My point exactly.
If one has met a lot of Israelis and cannot distinguish them from Cohen’s minstrel show version, there is something wrong with the eyes one is looking with.
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If you're saying there's no Israelis like that, I have to disagree. Christ, I have in-laws who are almost that far gone.
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I recognized the type he was spoofing. Doesn't make it any less a minstrel show.
If one cares about Israel, one should be able to recognize the difference.
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Sort of in the middle on this one.
Yeah, the caricature was extreme, but the difference is not so great when you consider what the IDF actually is. I know some, too...
Which has zilch to do with Israelis or Jews. You get similar talking points from US cops, as you well know.
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It's not just what he said, it's the whole performance of it.
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And I suspect they *are* racist towards Israelis, but in much the same way as a Nazi is racist towards me, with my overly Norwegian features.
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The twistiness of American conservatives' "philo-semitism" is how it is a love for Jews as we are or Israelis as they are but rather a lot of their fantasy of what the imagine Israelis to be ... an invention that emerges from their anti-semitism.
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Not sure if I can follow your priors for that final clause.
I do understand what you mean about fantasies, of course. I've had creepy racial traits projected on me by "well-meaning" fascists more times than I'd like.
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The Israelis of conservatives' imagination do not really exist; they reflect a shallow understanding of real Israelis filtered through their unconscious antisemitism.
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An even more extreme example: a White US minstrel show audience in 1910 imagines that they are seeing some kind of portrayal of Black people as they are, because their anti-Black bigotry makes the differences from real people invisible to them.
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I understand the minstrel show reference now. I'd forgotten the exact meaning and had it stored as "theatrical quackery" a la P. T. Barnum. My bad.
I don't know if you can apply the same argument to US conservatives, but I can believe you'd know that better than me.
It's slippery. And I don't want to say it's the only thing going on there. But it is a significant part of it.
My reflexive disagreement is in two parts:
1) Nazis don't seem to subconsciously hate me because they ascribe me a bunch of traits *I* find heinous.
2) I feel the wider filter US neocons and Nazis have in common is narcissistic self-orientation, almost like Han-era Sinocentrism.
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So in this view it's less about antisemitism, more they rate anyone else by how close to "American" their culture is supposed to be.
But I do realize the US has its own history with antisemitism, which complicates the model a lot.
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