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2019-12-15 Home Front: Culture Wars
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The Nation of Islam, The Black Hebrew Israelites, and shouting abuse at Jews on the London Underground: an essay on Antisemitism and Black Nationalism
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| Recommended. This really is multi-national culture wars, but we don’t have that category. |
[AreoMagazine] One of the artefacts resulting from the rise of the smartphone and social media is the phenomenon of abusive racists caught on camera. One such episode took place recently on the London Underground. A man stood over a seated Jewish family with children, ranting at them for about twenty minutes, ignoring the father’s repeated requests to leave them alone. Another man tried to intervene and was threatened with violence. Reportedly, at least three people filmed the episode, and a clip from one of these videos went viral on Twitter and then appeared in the media. The abuser was later identified and arrested. The unpleasant story had a feel good ending, when a hijab-wearing Muslim woman intervened on the Jewish family’s behalf. She was later identified as Asma Shuweikh, and the father met her to personally thank her for her support. What began as a tirade of hatred ended as a story of cross-faith solidarity.
What made many commentators surprised and uncomfortable was that the attacker was a black man. His ideas seemed outlandish, especially the remark that, "These people are impostors, trying to claim my heritage and they’re trying to tell me that’s cool." He also mentioned the slave trade. He was clearly angry, not just in general but towards the Jewish family in particular. Many Twitter commentators concluded that he must simply be mentally ill‐which is possible. However, the strange ideas he mentioned were not simply his own warped inventions, but myths with deep roots in American black nationalist ideology. As a Jewish Londoner with a broad, racially mixed social circle, I have encountered these ideas frequently. I have watched them evolve and become popularised over the past few decades, and, in recent years, fuelled by social media and WhatsApp, they have reached a far broader audience.
The Tube attack may have been seen as an outlier, but, two days later, black men boarded a bus in East London and assaulted a group of Jewish schoolchildren. And a few days after that, two black men beat up a rabbi, while shouting "Kill the Jews," again in East London. Something was stirring, but this something was not new.
Anti-Semitism does not have a long history in black populations because there have been few deep historic ties between black and Jewish people. Ethiopia has an ancient Jewish population, but Ethiopia is an exception. In the rest of sub-Saharan Africa and the mostly West African diaspora in the Americas and Europe, there have been few sustained contacts between black and Jewish communities.
It's long, click through to read the whole thing. 
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Posted by Herb McCoy 2019-12-15 00:00||
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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2019-12-15 01:50||
2019-12-15 01:50||
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Posted by g(r)omgoru 2019-12-15 02:16||
2019-12-15 02:16||
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