Discourse

I don't want to specifically discuss the horror of what happened in Arizona on the 8th. Already people are pretending that this should be a knee jerk of one side defending itself against (justified) charges that it has embraced polarizing discourse.

Instead, I want to think aloud about the state of public discourse.

A few days ago I posted some thoughts on the New Year and one of those thoughts was that I needed to remove certain people and attitudes from my atmosphere. I talked about how individuals, empowered through the internet, were increasingly using ad hominem attacks and how glad I was that the bullying could not become physical because I live in a civilized society.

I spoke too soon. Or the USA is not civilized. At least here in Germany the likelihood of someone attacking me with a gun is vanishingly small and my odds of surviving other physical attacks is much greater. The verbal attacks are, to a certain extent, forbidden by law. And those in the internet which I find intemperate or uncivil, I have removed from my view.

But the question is why individuals feel entitled to act in such a manner? So I'm going to look at three specific examples in the past year that have either silenced me or forced me to curtail my activity and active exchange of thought.

The first was earlier this year. Another expat blogger posted an ad campaign that she found amusing. It was a British campaign and I found it sexist and as such, a bit misogynistic. Some other commenters saw my point and some thought it was funny in spite of that and some did not see my issue.
That's not the point: what happened as the result of my comment was. Another blogger attacked me, took a post from my blog to say that I myself was sexist, posted it on his blog with commentary and without telling me or permission. Then another of his friends told me that I had no sense of humor, suggested that I needed to have sex more frequently to give me a sense of humor and used common misogynist language to belittle me. His wife told me that being told I "needed to get laid" was neither an insult to me nor to my husband (whom they had both met). She assured me that she had taken feminist studies and therefore knew that this language was not sexist or misogynist. I didn't point out to her at the time, but will now: I understand that we all tell ourselves stories to live with the unbearable. Telling a woman that she has no sense of humor about sexism and misogynism, that she needs to have sex enacted against her, that her ideas and opinions are formed by her hormone levels: this is indeed the heart of misogyny. Let me direct you to Feminism 101 and more specifically to this.

I removed these people from my blog reader.

The next issue that arose came in the context of the removal of Elizabeth Moon from the Guest of Honor position at Wiscon 35. Wiscon is a science fiction convention concentrating on issues of feminism. This is their statement of intention:

Wiscon is the world's leading feminist science fiction convention. WisCon encourages discussion and debate of ideas relating to feminism, gender, race and class.

Moon was "dis-invited" as the result of an interview that she gave wherein she stated that Muslims in the US have the same responsibilities as all Americans.

This is a small quote:

...I can easily imagine how Muslims would react to my excusing the Crusades on the basis of Islamic aggression from 600 to 1000 C.E....(for instance, excusing the building of a church on the site of a mosque in Cordoba after the Reconquista by reminding them of the mosque built on the site of an important early Christian church in Antioch.) So I don't give that lecture to the innocent Muslims I come in contact with. I would appreciate the same courtesy in return (and don't get it.) The same with other points of Islam that I find appalling (especially as a free woman) and totally against those basic principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution...I feel that I personally (and many others) lean over backwards to put up with these things, to let Muslims believe stuff that unfits them for citizenship, on the grounds of their personal freedom. It would be helpful to have them understand what they're demanding of me and others--how much more they're asking than giving. It would be helpful for them to show more understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship in a non-Muslim country. (And the same is true for many others, of course. Libertarians, survivalists, Tea-Partyers, fundamentalist Christians, anyone else whose goals benefit only their own group. There's been a huge decline in the understanding of good citizenship overall.)...

Leaving aside whether one disagrees with what Moon said, I see nothing against feminism here: in fact, it stands up for women against a religion which when followed as Islamists do, is misognistic. This ( from Reclusive Leftist) is a good discussion of that aspect.

However, I personally agree with what she said. I am a member of a religious minority and I want the country I live in to protect me from other religious groups. I am a woman and I want my country to protect me from groups and individuals that seek to curtail my freedom as a tenet of their religious faiths. I am afraid of Islamists and I have every right to be so, as I pass through gates guarded by policemen with machine guns on a daily basis and know that in India, people just like myself were sought out by Islamists, to be murdered, for no other reason than their religion or their visiting of a place associated with my religion.

When I said that, I was attacked personally for my beliefs. No one explained why my fear was wrong, but I was told that I was racist (it's tough to not have a word for fear of religious extremism or one for hatred of a specific religion or cult, I know– that's why Jew haters are called antisemites although they really only hate Jews). Someone who I had been corresponding with for years told me that she was "afraid of me".

Here we see the concept of the Big Lie. Here are some specific words of Hitler from Mein Kampf, where the phrase originally arose (and was used specifically against Jews) and was then used by Göbbels:

All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.

Was my acquaintance afraid of me? No. We go to conventions together– does she feel in any danger from me? No. Does she feel that any of my actions will damage anyone's freedom or speak negatively against a single individual? No. But when I say that I am afraid, she says that she fears me. Now the emphasis seems to show that my saying that I am afraid (we won't discuss lack of action) has engendered a sense of danger in her.

That's the same type of lie where Sarah Palin says that when the world looks at her "attack map" with gun sights and says it helped to create an atmosphere of rancor and acceptance of violence, that: it's a blood libel. Does she even understand the Jew hating context of that phrase? This type of appropriation is often part of the big lie, as when the above blogger takes my fear for her own and dismissed mine in its entirety.

Lastly is the reason for my New Year's post, after which I determined to continue to rid my environment of people who think that attack is a replacement (or synonym) for debate or discussion. Another blogger had posted a list of posts that had the most viewers this year and one was a discussion of the way some parents fear allowing their children to go to school alone, in relation to commuting. I mentioned that the same morning I had heard, on the BBC, the statistic that 2000 children in the US go missing every day.

The same expat blogger from my first example told me I was wrong. Now, he didn't say the BBC was wrong, so the implication was that I lied. In a few seconds, I looked up and supplied the link from the interview where the pertinent information can be seen: "An estimated 800,000 children are reported missing each year – more than 2,000 children every day." This information is sourced from the FBI and the Department of Justice.

But the blogger told me that I was wrong, that statistics lie, that my unwarranted fears and these lies were responsible for the atmosphere of fear in which people live. He also said that the organization lied and made up a bunch of statistics to prove that the numbers were not possible.

Here we see misdirection: he was shown the source for what he called a lie, and now has no direct response (because he won't apologize). Another commenter posted that many of these missing children would have been taken by parents: absolutely. With a little Google-fu one can discover within moments (also from the FBI and DOJ) that many kidnappings are guardian or non-custodial parent(although that certainly does not make them less tragic to the child or parent/guardian, although one could at least hope that in those cases the children were not being harmed). This same magic of research comes up with 7000 children "permanently" disappearing a year: still quite a lot, but not 800,000. Not pertinent to my original comment of having heard an interview, but would have been useful if mentioned later by someone commenting.

I do look forward to seeing the FBI and the Department of Justice change their statistics in response to the blogger's off the cuff analysis.

I didn't respond, because responding to individuals who attack in this unreasoning way leads one to be attacked by them and their friends but as I understand (and do not know because I don't read this person's blog) he has discussed this at length on his blog and once again attached a link to mine: I see this because individuals I don't know are coming to my blog through his. That's what stats view allows. These individuals are attacking and I have moved to comments moderation as a result.

And that's what silencing is about. (Or as wikipedia calls it, suppression of dissent.)

What's been happening in the US is remendous stridency and usage of terms of violence and hunting terminology from the Right, but whenever anyone mentions this atmosphere, the right responds that the left does it as well.

Well, they really don't. But many normal individuals just can't deal with the violent rhetoric and in your face behavior of the new normalized wacky Right, and we give up.

Here's a look at the Insurrectionism Timeline put together by the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence (which one would have hoped was non-partisan, even if it isn't to the wackos).

That's sad and that's dangerous.

What I've been reading in links: Anti-Semitism and veiled Jew Hatred

Time to pull these off my desktop.

A discussion of arguments against the opponents of the Isareli academic boycott, and how choosing to dismiss the introduction of anti-Semitism as an argument is "non-productive and thereby should not be used.

This examines how ordinary it has become for those we consider our peers to dismiss their own and demonstrated anti-Semitism. Here's a long quote, because it so epitomizes how I feel myself.

Nothing so surely confirms the growth of anti-Semitism today than sentiments like these - not from neo-Nazi thugs, or Islamist hate-mongers, but from members of polite liberal society and the international left. Whether denying or minimizing the evidence of increased attacks on Jews and the spread, everywhere, of anti-Semitic tropes in public discourse, such voices themselves testify to a willingness to cushion those guilty of blatant anti-Semitism with an understanding tolerance and a willingness to look the other way. Instead of 'never again', their watchword is 'What on earth are you talking about?'

Jews of my generation grew up not only with a sense of the disaster that had so recently overtaken the Jewish people, but also in a climate of opinion in which anti-Semitism had been more or less marginalized, driven into the sewers of the political far-right and into coded and 'genteel' forms elsewhere. It was possible to believe that its National-Socialist manifestation had discredited anti-Semitism beyond recovery. No more. That turns out to have been an illusion. Anti-Semitism is back - not that it ever went away completely, but I mean back out of the sewers and from the shamefacedness and the self-restraining codes - in all its ugly colours. It still bears the stink of what it essentially is. (Via Z Word.)

Another tremendously well-reasoned discussion of why using the "Nazi-Israel" analogy is intrinsically anti-Semitic (as the EU has declared, and as is clear to  objective readers of the words where that analogy is used).

 ....these Nazi-analogy critics don't generally apply their favoured analogy elsewhere than in the Israeli case, they don't often use potentially apt comparisons between Israel and other cases that would be less hateful to Jews, and they use the analogy precisely to magnify the parallels and minimize the discrepancies between Israel and Nazism. I submit, therefore, that there are strong grounds for seeing a certain malice in use of the analogy, and as this malice is aimed specifically, aimed by the very particularity of its shape, at Jews, it is hard to know what else to call it but anti-Semitism.

 As I so frequently find (and mentioned recently in my review of Foer's book), many people here find it easy and comfortable to take cheap shots at America. Anti-Americanism is even popular with American ex-pats, as I found the day that I moved into my apartment, when an ex-pat I had never met before told me how the International school was better than the American one, beause he (an American) didn't much like Americans (said to an American he met 20 minutes before). I understand the desire of converts to be even harder than the "born into", and how, in a casually anti-American atmosphere it is seductive to say:" I'm a different type of American- everything is better here and I acknowledge that immediately." This is an interesting glance at that atmosphere in the European left. This is a quote from quite a famous American,

[I]n Europe, there is an anti-Americanism that is at once casual but can also be insidious. Instead of recognizing the good that America so often does in the world, there have been times where Europeans choose to blame America for much of what's bad.

When the Times concludes that the disproportionate targeting of minorities in stop and search is so egregious as to prima facie prove racism, the question is raised as to whether the disproportionate focus in the UN on Israel's actions is proof of the same (my opinion is that it clearly is and has always clearly been so).

Must we not then conclude also that the UN Human Rights Council is institutionally racist because of its singleminded focus on the Jewish state? And that political campaigns - of boycott and such - which target Israel and only Israel are racist in effect? Well, people could argue that such narrowness of focus is not on account of Israel's being a Jewish state, but on account of its human rights offences. Couldn't they? Except that if human rights offences are the reason for this focus, then there's a disproportionality here easily as great as in the police stop-and-search statistics today reported, with human rights violators of an entirely non-Jewish complexion thick on the ground globally.

What I have been reading: Antisemitism or Did you just think the Britsh Foreign Office was biased?

Have you heard about the high ranking British Foreign Office official who burst out cursing Jews and Israelis while running at the gym. It may come as a surprise to my American readers, but leaving aside the obvious problem of having a diplomatic official engaged in that area so little in control of his emotions and so clearly biased, it's actually a crime in most of the civilized world to incite hatred against other races and religions.

That's a real crime. One punishable by years in prison. Although I doubt he will get more than a wrist slap.

(this was hanging in the draft queue)