30 thoughts on “The American Left’s Anti-Semitism”

  1. Only in the US is “hatred” a crime.
    If they committed arson then they get sentenced for arson.

    1. The left are pushing ‘hate speech’ (aka ‘anything we don’t like’) laws all across the West. Look at Britain, where merely ‘offending’ someone on Twitter is enough to get the cops coming to your door, while a mere burglary would just result in shrugged shoulders.

      The left demand ‘free speech’ when they have no power, then demand censorship once they have the power to impose it.

  2. For example, some kids a couple years back here blew up everyone’s mailboxes in a block with explosives. The sentence was they had to pay to replace the mailboxes they blew up. If it is considered a crime of property damage people typically have to pay damages, they seldom get prison time. If it is a violent crime you get jailed.

    Then again I wouldn’t expect people in the world’s leader in incarceration to understand European sentence rationale.

  3. Gojira,

    I think you’re somewhat mistaken for at least one narrow way of hating. You didn’t say which European country you live in, but in many European countries, various ways of signaling that you are a Nazi is illegal, in contrast to the USA.

    1. There is a grammer error in the comment above which bugs me: is => are. Since no one but me really cares about that, I’ll try to make this comment have some value added:

      Consider this German law against various ways of greeting one another, using symbols, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strafgesetzbuch_section_86a

      Also consider that it only became legal to publish Mein Kampf in German in the few years after 70 years of it being illegal to publish a hateful book.

    2. The UK has no free speech. They send the cops out after people for making comments on the internet that run afoul of what’s in vogue for cultural Marxism.

      1. They’ve literally persecuted (and prosecuted) a man for making man for making a video where he shows a dog as a Nazi (raising its paw in a fascist salute, watching Nazi propaganda, wagging its tail when it hears “gas the Jews”.

        I have seen the video; I consider it in bad taste. I also consider it freedom of speech. And, in the video he’s clear; he’s portraying the dog as “the most offensive thing possible – a Nazi”.

        So, of course, the police decide to prosecute him. As part of it, they make sure his employer knows he’s being prosecuted for a hate crime – thus getting him fired. They put his life in limbo for years, until he finally got his day in court. And got convicted. Oh, dare I mention, he didn’t get a jury. No right to that, so the judge decided he didn’t get a jury, and then the judge decided he didn’t get any appeal, either. He was, in the end, given a fine instead or prison time, and he donated the money to a children’s charity instead of paying it, so he’s probably going to prison after all. I hope not, but it looks that way.

        This was in Scotland. The guy who got persecuted (and still is being persecuted) goes by the handle “Count Dankula”. I can only note that the ACTUAL Nazis, when faced with a dog owner likewise teaching his dog a Nazi salute (in Finland, when Finland was basically under the thumb of Hitler) considered prosecuting him, but even they didn’t go that far. Which means that the Scottish court managed to out-Nazi the actual Nazis. Quite an accomplishment, that.

  4. And a lot of people think the anti-Nazi laws in Germany are overblown. Besides, I didn’t hear anything about Nazi symbology in this case.

    The kids I talked about who blew up those mailboxes used acid bombs. The mailboxes were basically shredded to bits. They caused a lot of property damage but no one got physically hurt.

    To be considered a violent crime they had to either have caused physical harm to someone or attempted to cause it. From what I read those people did 800 EUR of property damage. Which sentence did you expect them to get?

    Also, if you read the link Rand posted, this is the original article they talk about.
    https://www.jpost.com/Diaspora/German-court-calls-synagogue-torching-an-act-to-criticize-Israel-478330

    So the news is at least two years old already.

    1. I’m not sure what your point is. I’m arguing that both the USA and Europe have hate crime laws. Furthermore, in the USA, mere expression of hatred itself can not be criminalized, whereas in Europe it can.

      1. Well we don’t have minimum sentence laws or three strike laws.
        I am sure the judge considered the extenuating circumstances and gave them what he considered to be an appropriate sentence.

        Like I said. 800 EUR in property damage. Plus if you read the story in DW I linked below it seems to have been a crime of opportunity and they allegedly did not plan to cause physical harm. Had the judge considered so they could have been sentenced.

        https://www.dw.com/en/germanys-confusing-rules-on-swastikas-and-nazi-symbols/a-45063547

        But honestly do you think they should have been jailed for having done property damage? Seriously.

        1. I’m confused about why we are talking about mailboxes. I apologize – maybe I’ll come back tomorrow after I’ve gotten more sleep.

    2. And a lot of people think the anti-Nazi laws in Germany are overblown.

      A lot of people think bad laws are fine, when they aren’t the ones directly harmed by those laws.

      1. My take on German “anti-nazi” laws is that the address the forms, but not the substance. So they prosecute play nazis but miss real nazis.

  5. Goijra,

    You’re mistaken in a more general way as well. The article Rand linked to cited this Norwegian law: “It is still illegal to “deliberately or grossly negligently publicly present a discriminatory or hateful expression shall be punished by fines or imprisonment for up to 3 years.” Isn’t that an explicit European example of making hatred a crime?

    1. The laws depend on the country but it is highly unusual for someone to get sentenced for a “hate crime” in the EU even if there is legislation about it. I know the Norwegians tightened their laws recently because of the mass murder a couple years back.
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_Norway_attacks

      But this is not exactly the same thing is it? That was a premeditated attack which led to actual deaths.

      Personally I think “hate crime” laws are stupid. If you’ve comited arson, it’s arson, if you’ve done manslaughter, that’s what it is.

  7. In the USA, we have something similar. When a mosque is vandalized, its always a hate crime but when a church is vandalized, it is often not considered a hate crime. Christians often don’t report these types of incidents, so the FBI numbers are not very accurate.

    A year or two ago, a group of Christians were kicked out of a coffee shop in Seattle because they were Christians and the owner didn’t like Christians. The lawsuit happy state AG did nothing. The media didn’t report on it. The Christian group didn’t do anything in response. The video is probably still up on youtube someplace.

      1. I call BS on your nonsense.

        ” The Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino, estimated that of the approximately 21,000 reported hate crimes between 2016 and 2018, just under 50 of those, or 0.2 percent, were found to be false. According to The New York Times, the center estimated that just 1 percent of all reported hate crimes were falsified.”

        My source: https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-jr-hate-crimes-hoaxes-fox-friends-jussie-smollett-1343168

        Where’s your source?

        1. Duh. When dealing with leftists, you have to look at exactly how they phrase things.

          ‘Reported hate crimes’.

          How many actually led to someone being caught and convicted, and therefore actually have a culprit to lay the crime on?

          Every major ‘hate crime’ I remember reading about lately has turned out to be a hoax, except for the recent shooting in New Zealand. Which is probably the only one really worthy of the name.

          And, no, I don’t count some ‘edgy’ 4chan kid posting a swastika on Facebook to be a ‘hate crime’, but I suspect your ‘source’ does.

          3. I would urge everyone to have a look at the data. There is also a link to the FBI training manual on the subject (here it is: https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime-data-collection-guidelines-and-training-manual.pdf)

            The Center’s data is quite fine grained – and it certainly, contrary to Edward’s suspicion, allows for analysis of cases where there was a conviction.

            Correct me if I’m wrong, but it appears to me that anti-Semitic crimes far outweigh every other type of hate crime in the reports no matter how you slice up the data.

  8. Rand,

    I think we are both wrong.

    First, I think I was wrong about anti-semitism outweighing other motivations. I took another look at the data, and it looks like I missed the fact that anti-black and anti-gay crimes outnumber anti-semitic crimes. I think. I need to take a little more time to look at the reports. (Meta-comment: this blog encourages quick commenting because older comment threads slide off the first page as you add more content and then they get ignored. That’s entirely your choice, and I’m not criticizing, but it leads to people being hasty and thus wrong).

    I think you’re wrong, if you’re referring to the data I cited. The data is from the US and about the US. There is FBI data for the whole country, and there are detailed reports for California by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. If you look at the US data from the FBI, as far as I can see, it doesn’t show that Muslims commit the majority of crimes in the USA with anti-semitic bias. Here is the data on offenders:
    https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2015/topic-pages/offenders_final
    As you can see, it doesn’t list the religion of the offender, only their race and whether they are hispanic, but there is a surprisingly fine grained analysis of their motivation. You have to drill in a little — for example, you can click on “table 5” for example, to see what I’m talking about:
    https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2015/tables-and-data-declarations/5tabledatadecpdf

    So I need more time to poke around to find the data I’m looking for.
    Or maybe you have it?

    So I’d like to respectfully ask you something I disrespectfully asked Edward: do you have any data or sources to back up your belief that Muslims are the source of a majority of anti-semitic crimes in either the USA or Europe or both?

    1. There was a bar graph that David Bernstein put up on Instapundit a few days ago, but I don’t have time to look for it. But as an example, here’s Ha’aretz:

      In Germany, government statistics published last year revealed “that German police nationwide documented an average of four criminal incidents with an anti-Semitic motive every day last year, for a total of 1,453 incidents.” German Interior Ministry statistics found “that Muslims are responsible for most of Germany’s anti-Semitic assaults, whether physical or verbal.”

      A recent survey of Jewish communities across 12 EU member states highlighted the “shocking statistic” that more than 30% of the continent’s Jews say that they would consider emigrating because they no longer feel safe as Jews: “Anti-Semitism appears to be so deep-rooted in society that regular harassment has become part of their normal everyday life. Almost 80% do not report serious incidents to the police or any other body.”

      And the source of this “pervasive antisemitism [that] undermines Jews’ feelings of safety and security”? Respondents were asked about the most serious experience of anti-Semitism they’d faced in the last five years: 30% responded they were targeted by an “extremist Muslim,” 21% by a left-winger, and 13% by someone from the right.

      Emphasis mine. For Europe, half of it is either from the Left or from Islamic extremism. Only 13% from “the right.” Of course, not clear what they mean by “the right” in this context, but I’d assume neo-Nazis (who are actually just a different flavor of leftists).

    2. Berstein’s post is here, source is here (Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015).

      No question Islam is the major source of anti-Semitic violence in Europe. And nice twist there Bob; “Crime” vs. “Violence”, since a 12 year old scribbling in chalk constitutes a “Hate” “Crime”. Then there’s Ilhan Omar’s open and blatant anti-Semitism. But again, she’s of the left, YOUR left, with enough intersectional pokemon points to start her own game verse. Nobody would expect you to be familiar with her schtick.

      I’ll try again Bob, are you looking forward to Dick Wolf’s new TV series?

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