Some Disorderly Thoughts on Antisemitism and Related Matters
1 In response to protests at American universities against Israel’s genocidal “war” in Gaza, the United States House of Representatives accepted the “Antisemitism Awareness Act” on April 30. This act codifies the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) Working Definition of Antisemitism as well as its attached list of eleven “contemporary examples of antisemitism”. Most of those examples are antisemitic indeed by any reasonable interpretation of the term, but three of those – namely, examples 7, 8, and 10 – are a bit more dubious, largely due to their ambiguity. The text of these examples is the following: (7) — Denying...
What’s there to be proud of?
Pride plays an important role in most – if not all – ideologies on the right of the political spectrum. National pride and racial pride are the most obvious examples. The former is, of course, the core feature of nationalism or patriotism; the latter is the foundation of racism. The dominant kind of pride in contemporary right-wing thought seems to be civilizational pride, however. That is, one of the key aspects of the alt-right and right-wing populism as well as more mainstream contemporary conservatism is pride in Western civilization. This pride in Western civilization, let’s call it “Western pride”, is...