Angry accusations of anti-Semitism, 800 shares, 1.3 reactions, that will give a page that barely has 2,000 “likes” quite a lot of traffic! As an NYU student who is interested in understanding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict better, naturally I was intrigued, and so I went to check out the original post:

I saw nothing in this post that I would not expect from an organization that openly opposes Israel as a Jewish state (which is justified at the very least because Palestinian Arabs have as much of a claim to the land as Israeli Jews do — no more and no less, in my opinion), so naively, I thought the “scandal” would end there, but I was wrong. Emboldened by the hundreds of angry Facebook commentators who read the Tablet article and immediately went to comment “don’t you dare criticize my precious Israel” under NYU SJP’s post, winged like a downwind sailboat, NYU student and “Realize Israel” president Jacob Sternberg decided to take this “outrageous incident” to the big boss and NYU President, Andrew Hamilton, generously inviting him to a personal meeting at which he will tell Mr. Hamilton everything he needs to know about the “anti-Semitic” Palestinian activists on campus, presumably on behalf of the Jewish community.

I will leave the petty inconsistencies of this sycophantic letter out of this discussion and jump straight to the point:

“The same forces behind the genocide of black people in America are behind the genocide of Palestinians”

I cannot wrap my mind around what’s wrong with this statement. Yes, the same forces: ignorance, prejudice, and selfish nationalism, are behind systemic oppression of racial and ethnic minorities around the world and throughout history.

Palestinian activists have a right to express solidarity with the Black rights movement in the US. I don’t understand why the pro-Israel crowd is justified in lashing out against this statement, and I am convinced that this statement would not have raised an eyebrow if not for the inflammatory Tablet magazine article. Other oppressed groups, including Jews, face no problem connecting their own struggle with the BLM movement in a show of solidarity. The Workmen’s Circle has expressed their solidarity with the BLM movement:

“As Jews, we understand that there is a slippery slope from systemic individual killings to further heinous acts that can, and have in the past, led to mass genocide. As Yiddishists, we say genug: enough.”

So they have drawn a parallel between the oppression that Jews have experienced and the oppression that the Blacks are experiencing. They have acknowledged that similar forces or patterns drive racial and ethnic oppression around the world and across history. But when Palestinian activists make such a statement: oh woe, they are vilifying Israel! Well, Israel is the main source of the oppression they experience, and there is no way around it. No matter how they are going to express solidarity, it’s going to be about the Israeli government oppressing them. If you think this is a good enough reason to beg the university president to use administrative resources to restrict SJP’s operations, then I question your commitment to living in a society that allows for points of view that oppose yours.

Furthermore, SJP’s post said nothing about Jews. Their post was specifically aimed against Israel. Israel might be a Jewish state, but it does not represent all Jews and it certainly does not represent me as a Jew. I don’t have a problem with people criticizing Israel; just as someone who grew up in Russia and feels a connection to it, I have no problem whatsoever with people criticizing Russia because of its awful human rights record, authoritarian politics, and imperialist militarism, historically and today.

What I do have a problem with as Jew is the incessant insistence of the pro-Israel crowd to cry “anti-Semitism” whenever somebody brings up that THEIR state has murdered civilians and otherwise ruined lives through deportations, dispossession, and other oppressive tactics. This reactionary rhetoric belittles the anti-Semitic experiences that I and my family have endured, and therefore I find these selfish political manipulations offensive. The “Realize Israel” organization and their president does not represent me as a Jew, and as a human being and an NYU student, I condemn their letter.

America is literally bathing in firearms. It doesn’t matter if any particular town, city or even a state makes it illegal to own a gun, given that anybody can go to a neighboring state and buy a semiautomatic weapon at a gun show or at Walmarts, with but a minimal background check, unless the “gun-free” town, city, or state surrounds itself with barbed wire and performs a full body search anyone who comes in or goes out.

The common argument that if we ban guns or add restrictions, criminals would still be able to obtain them, supported by the fact that Chicago, LA and NYC have high gun-related crime rates despite their tough gun ownership regulations, hinges on the assumption that the number of guns in the country is going to stay the same regardless of legislative measures on purchasing new guns. This is true and it’s simple economics: as long as the supply is ridiculously high, the prices will stay low. Even if it becomes illegal to purchase guns, the black market price for a gun will remain low, and even petty criminals will continue to be able to purchase guns from existing owners. Background checks and gun licenses make for but a small hurdle, whereas the real challenge is the cost and availability (i.e. knowing where to go to find it, who to ask etc).

There is no way around it, and there is no good half-measure. If we want to continue experiencing tragedies after a tragedies until we become numb to them, we can keep going about this in the regular way, by making it “tougher” to purchase guns in more areas. But even in states with the “tough” gun laws, it’s a simpler process to obtain a gun than to get a driver’s license. Anybody can obtain a semiautomatic gun without any good reason. And even if any particular place is designated as a “gun-free zone”, who is going to go ahead and check everybody who enters and leaves? When you are traveling between two countries, they ask you if you are bringing in any weapons. When you go between states, in and out of “gun-free zones”, who is checking you with a metal detector?

And the other option is to dramatically disarm the population. And I’m coming to the conclusion that given that no half-measure would work, this is the only way to change the status quo. Because it’s a Nash Equilibrium type of situation, and the disarmament must be done on a federal, national scale. Our government has billions of dollars for military operations around the world, playing everyone’s favorite “world policeman”. We have money to maintain the world’s largest prison system, we have money to arm every single cop. But why do we have the problem of the police overreacting, why do we have the “shoot first or be shot” mentality that causes shootouts with the police at routine traffic stops? Why does every cop have to keep a gun within a draw’s reach? And how can that ever not be the case given that statistically speaking, a regular citizen is likely to have a gun, and in a “gun-free zone” or in a place with tough regulations, a criminal, even a petty one, is likely to have a gun? Because it is so easy to obtain it. Because guns are in overabundance. Just google “found a gun in a dumpster”, and see how many results you get.

A federal, compulsory gun buyback program is expensive, but it is an investment that will eventually lead to lowering expenses on the police force and on the prison system. Furthermore, firearm-related homicide is a bigger threat to an average American than the threat of a foreign invasion, which is why this should be a priority over military spending. It is an investment that will make everyone safer.

Your right to bear arms is a menace to public safety. Every new firearm purchase contributes to the overabundance of guns in America, which is at the root of the problem we have with firearm-related deaths. Your right to bear arms can never be more important than my right to live, which is being threatened by you buying a gun. And therefore, I maintain that you can wipe your ass with the Second Amendment. The Founding Fathers were visionary, but they were not the Messiah. They are not supernatural, they were humans, like us. This is not the first time they were wrong, and this will not be the last.

Lomir Ale Ineynem — an old Yiddish song, featuring a Yiddish heavy-metal band Gevolt.

I put together this video as a tribute to Sholem Aleichem’s yortsayt and to the once-thriving Eastern European Yiddish culture that went extinct due to Hitler’s genocidal mania, Stalin’s murderous paranoia, and an early Zionist ban on Yiddish language and culture.

In spite of oppressive ideologies, the mame loshn spirit lives on in undz hartsn.

Hersh Dovid Nomberg, writer and journalism from Warsaw, Folkist party supporter. Visited Palestine in 1924:

“But Eretz Israel has its ideology. This is the ideology of goles (diaspora). The Yiddish language is of course officially banned. But together with the Yiddish language, the Jewish folksong has had bad luck, as well as the whole of Jewish folk tradition, everything which has been spun and woven in the course of 2000 years. And the Persian Jew, the Bokharan, the Yemenite, with his language, his customs, and his folkways are goles, even though not as dangerously “diasporic” as the Yiddish language. But it is goles. And even if it is not banned, like Yiddish literature, then no one considers it something worthy of being invested in.”

Sholem Asch, writer and playwright, among the most popular writers in Yiddish literature. Visited Palestine several times, and his visit in 1927 inspired him to write:

“I get up in the morning in Jerusalem with heretical thoughts: in the end, what is Jerusalem for me? A religious memory, as for the whole world. Of what concern is it to me? And, by the way, don’t we stretch the thread of our memories too far? A people that wants to live shouldn’t remember so much and so far. It’s about time we made a break and set our beginning a little later, closer to our own ways, just as the branches of a tree that has become too old should be replanted.

In the end, we are more at home with the ethical and religious conceptions of the first Ashkenazim than with the agrarian tribes that lived here. Had we remained here in Jerusalem, we might today be a tribe like the Samaritans. Who would recognize us*? Thank God that we were driven out of this small, impoverished land; that is why we have survived to this very day; that is why we can, more than any other people, consider ourselves to be cosmopolitan; to be the avant-garde of world thought. Everything that we acquired, we acquired outside of the boundaries of the land of Israel. Of what concern to us is Jerusalem?

I say this to myself, and I go out in the city, and wander from one place to another. And when I come home for lunch, I unpack from my pockets the little stones and grass that accumulated from all the places so dear and beloved to me as memory: a stone from the Western Wall, a piece of glazed marble that I picked up from the site of the Temple, a handful of earth from the Mount of Olives, a few poppies that I collected on the way to Rachel’s tomb — and I seem to myself a a fool, like a poor inheritor of rich and distinguished parents, whose fortune was taken away. And nothing was left for him except graves — so he wanders around the graveyards and considers himself privileged.”

*Ironically, Samaritanism, a belief system which stems directly from ancient Judaism and of which there are approximately 800 adherents in the world, living indigenously and continuously (for the last 2000 years) in today’s occupied West Bank, is not recognized as a branch of Judaism by today’s rabbinate. Neither do Samaritans recognize the rest of the Jews as “true” Israelis.

It is time for us, young educated liberal Americans living in our comfortable and progressive Northeast or West Coast bubble (but for others too), to start getting worried, because things are not what they used to be, and we might not get a Democratic candidate elected this time around. A lot of things are looking different than they did in the last two elections, in particular when it comes to media technology.

Viral videos used to be our thing, while the Republican party was notoriously bad at Internet. They clung on to their Fox News and failed to appeal to young people, because who watches TV anymore? Every viral video you’d see back in the day was probably mocking Republicans. Their establishment has not changed even today, it has not evolved. But Drumpf is different. And as someone who has been following Russian politics a lot, I am starting to get a slight deja vu: I think he is taking from Putin’s handbook.

When it came to politics, YouTube and Twitter used to be places where you could expect to hear some progressive ideas. But lately, the two websites have become flooded with conspiracy theorists, racists, and neo-Nazis. This created a fertile ground for channels like RT and for Drumpfs’s campaigners. And I am sure that Drumpf is taking full advantage of this fact with his team of advisors headed by Paul Manaford, a “political technologist” already infamous in Eastern Europe for reinventing autocrats as noble saviors.

But let’s get back to the 300 “parody” video. It might seem like a silly prank, but this is really not something a silly highschooler can produce in a weekend. The scariest thing about this video is its high quality. It takes time, money, and talent to make this: choosing which parts of the original movie to keep, picking which characters will be which political figures, and most importantly, selecting which audio tracks to use for every politician, out of hundreds of hour of speeches. Most importantly, in the end, everything actually fits together very well and appeals to young people.

Also, a side note about this video, which brings me back to the name of the channel, “Aryan Wisdom”. There is this conservative journalist named Ben Shapiro, whose views I honestly despise, but in this situation I’m going to defend him. He used to work for the right-wing publication Breitbart, until he came out against Drumpf, calling him a liar, and defended another Breitbart reporter who was assaulted by a Drumpf campaign manager (and later received death threats), and as a result, fell out with Breitbart’s administration and resigned. Interestingly, Shapiro appears in this video among US establishment politicians (with one non-US exception: Angela Merkel, the de-facto leader of the EU, which Putin and Drumpf both seem to target). Portrayed as the “traitor” character from 300, he is the first one to be killed after Obama “the messenger” gets pushed down the abyss by Drumpf: Ivanka knifes him.

So I thought: I wonder if Ben Shapiro is getting the same anti-Semitic treatment on Twitter as Russian-Jewish journalist Julia Ioffe recently got after publishing an article that Drumpf didn’t like (he didn’t read it, but “somebody told” him about it). I open his Twitter, and sure thing, under his tweet from a couple of hours ago in which he thanks God that his wife just had a baby, the top comments with multiple dozens of “likes” are threats and insinuations about gas chambers and lampshades.

I would have thought that Ben Shapiro’s most active followers would be people who have at least a respectful attitude towards him. But the evidence points to the contrary. What motivates people to constantly prey for new tweets from someone who they are going to harass? Is that really something people do, out of hatred and blind anti-Semitism, or are these paid trolls, like the ones working for Putin? Who are all of these accounts harassing anti-Drumpf journalists, writing comments on YouTube, making these trendy propaganda videos, tending popular Facebook meme pages? Are they for real or are they getting paid?

Either possibility should get people worried.

*I am using Drumpf because I don’t want his real last name to be trending on Facebook.