there is no reason whatsoever to add a disclaimer when you reblog a post about an anti-semitic massacre. if you think that mourning jewish people is on any level contradictory to your values — if your values are somehow inconsistent with valuing jewish lives — you have anti-semitic values. if you’re worried that your friends will judge you if they see you acknowledging without a caveat that it’s wrong to murder jewish people, you have anti-semitic friends. it is an outrage that this even needs to be said.
i’d encourage people to donate to HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, if able. they support refugees and immigrants all over the world.
the pittsburgh shooter allegedly posted on social media, claiming that HIAS are bringing in ‘hostile invaders’ that ‘kill our people’, before carrying out the shooting.
he will not silence us. now, more than ever, we stand with immigrants and refugees, and live our jewish values publicly and bravely.
Eight Jews Dead in an Antisemitic Hate Crime, and Trump is Already Victim Blaming
This morning, a white man named Robert Bowers entered Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, shouted “all jews must die,” and shot 14 people. At least 8 so far are dead.
When asked if this reflected on gun control, the president of the united states said, “If they had protection inside, the results would have been far better…if they had some kind of a protection inside the temple, maybe it could have been a very much different situation. They didn’t — he was able to do things that unfortunately he shouldn’t have been able to do.”
This is victim blaming. He is saying that because these congregants had chosen not to defile a house of g-d with instruments of death, they were shot.
When building the Temple in Jerusalem, it’s said, g-d required the stones not be cut with metal tools, as such things could be used to kill people. We believe that instruments of death have no place in the praising of g-d. We should not be required to sacrifice this value in order to stay alive.
May their memories be a blessing.
I appreciate that people are liking this, but please reblog as well
Today in Solidarity (5.18.18): In both March and April, students at Santa Fe High School staged a walkout in solidarity with Parkland High School students following a school shooting that took more than a dozen live.
Today, Parkland students are now having to stand in solidarity with Santa Fe High School students after another school shooting has cost at least 10 lives.
The youth will lead us to our liberation. They keep killing the youth. When will it be enough?
“They tried to bury us. They didn’t know we were the seeds.”–Mexican Proverb
I like the reference to Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny:
But “Virtuous Violence: Hurting and Killing to Create, Sustain, End, and Honor Social Relationships” (Cambridge), by the anthropologist Alan Fiske and the psychologist Tage Rai, argues that these standard accounts often have it backward. In many instances, violence is neither a cold-blooded solution to a problem nor a failure of inhibition; most of all, it doesn’t entail a blindness to moral considerations. On the contrary, morality is often a motivating force: “People are impelled to violence when they feel that to regulate certain social relationships, imposing suffering or death is necessary, natural, legitimate, desirable, condoned, admired, and ethically gratifying.” Obvious examples include suicide bombings, honor killings, and the torture of prisoners during war, but Fiske and Rai extend the list to gang fights and violence toward intimate partners. For Fiske and Rai, actions like these often reflect the desire to do the right thing, to exact just vengeance, or to teach someone a lesson. There’s a profound continuity between such acts and the punishments that—in the name of requital, deterrence, or discipline—the criminal-justice system lawfully imposes. Moral violence, whether reflected in legal sanctions, the killing of enemy soldiers in war, or punishing someone for an ethical transgression, is motivated by the recognition that its victim is a moral agent, someone fully human.
In the fiercely argued and timely study “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny” (Oxford), the philosopher Kate Manne makes a consonant argument about sexual violence. “The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature,” she writes, urging us to recognize “the banality of misogyny,” the disturbing possibility that “people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhuman ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness.”
Manne is arguing against a weighty and well-established school of thought. Catharine A. MacKinnon has posed the question: “When will women be human?” Rae Langton has explored the idea of sexual solipsism, a doubt that women’s minds exist. And countless theorists talk about “objectification,” the tendency to deny women’s autonomy and subjecthood, and to scant their experiences. Like Fiske and Rai, Manne sees a larger truth in the opposite tendency. In misogyny, she argues, “often, it’s not a sense of women’s humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem.”
Men, she proposes, have come to expect certain things from women—attention, admiration, sympathy, solace, and, of course, sex and love. Misogyny is the mind-set that polices and enforces these goals; it’s the “law enforcement branch” of the patriarchy. The most obvious example of this attitude is the punishing of “bad women,” where being bad means failing to give men what they want. But misogyny also involves rewarding women who do conform, and sympathizing with men (Manne calls this “himpathy”) who have done awful things to women.
As a case study of misogyny, Manne considers strangulation—almost always performed by men on female intimate partners—which she describes as “a demonstration of authority and domination,” a form of torture that often leaves no marks. Other forms of expressive violence are very much intended to leave marks, notably “vitriolage,” or acid attacks, directed against girls and women in Bangladesh and elsewhere. Catalysts for such attacks include refusal of marriage, sex, and romance. Then, there are so-called family annihilators, almost always men, who kill their families and, typically, themselves. Often, the motivation is shame, but sometimes hatred is a factor as well; and sometimes the mother of murdered children is left alive, perhaps notified by phone or a letter afterward—See what you’ve made me do. The victim is also the audience; her imagined response figures large in the perpetrator’s imagination.
Manne delves into the case of Elliot Rodger, who, in 2014, went on a killing spree, targeting people at random, after he was denied entry to a sorority house at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He slew six people and injured fourteen more before killing himself. In a videotape, Rodger, who was twenty-two, explained that women “gave their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me.” And then, talking to these women, he said, “I will punish you all for it … . I’ll take great pleasure in slaughtering all of you.”
Manne makes clear that Rodger wasn’t objectifying women; he was simply enraged that their capacity for love and romance didn’t extend to him. Manne’s analysis can be seen as an exploration of an observation made by Margaret Atwood—that men are afraid that women will laugh at them, and women are afraid that men will kill them. For Manne, such violent episodes are merely an extreme manifestation of everyday misogyny, and she extends her analysis to catcalling, attitudes toward abortion, and the predations of Donald Trump.
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