian Beutler has astutely noted, the right wing has embraced the idea that calling Islamic terrorism by that name is a “strategic prerequisite to vanquishing” Islamic terrorists “without a shred of evidence.” Kerry’s policies, in other words, aren’t “doomed from the start,” as Abrams says (Abrams’s service in government should serve as the best indication that he’s not the best judge of which polices are and aren’t doomed). Instead, he’s making an ideological and political point.

Ultimately Abrams’s rant is far from an exercise in scholarship or policy-making critique. It’s just an attack, pure and simple, and a scurrilous one at that. Abrams’s history in the Hagel affair makes this abundantly clear. No one should be fooled by his rants or take his allegations seriously, especially when he won’t even come out and make them beyond thinly veiled innuendo. He’s not speaking truth to power, just shouting lies into the wind, hoping that someone catches his gist and latches on to his own misguided view.

Is John Kerry an Anti-Semite?

by Jim Lobe

For a rather slow Thanksgiving weekend, must reading should include an article on The Nation website by Henry Siegman, a former head of both the American Jewish Congress and the Synagogue Council of America. The article assails a full-page ad that appeared in The New York Times on November 14 featuring Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, whose operations are funded in major part by Sheldon Adelson. In the ad, Boteach accuses John Kerry of anti-Semitism because of the secretary of state’s recent suggestion that the expansion of Jewish settlements may have some responsibility for the continuing attacks by Palestinians on Israelis and may eventually lead to an apartheid situation.

Siegman, who is currently president of the U.S./Middle East Project and who previously led the Middle Eastern Studies program at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), doesn’t pull many punches. Here’s the concluding passage:

Boteach argues that there cannot be moral equivalence between victims and their oppressors, but he, like his patron, believes Palestinians who have lived for half a century under Israel’s occupation are the oppressors and their Israeli occupiers are their victims. As someone who was born in Germany and lived for two years under Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime that rounded up Jews for deportation to Auschwitz, I can assure Boteach, and Prime Minister Netanyahu, that their perspective is one that Goebbels, who considered the German people to have been the victims of the Jews, would have greatly admired.
It’s worth noting that Elliott Abrams, who became a senior fellow for Middle Eastern Studies at CFR after his disastrous tenure as George W. Bush’s chief Middle East aide on the National Security Council staff, helped lay the groundwork for Boteach’s attack on Kerry. In an October 14 blog post published on the CFR website, Abrams called Kerry’s remarks on the relationship between settlement growth and Palestinian attacks on Israelis “morally obtuse and “factually wrong.”

In a more recent article about the Paris attacks published in The Weekly Standard, Abrams repeats those charges and all but calls Kerry an anti-Semite. Presumably, Abrams decided against tipping over the edge, perhaps as a result of the public reprimand CFR President Richard Haass gave him after he called former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel an anti-Semite.

Abrams has long claimed that the Obama administration has greatly exaggerated settlement growth, a position that would seem very difficult to reconcile with the findings of Israel’s own Central Bureau of Statistics.

In any event, Siegman’s article makes the situation quite clear.

[tapitsbo]

I did a quick search and this thread has no discussion of the allegations that Jeremy Corbyn is an "anti-semite".

One article making that accusation was copy/pasted on this forum but then quickly deleted... I think that says a lot about something odd happening with this rhetoric - these extreme accusations are coming from a very tone-deaf place. To what extent are the accusers helping, rather than ultimately harming, their own cause?

[seemslikeadream]

I did a quick search and this thread has no discussion of the allegations that Jeremy Corbyn is an "anti-semite".

One article making that accusation was copy/pasted on this forum but then quickly deleted... I think that says a lot about something odd happening with this rhetoric - these extreme accusations are coming from a very tone-deaf place. To what extent are the accusers helping, rather than ultimately harming, their own cause?

oh I missed that so I went looking ..well that was quite a dust up wasn't it?

Telegraph censured over 'significantly misleading' front page anti-semitism claim against Jeremy Corbyn

Daily Telegraph Reprimanded Over Jeremy Corbyn “Anti-Semite” Story

Jeremy Corbyn target of 'anti-Semitic smears' from 'terrified' political class, Diane Abbott says

this is Breitbart ..no need to click on it
Anti-Israel Corbyn Could Appoint ‘Minister for Jews’ to Allay Anti-Semitism Fears

[seemslikeadream]

Palestine Legal to Oberlin: False Accusations of Anti-Semitism are a Tool of Suppression
January 28, 2016


On Tuesday, Palestine Legal sent a letter to Oberlin College President Marvin Krislov in response to recent accusations of anti-Semitism against the student group Students for a Free Palestine (SFP) at the Ohio liberal arts college.

A number of Oberlin alumni stated in an open letter to Krislov and to the media that SFP’s work to raise awareness around Palestinian human rights has led to an “anti-Semitic culture on campus” and that Jewish students feel uncomfortable expressing their support for Israel. The letter demands that the College undertake “A thorough investigation and documentation of all acts of anti-Semitism, including student rallies that voiced inflammatory language about Israel,” and form a task force to address “the crisis.”

SFP’s statement in response to the open letter read: “Confronting the realities of the occupation is uncomfortable and difficult, but it is not anti-Semitic...We see these accusations as a way to limit the free speech of students, silence political activism, and intimidate pro-Palestinian activists.”

Palestine Legal wrote to Krislov to warn against acceding to demands to monitor SFP’s speech activities, and to bring attention to the pattern of similar attempts to malign students and others advocating for Palestinian rights with false accusations of anti-Semitism based solely on speech critical of Israel.

The letter refers Krislov to Palestine Legal and CCR’s recent report, The Palestine Exception to Free Speech. It also reminds him of a previous letter from Palestine Legal and partner organizations that provided guidelines “to ensure that the expression of political views is not stifled by individuals and groups inside and outside the campus community who disagree,” and emphasized that previous complaints by Israel advocacy organizations of a “hostile anti-Semitic” environment based on speech critical of Israel have been roundly dismissed by the U.S. Department of Education.

In 2015, Palestine Legal responded to 240 incidents of suppression of Palestine advocacy, over 50% of which involved accusations of anti-Semitism based solely on speech critical of Israeli policy.

The letter is available here and below

.

[stillrobertpaulsen]

This surprised the hell out of me. I had no idea Roseanne had jumped into this shallow end of the intellectual pool.

Roseanne Barr's Bizarre Evolution From National Comic Sensation to Racist Twitter Troll
Barr has compared Muslims to Nazis, and will soon receive an award from an Israeli government-funded propaganda group.
By Richard Silverstein / AlterNet
February 17, 2016

When Roseanne Barr performed her first gig on the Johnny Carson Show in 1985, America was electrified. They’d never seen anything like her on television. A smirking, profane, suburban housewife trampling middle-class values with glee, she was the id, the Domestic Goddess turned Avenger. She said things women couldn’t say on stage. She delved into the nether recesses and spoke barely understood truths about the absurdity and unfairness of domestic drudgery.

She parlayed her standup comedy into her own network TV show, Roseanne, which debuted in 1988. It featured the Connors, a working-class family from the Heartland. She put together an astonishing ensemble of actors like John Goodman and Laurie Metcalf, who went on to become two of the better actors of their generation. Not since "The Honeymooners" decades earlier had American TV comedy offered such a fulsome celebration of working American families. For two years, "Roseanne" was the most popular show on American television. TV Guide has ranked the show, "one of the greatest of all time."

But unlike comedians like Ray Romano or Will Smith, who followed the same route and parlayed their TV shows into successful acting careers, Roseanne’s career sputtered. There were the failed marriages to Tom Arnold, the outrageous stunts like mangling the "Star Spangled Banner" before a Major League baseball game. Then came her dabbling in Kabbalah, her embrace of wild conspiracy theories like the New World Order and her conversion (according to her) to observant Jew.

Roseanne went from tapping into the zeitgeist to self-parody in a matter of years. Instead of laughing with us, Roseanne now hates a good portion of us. Today, Roseanne inhabits the seamy recesses of the pro-Israel Twittersphere, raging against anyone who doesn’t conform to her Likudist, anti-Muslim line, branding them “Nazis” and sometimes fantasizing about their deaths. Her allies are a collection of anonymous racists and professional pro-Israel propagandists, almost exclusively of the right-wing variety. And while she somehow maintains a gig at NBC, she seems to be heading toward the depressing end of a sad downhill slide.

Barr Headlines Israeli Government-Linked Gala in Bay Area Synagogue

The Israel-advocacy group, StandWithUs (SWU), plans to host a fundraising gala with Roseanne Barr on February 27 at Temple Beth Abraham in Oakland, Calif. The comedian, who has undergone a conversion from being anti-Zionist as recently as 2012, when she ran for president, is now a staunch supporter of the Likudist Israeli government. StandWithUs is one of the pro-Israel lobby’s most aggressive promoters of Israel’s agenda in this country, and is directly funded by the Israeli government.

Last year, the Israeli government awarded SWU a $250,000 contract to create a war room in its Jerusalem office to train students from the U.S. and the UK in mounting effective propaganda efforts during times of emergency, which SWU defined as periods when Israel is invading Gaza and the country is under specially harsh attack in the international community. Since organizations that receive direct funding from foreign governments must register under U.S. law as foreign agents, SWU by rights should be so registered under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. The Obama administration, however, has been reluctant to take on Israel lobby groups and pro-settler charities when they violate our laws and tax code.

Temple Beth Abraham president Mark Fickes responded to a request for comment with the following statement excusing Barr’s history of bigotry and extremist rhetoric:

“Roseanne Barr has a long history of voicing whatever thought comes to her mind. Her views are controversial, to be sure, and TBA understands the risk of having her speak at our shul. We hope and trust that most people know what they are getting into when they decide to see her speak."

SWU has joined other pro-Israel groups and even university presidents in decrying the “lack of civility” on college campuses. This is, in fact, a code for the rise of “anti-Israel” activism, which they claim threatens Jewish students by making them feel “unsafe” at school. The pro-Israel NGO seems not to have the same sensitivity to the insults Barr makes against Israel’s critics.

Clinging to Relevance at NBC

Barr’s most prominent professional gig currently is as a judge on NBC’s hit-show, Last Comic Standing. During her TV appearances she exhibits none of the mercurial behavior and scatological insults that grace her Twitter feed. She apparently understands quite well where boundaries are in her public persona. But when it comes to social media, she flings off the mask and exposes her hateful, misanthropic personality.

Oddly, as recently as a few years ago she was known for her anti-Zionist views. And even then, she alternated between impassioned pleas for peace and tolerance and lewd, unfunny displays. (Attempts to reach the producers of "Last Comic Standing" and NBC-TV for comment were unsuccessful.)

Baking 'Jew Cookies'

In 2009, the Jerusalem Post quoted Barr as calling Israel a “Nazi state.” On Kathleen Wells' radio show in 2011, she called Israel a “brutal and undemocratic theocracy…which has the world's fourth largest army.” In the same interview, she decried the 2009 Israeli invasion, Operation Cast Lead, as “terrible crimes against humanity” that made her “weep and sweat at night.”

Barr went on to denounce Zionism:

“A Jew is required to correct his thinking and transform the world for the better, but Zionism has changed every single corner of Judaism now…What are the Zionists fighting for? Land? For what? Strip malls and movie theaters and tract housing?”

She praised the courage of Rachel Corrie, who died defending Palestinian homes in Gaza, and she hailed the Gaza flotilla that broke the Israeli blockade of the Palestinian enclave.

That same year, Roseanne volunteered for an inexplicably offensive photo shoot/article for Heeb Magazine titled, That Oven Feelin’, which featured her dressed as Adolf Hitler with moustache and Nazi armband. Pictures from the session show her eating burned “Jew cookies” fresh from the oven. Though both she and the magazine initially defended the tasteless stunt, the article no longer appears on the Heeb site.

Charlie Chaplin showed, in his controversial masterpiece The Great Dictator, that the subject of Hitler and Nazism was a rich target for satire. But his portrayal in that film was acute and penetrating, and skewered Hitler in a thought-provoking way. Such sardonic humor seems to be missing from Barr’s photo shoot, which did little more than defile the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.

In 2013, she outdid herself, promoting a jazz concert by the anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying ex-Israeli Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon has said that the greatest historical tragedy to afflict the Jewish people was “not at all an historical narrative.” When criticized, Barr called the claims against Atzmon “lying bullshit.”

Barr did not respond to requests for comment sent by email and through her Twitter account.

Roseanne's "Come to Zion" Moment

Just over a year later, Roseanne underwent another stunning transformation as inexplicable as her last. She converted to extreme Likudism, adopting the anti-Muslim, anti-Palestinian tendencies that go with it. She now calls Israel’s critics, Nazis. Noted BDS activist and Jewish Israeli Ronnie Barkan was a “Nazi,” according to Roseanne, and so was BDS itself. Supporters of Palestinian rights were “Nazis helpers,” implying that Palestinians themselves are the real Nazis.

During the last Israeli election, Barr warned Israeli voters not to “capitulate” to Obama. She called the Zionist Union (former Labor Party) leader Isaac Herzog an Obama “puppet” and falsely claimed that President Obama supports BDS.

Within the past few days, Barr retweeted this graphic image posted by an anonymous neo-fascist account likening the religion of Islam to Nazism:



Perhaps her most infamous and outrageous public statement came after the UC Davis student government voted to endorse BDS. She posted to her social media account, “I hope all the jews leave UC Davis & it then it gets nuked.” After deleting that tweet, she followed with, “Nuke all UC Davis Jew-Haters.” She falsely accused Davis students supporting BDS of receiving “terror funding” from King Salman of Saudi Arabia.

Why Is a Jewish Sanctuary Hosting Roseanne?

Those in the Jewish community bringing Barr to Temple Beth Abraham should consider this question: if it’s unacceptable to equate Israel with Nazism, shouldn’t it be unacceptable to link Islam with Nazism? Or is Israel purer or more worthy than Islam?

After the UC Davis debacle, the San Francisco Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) canceled an evening of pro-Israel entertainment with Barr last year.

Presumably, UC Berkeley didn’t much like the idea of hosting an event for someone who had just called for dropping a nuclear bomb on another UC campus. The JCRC explained that it canceled not because it disagreed with anything Barr said at UC Davis, but because it feared her views would incite hatred against Jewish college students: “Roseanne’s remarks garnered a lot of attention from Israel’s detractors, and that’s really counter to our efforts to make sure Jewish students stay safe on campus.”

The Jewish agency, which lobbies on behalf of Israel in the American Jewish community, has never distanced itself from Barr's views.

Barr has also weighed in on other U.S. foreign policy issues close to the hearts of pro-Israel activists. In one instance, she said that “if Israel doesn’t nuke Iran then nothing makes sense.”

Compare this with what Barr told Kathleen Wells in 2011: “Is Israel going to attack Iran now? Israel cannot survive a war with Iran. This terrible programming is incorrect. It is lemming programming. Evangelicals are pushing for Armageddon, the final solution to the Jewish problem. Wake up America! Wake up Israel! Wake up world!”

When liberal Haaretz columnist Rogel Alpher encouraged French Jews not to heed Bibi Netanyahu’s invitation to make aliyah en masse, Barr replied on social media: "stfu privileged fat skinhead."

The comedian is an equal opportunity abuser. When the family owning the Chic-Fil-A chain donated funds to oppose gay marriage, she tweeted: “anyone who eats S*** Fil-A deserves to get the cancer that is sure to come from eating antibiotic filled tortured chickens 4Christ." Later she added, “off to grab a s*** fil-A sandwich on my way to worshipping Christ, supporting Aipac and war in Iran.”

By her own admission, Roseanne has sometimes had a tenuous connection with reality. Shetold Oprah Winfrey: “I was prescribed numerous psychiatric drugs. Incredible mixtures of psychiatric drugs to deal with the fact that I had, and still in some ways, have and always will have some mental illness. And the drugs and the combination of drugs that I was given, which were some strong, strong drugs, I totally lost touch with reality in a big, big way.”

Salon writer Mary Elizabeth Williams captured the tragedy of Roseanne’s predicament well:

“Roseanne is someone who’s left a profound and indelible mark on the entertainment business, and on generations of women in it. Watching her now devolve so profoundly, seemingly unable or unwilling to address the mental issues she’s acknowledged in the past, is nothing short of tragic. It’s the sight of a woman who’s achieved so much in her life, who has been so fiercely unique, reduced now to just another one of the millions of paranoid conspiracy theorists on the Internet.”

Think of Roseanne’s current state as a car wreck. When you drive by you feel guilty for looking at someone else’s pain and suffering. But then an unethical lawyer stops and leaves his card with the victim, trolling for business. That, in effect is what StandWithUs and Temple Beth Abraham are guilty of: They’re exploiting a troubled human without concern for her welfare, and in doing so, they have exposed how their own narrow, sectarian priorities trump basic values of respect and dignity.

[seemslikeadream]

Roseanne's "Come to Zion" Moment