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Kenny Schechter's avatar

Excellent article, but you make a mistake when you say that “Europe has been experiencing….clashes between supporters of Palestinians and Israel.” What has been happening in Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S. over the past year and a half are attacks by Muslims against Jews. Not “clashes”: attacks, with a perpetrator and a victim.

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Lorenzo Warby's avatar

On the streets, that is the basic pattern. When it comes to attempted cancellations, it is not one-sided.

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Kenny Schechter's avatar

Thank you for responding, but I’m not sure I understand what you mean. Do you mean that Jews are trying to dox/shame/silence Muslims to the same degree that Muslims are trying to dox/shame/silence Jews?

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Lorenzo Warby's avatar

Yes, except Jews have lost a lot of cultural power, so the lever is not working nearly as well as it used to: outside the US, in the Anglosphere, not sure it is working much at all.

A lot of folk on the “right” are very angry at Jews because of hate speech laws, for cancellations based on trying to control what folk say of them, for pushing mass migration and multiculturalism, for importing Middle Eastern conflicts into the West, for sabotaging attempts to entrench academic freedom, for regarding themselves as morally “special”: all things prominent Jewish intellectuals and lobby groups pushed. As has been acidly observed, Jews are not in favour of mass migration into Israel so why is the West different?

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Kenny Schechter's avatar

I’d agree on a couple of things:

1) Jews have lost cultural power since 10/7;

2) Most mainstream Jewish communal organizations fully embraced woke, alienating millions of people. Consequently, when the pushback against woke finally got momentum, these organizations had squandered so much political capital and erstwhile goodwill among normal people that the result was 1).

However, the accusation that Jews consider themselves “morally special,” however, is sloppy and emotional thinking. Who, exactly, is doing this, and how does this alleged tendency manifest itself?

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Lorenzo Warby's avatar

Everyone who took the Holocaust to be sui generis to start with. Anyone who took as fine for Jewish activists to cancel folk, but it is outrageous if it is done to Jews.

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