Yesterday Phil posted on the Israeli government-paid ad that says intermarried Jews in the United States are "lost." It ends up it’s not just an advertising campaign, but a full fleged effort to get family members to turn in their "abducted" family members to Israeli government offices. Haaretz reports:
A day after mounting a scare-tactic campaign to prevent the assimilation of Diaspora Jews, the Prime Minister’s Office and Jewish Agency received some 200 calls, most of them reporting names of Jews living abroad. . .
The campaign, which launched on Wednesday, urges Israelis to report the particulars of acquaintances living abroad so that these people, who are "in danger" of marrying non-Jews, can be persuaded to come to Israel. . .
About 100 of the callers reported unmarried Jews aged 18-30 living in France, the United States and New Zealand. Callers also left their acquaintances’ Facebook and Twitter names as well as email addresses so that MASA people could contact them.
According to Haaretz, the end of the ad asks anyone who "’knows a young Jew living abroad" to call MASA. "Together, we will strengthen his or her bond to Israel, so that we don’t lose them." The campaign is not just focused on intermarriage, but living outside of Israel in general. Assimilation is regarded as a "strategic national threat."
Why does this entire story just make me think that Eric Bana and the Munich crew is going to steal me off the street in New York and whisk me off to Tel Aviv? The number crunchers in Israel are certainly starting to look desperate.
This is simply bizarre. Israel always asks to be treated just like any other country. But I can’t think of any other country in the world, or even in history, which has done this sort of thing.
Really, really weird.
Think of the term “chutpah.”
And think of a total attack on USA basic freedoms, on what the USA in its highest
aspirations has sought to be. Also think of how Nazi Germany tried to infect
German Americans through their left-over relations in Germany. Got it?
typo: chutzpah
link to en.wikipedia.org
You got a point there, Citizen, though I was trying to sidestep it… it’s true that only one other country in recent memory has been imbued with a quasi-mystical cult of ethno-nationalist supremacism/exceptionalism. But (the years leading up to and including WW2 aside) still I find this even creepier.
It is creepier, more steathly, more ways to infect the diaspora with no obvious traces. And, Imagine the old German American Bund set up like immune AIPAC… And with its own stink tank rag like Commentary.
Wow, this is a state that is out-of-control. It has a 1984 Big Brother kind of feel.
Once MASA gets the contact info on Jews seeking to marry goyim (shiksa or shagitz, I think the offensive terms are), are they going to relentlessly twitter the victim with Jewish guilt until they give up and agree to intermarry?
Max and the Daly Nuisance should do a parody of the state-sponsored “public service” ad, and lampoon it with a white supremacist doing the voice over with white people “lost” or “abducted” by marrying blacks and Hispanics. Or, maybe even more to the point, do a “lost and abducted” parody with STEVEN SPIELBERG – LOST, ANTHONY WEINER – ABDUCTED . . . all the prominent American Jews who married The Others.
Exceptionalism — man, what a burden to have to go through life with.
Its negative exceptionalism.
• We’re special, only because were so especially burdened with _____
• We were forced to do (something bad) because of _____
Unfortunately, this paradigm lends itself to serious narrative blindspots in viewpoints that conflict with this worldview. This is what sites like this ultimately serve to correct: a richer picture of the whole picture thats not trapped in the confines of a paradigmatic cage.
Are you suggesting Richard Witty is Phil’s proxy, his job to show the density of the
iron bars of the cage we are in?
Citizen:
I got a chuckle. Though your point highlights push-pull behind the ham-fisted efforts to force a collective and collective mentality on Jews by Jews. In other words, Richard Witty’s efforts to force Phil back in to the ‘proper’ collective may be more personal, but its of a similar rubric. The problem is, as Phil so often notes, ‘what’s the proper viewpoint?’ ‘Why can’t there be a plurality of public discussions?’ Self-hating and other such terms be damned.
My point was just on a narrative thats pushed.
This sounds really funny:
Why does this entire story just make me think that Eric Bana and the Munich crew is going to steal me off the street in New York and wisk me off to Tel Aviv?
Although I’d appreciate informed comments about “Eric Bana and the Munich Crew”. My expertise in pop culture isn’t so good.
Its a reference to Spielberg’s film, “Munich”, about a bunch of Mossad agents that travel the world hunting down those they believe responsible for the murder of the Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. Eric Bana was one of the stars of that film.
thanks, tree.
It was on a public TV channel here, really, really late at night not long ago. Someone who thought I might be interested told me. Good movie. I was wondering about Munich but my synapses were blocked although Dana looked vaguely familiar.
A foreign nation launching a seduction of Americans of a particular ethnic persuasion. Somehow this feels right to talk about here–it’s an article about the German-American Bund during the years leading up to WW2:
link to spitfirelist.com
“Why does this entire story just make me think that Eric Bana and the Munich crew is going to steal me off the street in New York and wisk me off to Tel Aviv?”
I assume you meant that as a joke.
I don’t attribute anything sinister to groups in Israel attempting to keep Jews within the fold, even loyal.
The state is a different question.
Oh, you mean the self-defined “Jewish State”?
Richard, generally speaking, your comments are benign and often difficult to decipher. Unlike many others (and I’ve been criticized for this by other Mondo-ites), I appreciate that you bring a different voice to the website’s pro-Israel, anti-Zionist tone. That said . . . you stated:
“I don’t attribute anything sinister to groups in Israel attempting to keep Jews within the fold, even loyal.”
As an American, you and I are miles apart. Since my youth, I’ve been told that racism is unacceptable, that the U.S. is a “melting pot,” that any form of ethnic cleansing — or ethnic purity — is wrong and we as a superpower, cannot idly sit by and let WWII atrocities happen again.
Why does Israel claim we have shared values when they underwrite a public service campaign that suggests I “abducted” my wife from Judaism, and she is now a poster child for “The Lost.” My wife is Jewish and so is yours. But the difference is, I seem to have committed a crime against your faith and culture.
You should at least concede the tin-eared, ham-handed asininity of the Prime Minister’s campaign to reach out to American Jews and try to get them to break off engagements to the goyim before it’s too late is a s***show. This is confirmation that Americans have almost no shared values with Israel, our “staunch ally” and “best friend in the region.” Israel is a semitic-supremacist nation, and the major difference between this extremely racist piece of tripe and the stuff David Duke puts out is that my tax-dollars are subsidizing this infuriating racism AND the decimation of 1,000+ innocent women and children in Gaza with flesh-melting white phosphorus weapons and limb-shearing DIME-cube missiles.
Oscar,
Read my very short post again.
Richard, I suggest you read Oscar’s post again. Well, maybe you better reread it a dozen times.
Well, Richard, this is the state doing it. The end of the ad says: “Sponsored by the Prime Minister’s Office.” You got the right word for their action: sinister.
Why this isn’t front page news in the US is beyond me! A foreign nation declares the right to harass American citizens in the name of religion, or at least its idea of religious purity, subjecting Jewish American citizens to possible harm here by local extremist Jewish groups taking halakha into their own hands, and the American government doesn’t do anything about it? The American press doesn’t warn Jewish US citizens about this? Shameful.
Ha’aretz writes that 100 callers turned in unmarried Jews aged 18-30 living in France, the United States and New Zealand: in one day. Where does this end? What is going to happen to these kids? The Americans have the right of ‘separation of church and state’, they have the right of privacy, and freedom from illegal search and seizure (their Facebook IDs come under this). Is the presumption that because you’re Jewish and living in the US that you have automatic dual citizenship which Israel can somehow act upon in contravention of any international law, and these insane minds in the Israeli prime minister’s office can finger you, identify you, and expose you to harm?
We need to call this what it is: a horror. There is no excuse for this. Period.
So, McCarthy died and was reborn as an Israeli government official?
I don’t attribute anything sinister to groups in Israel attempting to keep Jews within the fold, even loyal.
The state is a different question.
That’s a peculiar view to have, in my opinion. If a certain policy is reprehensible – such as this one – it is so no matter if it is supported by the state or “merely” advocated by private organizations.
It would be more worrying if the state was doing it, of course, simply because the state is more powerful.
Koshiro,
If you regard a community attempting to keep a valued tradition is reprehensible, then we truly have different views.
So, Richard you have no problem if the Arabs reach out to their brethren in the USA in the exact same way? Good to know.
Richard Witty wrote:
“If you regard a community attempting to keep a valued tradition is reprehensible, then we truly have different views.”
But Mr. Witty, when folks of European descent in this country tried to keep their valued tradition alive via at least somewhat favoring Europeans in immigration matters, and maybe Christians too, they were told *that* was reprehensible. And I think it’s fair to say that overwhelmingly jewish groups held to that view that it was reprehensible and were even significantly if not very very heavily involved in trying to overturn that tradition. And indeed even today with the hispanic immigration issue my sense is that as regards those jewish groups or individuals who have weighed in on same, they are very much in favor of some sort of amnesty and against any severe limits on future hispanic immigration here.
Tell my how this doesn’t at least resemble a shell game then?
So
The US Congressional Record, the legislative history of the 1965 Immigration Act can be read in any law school library. The heaviest support of Meathead’s bill came from
Jewish American groups and agencies.
And, yes, your sense regarding Jewish congressional and organizational support of illegal alien amnesty
and open borders is correct.
Such groups also supported the amnesty in the 1980s; the original 1 million morphed into 3 million actual.
Shell game, yes. Double standards too.
Not so fast . The Center for Immigration Studies (one of Lou Dobbs favorite orgs) printed a harsh OpEd in The Forward in June 2006 in which they declared that they didn’t want no stinkin’ Mexicans because Mexicans don’t support Jews, or Israel. “Open Borders Threaten Jewish Clout” link to forward.com
Foxman had to backpedal an apology a week or two later, but the damage was done; moreover, the message was out, which was the point.
Ninety-nine percent (99%) of this country has no clue — absolutely no idea — that this country was Spanish before it was English, for a longer period of time than the US has been in existence. That’s what makes the Indian nonsense the Israelis are spouting about Americans taking Indian land so ridick: the Israelis are either (1) grossly misinformed, or (2) profoundly uneducated. Read Tony Horwitz in the NYT: link to nytimes.com
The winners write the history, which is why most USA citizens do not know the Spanish were here and settling in way before the Anglo-Europeans. Our immigration policy since 1965, which in fact heavily favors Mexicans as a practical matter, was heavily supported by American Jews as a safeguard against the USA ever turning
against its Jews in some echo of Nazi Germany; OTH some Jewish groups are now reconsidering this immigration policy (anchor babies, chain migration) because
Mexicans have not enternalized any guilt trip regarding the Shoah. Sin Nombre
was merely pointing out that American Jews historically have had no problem
dissing white Gentile Americans for trying to maintain their dominant culture while simultaneously supporting Israel for doing its utmost to maintain Jewish culture as
dominant.
does anyone see any simularities of long ago.
ALL you need is love…maybe a gigantic wife swap is in order …and for how long?
Could we do a government swap too
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