An Essay About Pro-Palestinian Democrats And Progressive Jewish-Americans

I recently read an article published 7/7/26 on CNN.com about Jewish-American progressives and the Democratic Party. Although this was sort of news to me, I had heard some stuff about the problem the article describes- supporting the Palestinians has become a litmus test  required by progressives in the Democratic Party and this was causing some problems for Jewish-American progressives who are at least sort of pro-Palestinian but also support Israel in some ways. 

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If our goal is to get the Jewish Israeli population to transform their relationship with the Palestinians, it will work a lot better if we can convince them that accusations of anti-Semitism among us are untrue.

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In the last 18 years I have given a lot of thought to blending support for the Palestinians with opposition to anti-Semitism. I have more to say about my qualifications, etc. in the final section of this essay at the very bottom. One thing I will mention here is that although it’s just a BA, I have a degree in a very relevant field- Ethnic Studies. If you want an example of me contributing to the progressive community on this issue, I got a Guest Opinion published in a MSM newspaper (see this or read it here).                   

My position is that progressive Jewish-Americans who are sort of zionist should be treated as part of the progressive community but simultaneously need to re-evaluate their understanding of what is going on with Israel and the Palestinians. There IS a problem with anti-Semitism among progressives and this, among other things, hobbles the Palestine Solidarity Movement (PSM) in America (I am not sure how many pro-Palestinian activists refer to it as the Palestine Solidarity Movement, but it’s a pretty good way of referring to us).

Progressive Zionists?!?!?!?

Although there is a spectrum for this, and at one end maybe some self-identifying progressive Democratic people don’t qualify as progressive, there are a lot of progressives who are Jewish and probably most of those are, to one degree or another, zionists. A big part of why I say that is an idea I adopted in recent years- that I’m not going to look at something political that I dislike and automatically and always say “I’m a progressive and I don’t like that, so that’s not progressive.” I initially came up with it when I thought about how many progressive activists I came across who were bizarrely friendly to the Libertarian Party and I decided that if they were SOME of the time capitalistic economically but only SOME of the time, and checked ALL the other boxes for stuff like opposing racism, supporting the environment, etc. they should be considered progressive. I also decided, in a similar spirit, that although I greatly value the DEMOCRATIC part of democratic socialism and am open-minded about the term “State Capitalist,” the Soviet Union actually had been about some kind of socialism.

Another reason to consider these Jewish-American progressives PROGRESSIVE is that when Irish-American GOP members expressed support for the Provisional Irish Republican Army (the one associated with Gerry Adams) in the 1980s, the other GOPers didn’t evict them from the party when their ethnicity led them to support what was, IN THE 1980s, a SOCIALIST organization.

One more reason is that the GOP Irish-American IRA supporters did a lot of conservative stuff, which I assume they were passionate about and for which they got credit for from their fellow GOPers. They kept LGBTQ+ people out of the NYC St. Patrick’s Day parade, they opposed Affirmative Action as passionately as they supported the MacBride Principles (Affirmative Action for Catholics in N. Ireland), they supported the invasion of Iraq, etc. etc. etc. I get the impression that the Jewish-American progressives we’re talking about have done and are doing tons of good progressive work that they deserve credit for.

No Pasaran?!?!?!?

That phrase is Spanish for “they shall not pass,” and the Spanish original was a rallying cry for the anti-fascist side of the Spanish Civil War.

This bunch of extremist progressive supporters of the Palestinians who are pushing a McCarthyist-like agenda overlap heavily with the “Uncommitted” movement in 2024 who urged critics of Israel to vote for anybody BUT Harris and sometimes were quite friendly towards Trump. This despite the fact that they are the kind of progressives who would insist that they are more radical than I am but basically sided with a fascist who probably IS the most pro-Israel US President we have had. Apparently being VERY pro-Israel is okay if you’re a fascist but being a little pro-Israel is not okay if you’re a progressive.

I also have to say at some point, that the people who coined the phrase “Genocide Joe” to refer to Biden in connection with Gaza and protested him never did get around to giving Donald Trump the same treatment, and Trump was much more in favor of Israel than Biden was and much more in favor of genocide for the Palestinians than Biden was (I don’t think that Biden was anywhere near that hostile to the Palestinians). I think that until Trump spoke about a Gaza Riviera describing the Gaza War as genocidal was going a little too far.

Was the June 1st 2025 Boulder Attack Anti-Semitic?

As you may know, June 1st 2025 in Boulder, CO there was a violent attack on a non-violent demonstration of support for the Israeli hostages. In a Guest Opinion that was published three days later in the local MSM paper here, I described it as anti-Semitic. Apparently a lot of Americans supporting the Palestinians refuse to call it that. In a recent email with one of these people (in this case a Jewish-American man) I wrote the following:

“You have said that the Pearl St. attack was not anti-Semitic. I realize it was a slightly (politically) pro-Israel activity that was attacked, but their focus was the hostages. And you have to take into consideration that they were non-combatants far from a battlefield. Yes, the Israeli flag was displayed, but that may have been less political than it usually is. In general, they were CIVILIANS and a physical, lethal attack on them from someone who is on the opposite side of a conflict which often touches on religion is bigoted, and I will not apologize for saying that in my essay. Unlike usual I am not sure what is analogous in N. Ireland- although I'll tell you this- not everyone in N. Ireland who identified with the Irish flag during the conflict was a supporter of the IRA and/or Sinn Fein.”

There’s also the fact that, in N. Ireland the main thing, conflict-wise, that the unionist (British-identifying) paramilitaries did was intentionally kill Catholic civilians (and about 99% of those Catholics were totally INNOCENT). Often it was in retaliation for republican violence, but anyone who wasn’t a sectarian asshole (and even some who were) labelled it anti-Catholic because they were innocent civilians.

Lastly, although I think the Palestinians and their American supporters have a point or two when they refer to many of the Palestinians in Israeli prisons as hostages, the fact is, there is nothing inherently colonial about Jewish-Americans being concerned about the hostages that were held by Hamas or others. The hostage-taking was roughly as bad as the murders of Oct. 7th- worse when you consider the medical problems made more complicated by being hostages, or the possibility of being raped, etc. I am open-minded about referring to the active duty IDF members taken prisoner Oct. 7th as something else, but in general the extremist parts of the Palestine Solidarity Movement are wrong about the hostage-taking.

Why the issue of the Palestinians?

I am less certain of my position on this aspect, but combined with everything else I will mention it. Why this issue? I’m certain that for most progressive Americans in the PSM it’s just a coincidence that the oppressor of the Palestinians is, largely, a big chunk of the world’s Jewish population. But I am certain there are also plenty of people who use the k-word and are obsessed with attacking Jewish people. 

On one hand, the conflict IS very important. It’s short history has contributed to making the region a “dangerous neighborhood.” For decades BEFORE Oct. 7th, the Palestinians, in different ways, faced one degree or another of serious injustice and inequity. And the United States is heavily involved as a sponsor of Israel and in some bizarre way is also seen by some as a mediator for peace there.

I was involved most of the time between 1995 and 2005 with the IRELAND Solidarity Movement (which was almost exclusively American) and the American Left really dropped the ball on that one. Why the difference? I understand that America isn’t propping up the UK the way we prop up Israel. But A) the oppression of Northern Ireland Catholics was serious, probably more serious than American progressives understand, and B) the UK (until Trump) was the most important ally of the United States in the entire world, and C) the Northern Ireland issue would have given engaged American progressives opportunities to drag a significant chunk of the Irish-American population towards the Left, and D) the US government did not have a good record on The Troubles. (I explain a lot more about those four points in an essay here starting with the words “Here are some of the reasons…” about 3/4 down from the top and ending with the third paragraph (you will then need to skip down to the very last section of the essay starting with “What makes me confident about….”)) (the fourth point I make is backed up in a post here about halfway from the top starting with “Ways in which Washington D.C. was bad…..” )

Another problem with this focus on Israel and use of it as a litmus test is that there have been a lot of very reactionary people who were anti-Zionist. There is not a strong, consistent connection between being a progressive and being opposed to Zionism.

I am not sure I am proving this aspect of my argument beyond the shadow of a doubt, but the differences are glaring in terms of the extent to which progressives today are embracing one cause and how they neglected the other cause in the mid and late 1990s.

Yes, These People Are Being Obnoxious, But Israel As A Jewish State Is Not Acceptable

Here’s the thing. I’m sure that many of the Jewish-American progressives are (according to the CNN article linked to at the top) supporting Israel to such a small, acceptable degree that I probably have no or little problem with them at all- i.e. if they simultaneously also identify as supporters of the Palestinians. But I’m also sure that many of them, for example, object to use of the phrase “Israeli Apartheid,” a phrase that, in different ways, accurately captures how the Palestinians were treated in the Gaza Strip (before Oct. 7th) and have been treated in the West Bank, and in East Jerusalem, and in the internationally recognized borders of Israel. I did a post that debunks the idea that applying the word “apartheid” to Israel is inaccurate and/or anti-Semitic. About 1/3 of the articles it’s based on are from The Times of Israel, which I believe is a fairly mainstream web publication based in Israel and about 1/3 of the articles are from the BBC (the BBC’s professional coverage of N. Ireland 1997-2005 probably means that they are a good source in general, especially for issues that DON’T involve people frequently setting off bombs in London for decades).

In general, some Jewish-American progressives need to understand that a self-defined “Jewish State” of Israel does now and very likely would in the distant future, involve continued inequality for Palestinian-Israelis- when the Israeli Left is in power that would change a little, but about 3-4 years later Likud or other right-wing parties would get into power and use the formally Jewish identity of the State as encouragement and cover for re-imposing anti-Palestinian policies. I have no idea how progressives can accept a state based on religion and/or ethnicity. It is so much in conflict with progressive values. (If you think that I have a double standard because I am not opposed to the 26-County Irish state based in Dublin and I support uniting the two parts of Ireland, see a post here and read the very last part starting with “Lastly, here is my response….” )

At some point I need to link to a post that takes a fairly comprehensive look at why I think Zionism was a bad idea and and why I believed in the one-state solution. On one hand, since Oct. 7th and Israel’s response I have leaned towards saying that now there must be so much hate on both sides that maybe the two-state solution is better. On the other hand, people who believe in justice and equality and peace might continue pushing for the one-state solution and I would sort of still support that and I can’t help but criticize progressives who rejected the one-state-solution BEFORE Oct. 7th. I should also say that uniting Ireland is more or less the one-state solution for that conflict, whereas re-partitioning Ireland would be comparable to the two-state solution in the Middle-East and is something that Sinn Fein and most Catholics in N. Ireland would never accept.

Anti-Semitism Weakens The Palestine Solidarity Movement

Was there anti-Semitism in the college campus protests that swept the nation 2-3 years ago? I am certain that Trump is not nearly as concerned about anti-semitism as he is hateful of Muslims, Arabs, and the Left. But some of the articles about that issue quoted Jewish-American leaders who said that although Trump is not helping and is exaggerating  the problem and/or that they hate Trump, there was a problem with anti-Semitism in those protests.

I make a big deal on my blog about the need to purge the PSM of anti-Semitism (to a large degree I am influenced by an article here that helps define what is anti-Semitism and what isn’t anti-Semitism in connection with the conflict). I have written on this topic here, here, here, and here (this last one is probably the best). I am not sure how popular or unpopular anti-Semitism is in America, and there’s a spectrum that makes this difficult to measure, but I think there’s at least a small majority of Americans who oppose it. So there’s a very good chance based on that alone that this bigotry costs us political influence and the Palestinian people support. If our goal is to get the Jewish Israeli population to transform their relationship with the Palestinians, it will work a lot better if we can convince them that accusations of anti-Semitism among us are untrue. More members of the PSM who are either Jewish or allies, numerically and strategically outweigh any loss of support from people who are simply anti-Semitic and show little potential for change.

On a personal level and on a political level I greatly value the Jewish-American population. Those who were/are liberal or progressive were disproportionately involved in the anti-Vietnam War effort, with supporting the anti-racist cause, and with Democratic Party victories. In my experience they were disproportionately involved with supporting the N. Ireland Catholic population during the conflict. On a personal level I have had some friends here and there who are Jewish, my Mom’s best friend almost her entire life was a Jewish woman, etc. My fiancé who I’ve been with for 6 and 1/2 years is partly Jewish. In case anyone thinks (after all I have written here) that  I will do anything to get along with Jewish people I should explain something- when I started thinking of leaving the Catholic Church about 5-10 years ago, I decided to convert to a Protestant Church after spending maybe an hour contemplating the idea that Christ was NOT the Son of God and then dismissing it and sticking with Christianity.

I think I say enough things in this essay that contribute to this statement: Anti-Semitism is destructive to our communities, our political movements, our nation, and our world. No more or less than, for example, anti-Muslim bigotry (some will say that the greater number of Muslims means that anti-Muslim bigotry is more destructive to humanity, but I am also influenced by the facts that within the last century we almost lost the Jewish population and anti-Semitism is the fuel for the neo-Nazi movement which is still a threat).

Islamophobia and Support for Israel Weaken The Movement Against Anti-Semitism

Via articles on the Southern Poverty Law Center web-site and other sources I have encountered anti-Muslim bigotry from Jewish-American people who were and are more right-wing than left-wing, but I am not sure how widespread is some mild variant of Islamophobia among progressive Jewish-Americans. I imagine it’s a small but significant problem because A) Jewish-Americans are basically White Americans and exposed to the same propaganda all white people are and B) Israel IS in a conflict that usually pits it against Muslims and that is often influenced by religion.

Most of what I would say to liberal or progressive Jewish Americans who might be islamophobic is either typed in, or linked to from, these paragraphs. These Jewish-Americans should spend some time thinking critically about how they see muslims and Palestinians. 

When progressive, Zionist Jewish-Americans say pro-Israel stuff alongside a ton of progressive things they make it a little more difficult for us to get progressive anti-Semites to abandon their bigotry because it is easy for people to experience that as politically maddening- that people would be progressive on all issues but one, about their people (when GOP Irish-American IRA supporters do their version of that I go a lot further and simply call them racist). The Palestinians do have very serious and legitimate national grievances and national aspirations and Jewish-American people denying that doesn’t help the fight against anti-Semitism.

Conclusions

People who are politically active and/or are inside certain communities can help advance these twin agendas of supporting the Palestinians and opposing anti-Semitism. When we convince progressive anti-Semites that their bigotry is wrong, we strengthen the PSM in America and the more people who hear the PSM’s message from people who oppose anti-Semitism, the more progress we make taking down anti-Semitism, the more Jewish Israelis will take us seriously— this goes around and around in an upwards spiral.

Some things that will help with combatting anti-Semitism:

1) American supporters of the Palestinians who believe that because Jewish-Americans are not oppressed (AS JEWISH-AMERICANS) no effort should be made to avoid friction with that community need to understand that we’re all standing in a lake of gasoline called ANTI-SEMITISM and we need to avoid creating unnecessary sparks that could set it on fire. 
2) The Irish political party Sinn Fein, which interacts with Americans a lot and which is largely against anti-Semitism, needs to stop putting out (side-by-side) the following two statements: A) that there must be a boycott of Israel and B) that it was okay that the IRA accepted aid from Nazi Germany (they need to repeal the second of those two statements).
3) It wouldn’t hurt if supporters of Israel would speak about anti-semitism in their own ranks (i.e. The Rapture, and the anti-Soros stuff, and comparing reasonable things like COVID-19 public health measures and hostility towards Republicans in our society with what Nazi Germany did to Jewish people).
4) Critics of Israel need to abandon two ideas I have encountered. The first is that because the conflict is asymmetrical it’s okay for the military wing of Hamas to target civilians. The other idea is that Palestinians are so powerless that they have the power to make war, but not the power to make peace. (I criticize both ideas here).
5) I think that a lot of American progressives fail to express enthusiasm, when looking at history, for the Allied cause in World War II. I’m thinking of people who are not anti-Semitic but who might be giving other people the wrong idea about the Holocaust, simply because they take their usually solid criticism of America too far.
6) Critics of Israel need to remember that although a majority of Jewish-Americans support Israel, that majority is a VERY SMALL minority of American Zionists.

I can only come up with two ideas to counter anti-Muslim bigotry besides everything else I have said or linked to above. 

1) If the opportunity arises, we should ask the US military if they would behave the way they did in Iraq 2003-2008 were they to find themselves policing a rocky Peace Process in N. Ireland (I am not sure how popular this shirt is, especially for the POST-Bush GOP, but the text of a shirt here should be discussed, especially the one about collateral damage).
2) I have read, at least once, the argument that anti-Muslim bigotry in America today resembles the anti-Catholic bigotry that occasionally surged and retreated in this country over the decades until about the 1940s (I think it has surged a little bit since then in terms of left-wing ignorance about Catholic politics). I used to be Catholic (I’ve sort of started converting to the Episcopalian Church) and I experienced anti-Catholic bigotry in this country at least two or three times (I also kind of experienced it in Northern Ireland twice).
3) The two very last statements in this conclusion should balance things a little.

It’s been about 15 years since I read huge amounts of information from the Southern Poverty Law Center, but if we DO see a resurgence of the Nazi skinhead movement, we should, as united communities, counter them by ANY AND EVERY means available. This will be more effective and successful if Muslim-Americans and Jewish-Americans cooperate and have not pushed each other away, and this future battle requires them to start massive dialogue now.

I am concluding with a quote from the hard-working opponents of organized hate, right-wing politics and economic injustice at the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one of the articles in the Fall 2008 issue of their publication, they wrote the following (it’s a statement by the author of that article, Sonia Scherr):
 

“Although criticism of Israel does not typically amount to anti-Semitism — and many critics of the Jewish state are unfairly accused of bigotry — in some cases those who denounce Israel also cross the line into denigration of Jews as a group.” 

My Qualifications And Some Other Stuff About Why You Should Consider What I Say In This Essay

I could be more familiar with this in some ways- but in other ways I believe I have a lot to offer. I  have read a ridiculous number of articles about the conflict there, I have read a ridiculous number of articles about anti-Semitism, and I have given a lot of thought to blending support for the Palestinians with opposition to anti-Semitism. Although it is just a BA, I got a degree in a very relevant field in 2003 at CU-Boulder— Ethnic Studies. When I attended the 2002 National Conference of Sinn Fein Youth in Galway, Ireland, I was representing the Anti-Racism Commission of the Democratic Socialists of America (see below). It might be relevant that I am engaged to marry a woman who identifies partly as Jewish- enough that I have been to three Passover Seders with her in the last four years.

I was a member of DSA from 1995-2002 and my familiarity with it gradually declined after 2002. I left for a hybrid of personal and political reasons but I have some reason to believe that I would probably still feel at home in it today if not for the personal stuff. The political stuff is not relevant to this. Even today I am not as literate when it comes to socialist theory as I should be, and around 25-30 years ago I knew even less. During that time I vaguely identified as a Marxist and I was either a third-party fan or reluctant to register as a Democrat. I have done an okay job of educating myself more since then and I now use two terms in combination to describe my political beliefs- democratic Marxist and left-wing social-democrat. I’ve been registered as a Dem since 2004. I am not officially with any political organization, although I might be close to identifying with Indivisible.

Some people might point out that practically no one has heard of me and suggest that I have done nothing in recent years to earn a prominent stall in the marketplace of ideas. The short version is that while I did a ton of activism in Boulder 1994-2004, since Aug. of 2001 I have been dealing with a “perfect storm” of things that are A) largely or completely not my fault and B) largely personal tragedy (in some ways that situation has been almost overturned since I started dating my fiancé in 2020, but in a lot of ways I still struggle with stuff vocationally, mentally, emotionally, etc.). During the time since 2001 I have continued reading a HUGE amount of political material, I have developed some analytical skills through writing a lot, and I have made some decent contributions to the progressive community. Since 2008 I have published about a million words on this blog. Although in the last 6 years my blog has gotten only about 10 page-views a week on average, 2008-2018 there were about 10,000 first time visitors (who may have looked at several posts and/or come back some other time for more) and in the first few months of the pandemic there were somewhere around 100 page-views a day. 2011-2022 I volunteered an average of five hours a week at a large food-bank in this area. Since early 2021 I have gotten a total of about 10 LTEs and about six Guest Opinions published in a mainstream Boulder County publication and a sort of mainstream Boulder County publication. Since 2010 I have gone to a progressive event or protest about twice a month on average and in the last year it’s been about twice a week on average.

A big part of why few people have heard a lot about me as a political activist in the last 20 years is that I have 4+ mental disabilities that got worse or more numerous at a few different points in the last 25 years (for more about my mental health and progressive politics, read this).           

Trump, Iran, and Genocide

Below is something I wrote about a week after Trump threatened to destroy the civilization of Iran in early April. 

 

Tom 

 

 

I am glad that President Trump has so far not gone through with his threat to destroy Iran. It is damning of him and his voters that he made the threat and he is guilty of threatening genocide (“Conspiracy to Commit Genocide” and “Direct and Public Incitement to Commit Genocide” are crimes in international law (according to the 1948 Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide ) and it’s reasonable to assume that Trump’s threat involved planning with high-ranking members of his administration). If there was no conspiracy because it was nothing but a threat, Trump should say so, apologize and acknowledge that even the threat by itself is harmful (and he would still be guilty of the incitement charge)). Although some of his supporters, for various and not-necessarily progressive reasons, have criticized him, the GOP don’t seem to understand how criminal it is to make the threat that he made. Some think that he was just being politically tactical and would never actually do it and therefore it’s okay. It’s so far from OK it is globally considered a crime. It reminds me of a scene in the Denzel Washington film "Training Day" where a cop interrogating college students who just bought drugs threatens to get the young woman in the group gang-raped.

The US should be more sensitive about this sort of thing- not because we have a great history of doing the right thing (we don’t). But because we did the wrong thing when it came to American Indians, because we are more familiar than most countries with the genocide of European Jews, and because we’re more familiar than most countries with the near-genocidal treatment of the Irish during the so-called “Potato Famine.” There are millions of Americans who lost relatives (and not distant ancestors) to Adolf Hitler’s Final Solution, and/or who are also similarily related to many Jewish people who were lucky to survive Nazi Germany- who would have been killed if not for that luck, Allied sacrifice, and/or their own efforts to escape the Holocaust.

I believe that one way to concisely capture the evil of genocide is that a 100%-successful effort could be described as the cultural equivalent of an animal species going extinct. I worry that putting it that way focuses too much on what other populations lose when the victim is (at least to a moderate degree) exterminated. But it contributes to understanding the severity of this crime.

Genocide is so horrible that it should be universally opposed by all nations. Although I am not a fan of the Islamic Republic, I have opposed Trump’s war since day one, and I have a little factoid relevant to this. Although I believe there is at least a fair amount of anti-Semitism in Iran (and I say that while supporting the Palestinians) in 2007 a TV mini-series was made by and broadcast by official Iranian media- a movie based on a true story of how an Iranian diplomat in Paris during World War II engineered some kind of Oscar Schindler-type effort that saved at least about 500 Jewish lives. The mini-series is called “Zero Degree Turn” and there’s an article that seems fair about it here.

Trump is of course selective, more so than most American politicians, in his opposition to genocide. It’s like his attitude to COVID-19, when he explicitly said that states would get more help from Washington if their governors publicly said nice things about him. It was a politically-indiscriminate PANDEMIC, and he saw it as transactional. He is, almost 100%, sensitive when it comes to the Holocaust, because he wants Jewish votes and Jewish money. When he thinks it will help him, he threatens the misanthropic destruction on an entire civilization.

Trump’s threat might give some nations and other actors the impression that genocide or threatening genocide is okay.

Lastly, Trump’s threat greatly undermines how the rest of the world sees the US. We have lost more moral authority on the global stage and we didn’t have much to begin with. It will increase support for or indifference towards any effort at carrying out another 9/11. We have already taken two steps backwards during Trump’s second administration in terms of conciliation with the Muslim world- supporting Netanyahu’s Gaza War, and the first month of Trump’s Iran War. What Trump has threatened would inflame hatred for us throughout the world.

If Trump were to go through with his threat it would be a nightmare for the Iranian people, a nightmare for the Middle-East, and would guarantee pandemic-level hatred of Americans for decades.

Combatting Anti-Semitism

Below is a guest opinion of almost 700 words that, with very few small differences, I submitted to the Daily Camera (Boulder's main paper) about four weeks ago. At this point it's not going to get published.

There are some things I'm going to clarify and offer some addendums below the essay following this introduction. Let me first say that I have heard of two other recent attacks in the last year or so and there was one more in London three weeks ago. Also, one thing I came across a few times in the last several months in articles on CNN.COM is prominent liberal or progressive Jewish-Americans saying that there ARE some problems with anti-Semitism on the university campuses Trump has been attacking, although these leaders make it clear that it's not as bad as Trump makes it out to be and that the President is not helping at all

 

Tom

 

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I’m sure I am forgetting 1-2 examples of this, but in the last eight years there have been some really significant anti-Semitic physical attacks. From the American Right there was the 2018 murder of 11 Jewish people at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh. Right here in Boulder in 2025 one Jewish person (a Holocaust survivor) was killed and several were wounded and the number one suspect is a Muslim. At Bondi Beach last year in Australia 15 Jewish people including one Holocaust survivor were killed and the two (dead) suspects were a Muslim father and son. In January 2026 an anti-Semitic arson took place at an important synagogue and the number one suspect is a White, American (possibly fundamentalist) Christian. A few days ago a destructive attack was carried out at a synagogue and community center in Michigan and the dead suspect was an Arab-American man.

Some of this predates the Gaza War and most of it predates the Iran War. The common theme is anti-Semitism. I do have some connections to the Jewish-American community, and I am incredibly partisan (on one side) in the fight against anti-Semitism, but I go where the facts take me and I say what has to be said, independent of the politics (I have been a supporter of the Irish political party Sinn Fein since 1997, but 1999-2004 I criticized them very publicly three times because they had strayed a bit from the path of opposing homophobia). Although this is greatly exaggerated by some political tendencies among Jewish Americans (such as the ADL), most Republicans including Trump, and an official part of the Israeli government, there IS some anti-Semitism among progressive supporters, Muslim supporters and Arab supporters of the Palestinians. I have encountered it in Ireland and in Boulder.

When I started my blog in 2008 I was very quick to add fighting anti-semitism to the list of official main topics. I’m not sure when I started thinking about it critically (probably about 25-30 years ago) but I have always been a fan, when looking at history, of what the Allies of World War II did. The Holocaust was one of the worst things to happen in this world’s history (a big part of my major was American Indian Studies and in some ways what happened to Native Americans may have been more destructive to humanity, but the Holocaust, overall, was way up there, too). One of the other reasons I made it a big part of my blog is that in my Sophomore year of college (1995-1996) I was mildly anti-Semitic. I don’t think I did any harm, and there were a lot of anti-Semitic things I did NOT do, but I believe in compensating for the tiniest possibility that I DID do some harm. Anyway, about half of why I was slightly but significantly hateful was the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

What can be done about anti-Semitism in the short-to-medium term? Some suggestions:

1) Supporters of the Palestinians who believe that because Jewish-Americans are not oppressed (AS JEWISH-AMERICANS) no effort should be made to avoid friction with that community need to understand that we’re all standing in a lake of gasoline called ANTI-SEMITISM and we need to, when appropriate, avoid creating sparks that could set it on fire.
2) Supporters of Israel need to be less trigger-happy with the accusation of anti-Semitism. I don’t have space here to go into any detail, but, for example, there is nothing inherently bigoted about the term “Israeli Apartheid.”
3) Sinn Fein, which is largely against anti-Semitism, needs to stop putting out (side-by-side) the following two statements: A) that there must be a boycott of Israel and B) that it was okay that the IRA accepted aid from Nazi Germany.
4) It wouldn’t hurt if supporters of Israel would speak about anti-semitism in their own ranks (I.e. The Rapture, and the anti-Soros stuff, and comparing reasonable things like COVID-19 public health measures and hostility towards Republicans in our society with what Nazi Germany did).

I AM a pretty solid supporter of the Palestinians, and for decades now I have believed that opposing anti-Semitism STRENGTHENS that movement, and that supporting the Palestinians STRENGTHENS the struggle against anti-Semitism.

 

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Some things to clarify and/or add:

 

1) There's a post partly about my sophomore year and anti-Semitism, here.

 

2) As far as my assumption that Jewish-Americans are not oppressed AS JEWISH-AMERICANS, I wrote a fair amount about that in mid-2020 here.

 

3) Why do I mention a "lake of gasoline"? There's a line in the 1991 movie "Backdraft" spoken by Robert De Niro, a line that for some reason I really like. It refers dramatically to a "lake of gasoline."

 

4) I don't know if this has been repealed since but at some point about 20 years ago an agency of the EU said that the term "Israeli Apartheid" is anti-semitic. I did a post that was largely about refuting that accusation. It's here.

 

5) After Bondi Beach I felt like I had to do something and I decided to weaponize a post on my blog about the problem with Sinn Fein that I refer to above. It went nowhere, for some reason or other. So I brought it into this. The post is here. 

 

6) Maybe the worst fit in this essay is suggestion #4. I did a post on my blog that is overwhelmingly about examples of anti-Semitism among SUPPORTERS of Israel. I think it's at least kind of relevant to this, but I'm not sure if I added it to this essay very well. That blogpost is here.

 

7) I am thinking of doing a fairly long essay that focuses on and substantiates and further develops the idea in the last paragraph of the essay above.

How To Address Tension Between Jews and Muslims, Zionists and Palestinians In America?

Below is something I am very fond of. It's not flawless but I believe it's pretty good. The joke about McMahon might not be as funny as I thought. Also, if the reference to Nazi skinheads seemed odd- A) I believe that they pose a very serious threat to our society and B) reminding Muslim Americans and Jewish Americans that they share or shared or will share a common enemy might be helpful.

 

With some small editing my essay was published as a Guest Opinion in Boulder's main paper a few days after the incident. Below is what I submitted to them. (The quote at the bottom is something written by Sonia Scherr)

 

Tom

 

********** 

 

I saw the headline around 4 PM Sunday afternoon. For the most part I wasn’t too surprised. Although at this point it seems likely there was no Boulder dimension to the planning and execution of the attack, I had encountered Israel-connected anti-Semitism, to a small but significant degree, on a discussion and organizing list associated with the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center shortly after Oct. 7th- at one point concerned City of Boulder officials were briefly involved. Although this attack is suspiciously convenient for the Trump Administration, I am inclined to usually take accusations of anti-Semitism seriously. I didn’t know it was too soon after the attack for some kind of unifying rally near the crime scene, so when I went to Pearl Street about 6:30 PM there were just cops there.

More so than with any other opinion piece I’ve submitted to local media in the last 5 years, I wish I could include links to my blog. Fighting anti-Semitism is a major part of my blog, about 15% of the total, and supporting the Palestinians is about 10% of my blog (those two parts overlap a lot). I am a very passionate supporter of the Palestinians (I was happy to cover my face with a keffiyeh I was given when I was standing next to working-class Catholics fighting the British Army in Belfast in 2002 (fortunately for all of us in the street that day, Education Secretary Linda McMahon wasn’t around enforcing her anti-mask rule!)). On the other hand my response to Oct. 7th was so hostile to Hamas that two people associated with the RMPJC accused me of being a Zionist and almost no one on that list disagreed with them.

The Peace Process in Israel/Palestine is in serious trouble. In recent years I have leaned towards supporting a one state solution, but after Oct. 7th and Israel’s response, maybe a two state solution is more realistic.

Until there is some massive progress towards peace, what can we do in America to prevent more attacks that target people because they are Muslim-American or because they are Jewish-American? With Trump in office, I don’t have high hopes. Here are some thoughts (not an exhaustive list):

1) Critics of Israel need to abandon two ideas I have encountered. The first is that because the conflict is asymetrical it’s okay for the military wing of Hamas to target civilians. The other idea is that Palestinians are so powerless that they have the power to make war, but not the power to make peace.
2) It’s been about 15 years since I read huge amounts of information from the Southern Poverty Law Center, but if we DO see a resurgence of the Nazi skinhead movement, we should, as united communities, counter them by ANY AND EVERY means available.
3) It’s possible that events in the near future will lead me to use this word without hesitation, but I think that until Trump talked about a Gaza Riviera, critics of Israel were a little trigger-happy with the word “genocide.”
4) I think that a lot of American progressives fail to express enthusiasm, when looking at history, for the Allied cause in World War II. I’m thinking of people who are not anti-Semitic but who might be giving other people the wrong idea about the Holocaust, simply because they take their usually solid criticism of America too far.
5) Critics of Israel need to remember that although a majority of Jewish-Americans support Israel, that majority is a VERY SMALL minority of American Zionists.

I am concluding with a quote from the hard-working opponents of organized hate, right-wing politics and economic injustice at the Southern Poverty Law Center. In one of the articles in the Fall 2008 issue of their publication, they wrote the following (it’s a statement by the author of that article):
 
“Although criticism of Israel does not typically amount to anti-Semitism — and many critics of the Jewish state are unfairly accused of bigotry — in some cases those who denounce Israel also cross the line into denigration of Jews as a group.” 

Fuck Hamas

This is my position on what happened in Israel and Palestine in early Oct.

First, as far as the history of that conflict, about 20% of my knowledge comes from Juan Cole’s site Informed Comment and about 20% is from the BBC. The rest, about 60% is from various sources, some  mainstream, some progressive, including The Nation, the Washington Post, the Times of Israel, etc. In the last week it’s something like 50% the BBC, 10% Juan Cole, 10% CNN and the rest is miscellaneous.

I have been a supporter of the Palestinians pretty much since I started becoming more than a tiny bit political. I sort of explain my general thoughts about the conflict in a post here. I have only briefly been VERY familiar with Israeli and Palestinian politics, and that was the first 2-3 months of 2020 when I was reading about 15 articles a day on the web-based newspaper The Times of Israel. I used to be a member of what used to be the American section of the Socialist International (the Democratic Socialists of America) and in 2001 learned that Fatah, the leading part of the PLO (Arafat was a leader of Fatah), was a less-than-full member of the SI. Until recently I basically supported them.

That was increasingly (in recent years as more and more criticisms were made of the PLO) because of who the main alternative was. My position has always been- “Fuck Hamas.” To one degree or another Hamas is a lot more socially conservative than Fatah is, and I think that the activities of the military wing of Hamas were more likely to intentionally kill innocent civilians than the PLO was when they were fighting Israel.

But for decades now I have heard about the PLO being corrupt and abusing their power. They also have done a horrible job of advancing the interests of their people. Although that’s been clear to one degree or another for decades now, there was a BBC article that really explained that just recently. And then there was a BBC article accusing the President of the Palestinian Authority (sort of an extension of the PLO, in the West Bank) of giving a VERY anti-Semitic speech. As you’ll understand if you read that article, Abbas said that European Jews were targeted because they had money. This is not true and even if all Jews were rich, how in the world would that justify killing them- especially when rich people outside the Jewish population were not targeted as well.

I won’t discuss this in this essay, but I am not sure who I can support among the political movements in the Palestinian population.

The Palestinians have very serious and legitimate grievances. Those who are Israeli citizens experience a fair amount of inequality. Those living in the West Bank have it worse (they are state-less), and in different ways the residents of the Gaza Strip have it even worse than that. The first two of the three aspects of the Israeli state I just referred to are often referred to as being governed by “Israeli Apartheid.” I explain how that’s a legitimate term for how the Palestinians are treated here. The two state solution has been dying a slow death for decades as Israel plants settlers in the West Bank, changing the “facts on the ground” that will make an independent Palestine non-viable.  The Israeli Right, who are in power right now, wants to annex all of the West Bank, at the expense of the Palestinians living there.

So, yes, the Palestinians have every reason to be FURIOUS with the Israeli state and the Israeli people. But what Hamas has done in the last few days is horrible. IF it had been aimed at the military and (using methods that avoid civilian death) government and commercial buildings, I would at least sort of approve. But that’s not what happened. What happened was a massacre of civilians and, especially with a right-wing extreme Zionist government in Jerusalem, it will provoke an even greater (UPDATE 310/10/23 bigger, and/or more extensive) response than what we have seen in the last few days. It will probably bury any chance at peace for a generation.

Is that guaranteed? Fortunately it is not. We need to continue our efforts to change American policy on Israel. That effort will be boosted if we do more to incorporate opposition to anti-Semitism into our solidarity work in support of the Palestinians. That is one of the main themes in my post on Zionism and a one state solution. At the risk of scheming internationally, this is one more reason to support the Irish political party Sinn Fein. After SF got within striking distance of leading a left-wing and republican government in Dublin in 2020, Juan Cole wrote a post about what that might mean for the Palestinians. In recent years there has been a trend of bigger and bigger percentages of the Jewish-American population supporting the Palestinians, and this will help.

In general I am a supporter of Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions, although I worry that a CULTURAL boycott could fuel anti-semitism. But an economic and political BDS network would be awesome.

So, we need to do a better job than we have done. And I think that a good place to start is to react to recent events by condemning Hamas, talking up a one state solution, and doing more of what we have already done.

 

********

 

UPDATE 10/12/23 There is another item on the same theme here.

Movie Reviews A

This is a new part of my blog. I’m going to start typing up some thoughts about the movies I watch.

Hidden Figures (IMDB Wikipedia)

I don’t know historically accurate it is, but it is a good story. I’m a little surprised that as long ago as the early 1960s black women were allowed to contribute that much to NASA but apparently they were and it’s so inspiring that these three women overcame the barriers of racism and sexism to such a degree that they succeeded as much as they did. I also love this movie because I love stories about space exploration, whether it’s Star Trek, Star Wars, Aliens or stuff like Apollo 13 and this movie.

I give it 4 stars out of 5.

Foxfire (IMDB Wikipedia)

I found this at a video store in 1997 and watched it a few times. I think it’s an independent film that did very well in the theaters. It’s basically about friendship among a group of high school girls who fight back against a sexually abusive teacher and get suspended. They encounter more sexism among their male peers.

I give it 5 out of 5 stars.

On the Basis of Sex (IMDB Wikipedia)

I don’t know historically accurate it is, but it is a good story. This is about the early career of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court Justice. It’s one of the best and most inspiring movies I have ever seen. I didn’t appreciate her as much as I should have when she was still alive. I got the impression her husband wasn’t as progressive as she was, but he still seemed like a cool guy, giving her some help with her first attempt at changing this country in a progressive direction. And her daughter also seemed pretty awesome- she verbally fought back as construction workers were harassing her, and earlier she ditches class to go to a rally that Gloria Steinem spoke at. In 10th grade I walked out of my 3rd period class to join other students protesting the 1992 Rodney King verdict (King was brutally assaulted by LAPD officers in 1991 and the officers were acquitted, sparking protests and rioting).

I give it 5 stars out of five.

Jewish Skinhead Army: A New Poem

Here's a new poem. For various reasons I'm doing it now instead of waiting for 2 more to be ready. You can read about how I write my poems here. This one is about anti-racist skinheads and general notes for that kind of poem are here.

You can find all the other lyrics by clicking on the "lyrics" label at the bottom. The other SHARP/RASH poems are here.

 “Jewish Skinhead Army” based on “European Skinhead Army” by No Remorse. Original lyrics are here.

1. This is about Jewish-American skinheads. I’m not sure how many of them are members of anti-racist skinhead crews (a skinhead gang but, with non-Nazi skinheads, it doesn’t mean what you think), but I’m sure some of them are.
2. The first 1/3 of a post here is relevant to this.
3. The Nuremberg Laws stripped Jews in Nazi Germany of their citizenship and contributed to the creation of a kind of Apartheid for German Jews.
4. Normally I wouldn’t encourage White people to brag about being white, but Nazis don’t think that Jews are White like, for example, Irish-Americans are (of course there are Jewish Irish-Americans).
5. “Bourgeoisie” is a term for the upper-class. Anti-racist skinheads are overwhelmingly working-class and proud of it. Very few are socialists or anarchists, but some are and I’M writing the poem (if that implies I’m a skinhead, I’m not).
6. “Sunwheel banner” is a term for the Swastika.
7. ZOB is the Polish acronym for the Jewish Combat Organization, the group that carried out the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto during WWII.
8. Bonehead is an anti-racist term for Nazi skinhead.
9. In the movie “Uprising” a member of the ZOB dressed in a German Army uniform jokingly says “Heil Shitler!”
10. Valhalla is part of Norse mythology, the idea is that it’s a place where warriors go after they die, although there seems to be some debate about exactly who gets in- only people who die in combat? Anyway, the fascists love it and have sort of taken over the concept, but in 2009 a friend told me that he likes the idea of the left claiming it and specifically said that if such a place exists, Che and others like him are probably there. (Do I believe in Valhalla? No, or at best in a political but neither spiritual nor religious way I am kind of an agnostic about Valhalla and am sort of solidly a Christian (in 2025 I started moving towards converting from the Catholic Church to a Protestant Church, which I think should establish my strong preference for Christianity in terms of my spiritual home)). This shouldn’t be taken too seriously- it’s a fun way to “poke the bear,” to celebrate various movements in conflict with fascism, etc. I would also add that although this wouldn’t be enough on it’s own to justify what I am doing with the idea of Valhalla, some of the fascist lyrics I alter mention it and I came up with a good way to alter those lines (out of about 9 references in my poems, all but one involved that word already being there- I only added it once).
11. Oi! is music that most skinheads (and some other fans of what you might call the kind of music that inspires moshing) listen to. I’m not sure how to describe it musically, although it resembles punk. I think it’s sort of defined by lyrics about violence and the working-class and being skinheads and the hair cut of most people in Oi! bands.
12. Hallah is a kind of Jewish bread.
13. **65% of this poem is me and 35% is the original.

On the Nazi boneheads we’re gonna go medieval
We're shaving our heads because it's good against evil
We've got the music, we've got the bands,
We never lose, we play the winning hand

Chorus:
Jewish Skinhead Army,
We stand together in the anti-fascist cause,
Jewish Skinhead Army,
We smash those who admire the Nuremberg Laws

We're on the streets, every night,
We’re of the working-class and we’re also White,
Smash the bourgeoisie, socialize their manors!
We raise our middle fingers to the sunwheel banner

We remember the ZOB, and fuck Shitler,
the Nazi bonehead is a class traitor,
If we fall in battle and go to Valhalla,
We’ll listen to oi! and eat some Hallah

Irish Unity: Three New Poems

Three more poems. For info about how I write my poems, see this. 2-3 of these poems are based on lyrics I find offensive, see the next paragraph. The last poem is about anti-racist skinheads. There are notes for those poems in general here.

I have until recently been very unsure about whether or not “Sweet Home Alabama” is a racist song. But, if wikipedia is not totally full of shite, I lean very heavily towards saying that it’s racist. That’s based partly on the song’s wikipedia page. I looked at the interview with the back-up singer, and I looked at the page with the statement by Ed King. Also, although Neil Young says they were right to be angry about his song “Alabama,” “Sweet Home Alabama” refers to the Neil Young song “Southern Man,“ which he doesn’t apologize for and which is (lyrically) a fairly-very good anti-racist song. I also found an article in The Atlantic that  makes it pretty clear they were racists when the song was written (the confederate flag has always been a symbol of racism).

You can find the rest of the lyrics, about ten pages of them, here.

1. "General Maurice Rose" About the Allies in WWII and specifically about Jewish-American soldiers who fought Nazi Germany.
2. "The North." N. Ireland. (A BLACK AND GREEN POEM)
3. "Skinhead Unity." Anti-racist skinheads.

“General Maurice Rose” based on “European Skinhead Army” by No Remorse. Original lyrics are here.

1. This is a little complicated. It started out as a poem about the US Army IN GENERAL in the European part of WWII. But then I needed something that rhymed with “Valhalla” (see below) and I found a kind of Jewish bread. Then I remembered about General Maurice Rose (see below) and made it PARTLY about Jewish-American soldiers in that theater (it's not from General Rose's perspective, and I imagine a lot of Jewish-American veterans might not know what to think about the part about Odin, but I explain that below (for whatever it's worth, the reference to Odin was already there)).
2. A medical center in Denver is named after the late General Maurice Rose. On their site they say the following about a point in 1945:

“It was around this time that news broke that General Maurice Rose, a Denver son and the highest-ranking Jewish officer in the U.S. Army during World War II, had been killed in combat. Rose was known for his aggressive style of leadership, directing his units from the front rather than a rear command post. When he and his staff, surrounded by German troops, were attempting to surrender, a panicked young German tank soldier fired one shot to Rose’s head, killing him instantly. His death caused an uproar: demands were made by congressmen for an investigation, and it was front-page news. Suddenly, the committee knew they could achieve two goals—create the new Jewish hospital and memorialize a fallen Jewish hometown hero.”

3. The Waffen-SS was the tactically-elite military, as opposed to paramilitary, part of the ideologically-based SS.
3. The Rhineland was a strategically important part of western Germany with a lot of industry.
4. FDR was the President of the US during almost all of WWII, until he died about a month before Nazi Germany was defeated.
5. Nazis made Jews wear a yellow star armband.
6. Although it’s true that the WESTERN Allies rarely carried out night assaults A) The Soviets frequently did, B) it rhymes, and C) sometimes they DID- see this and this.
7. The Wehrmacht was the German military, although it’s unclear if the Waffen-SS was part off the Wehrmacht.
8. The “sunwheel banner” is a term for the Swastika flag.
9. Odin is the god of Valhalla. Valhalla is part of Norse mythology, the idea is that it’s a place where warriors go after they die, although there seems to be some debate about exactly who gets in- only people who die in combat? Anyway, the fascists love it and have sort of taken over the concept, but in 2009 a friend told me that he likes the idea of the left claiming it and specifically said that if such a place exists, Che and others like him are probably there. (Do I believe in Valhalla? No, or at best in a political but neither spiritual nor religious way I am kind of an agnostic about Valhalla and am sort of solidly a Christian (in 2025 I started moving towards converting from the Catholic Church to a Protestant Church, which I think should establish my strong preference for Christianity in terms of my spiritual home)). This shouldn’t be taken too seriously- it’s a fun way to “poke the bear,” to celebrate various movements in conflict with fascism, etc. I would also add that although this wouldn’t be enough on it’s own to justify what I am doing with the idea of Valhalla, some of the fascist lyrics I alter mention it and I came up with a good way to alter those lines (out of about 9 references in my poems, all but one involved that word already being there- I only added it once). I MADE A POINT OF REFERRING TO ALL U.S. SOLDIERS IN THAT THEATER NOT JUST THE JEWISH ONES, TO LESSEN THE DEGREE TO WHICH I AM SAYING THAT GENERAL ROSE (SPECIFCALLLY) WENT TO VALHALLA. (also I’ve done six other poems where I imply that people who don’t believe in Valhalla go there, and one of them was about Allied soldiers in the Western European theater (the other references to Valhalla were largely but not exclusively about Irish Republicans)
10. After Germany was defeated, a process was started that resulted in a democracy being created in what would be West Germany. Although some would point out that it was done through military occupation and an effort called “de-Nazification”, I think the entrenched nature of Nazism in Germany meant that there was no other way to create a democracy there. If it weren’t for a lot of Allied soldiers, de-Nazification would have been impossible to enforce, and the German Army would have reconstituted itself.
11. The second to last line. It’s meant to refer to members of the Waffen-SS. They were responsible for massacres of civilians (even in the West), the execution (in ONE incident) of American POWs, and some of them were concentration camp guards. Such people, IF soldiers in general go to Valhalla (see above), don’t go to Valhalla, in my opinion.
12. Hallah is a kind of Jewish bread.
13. You have to emphasize the “er”s in “banner” and “shatter” to make them rhyme.
14. **73% of this poem is me, 27% is the original.

On the Waffen-SS, we’re gonna go medieval
The Allies have teamed up and it's good against evil,
We've got the tanks, we’re heading for the Rhineland
We won’t lose, we’ll play the winning hand

Chorus:
United States Army,
We fight together, commanded by FDR
United States Army,
We fight for the people who wear the yellow star

We're advancing day and night,
Behind the front our air support takes flight
Smash the Wehrmacht, make it shatter
We raise our middle fingers to the sunwheel banner

many U.S. soldiers will meet Odin, unlike Hitler,
After we take Berlin, a democracy we’ll configure
When we kill Nazis in battle, they won’t go to Valhalla
After the war, we’ll celebrate with some Hallah

******************

“The North” based on “Sweet Home Alabama” by Lynyrd Skynyrd. Original lyrics are here.

1. See my thoughts above about whether or not the original is a racist song.
2. This is set around 1990.
3. I assume that BA units were flown into the North instead of traveling by sea.
4. “The Six” is short for the Six-Counties, a republican term for N. Ireland (I say “the Six” not because republicans say that (they don't) but because it rhymes).
5. In 1983 the very popular British Nazi skinhead band Skrewdriver did a song called “Smash the IRA” and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of young, working-class, conservative and patriotic BA soldiers were fans. Skrewdriver’s vocalist and lyricist Ian Stuart Donaldosn started, in the late 1980s, a side project called The Klansmen, which was about the American South.
6. Margaret Thatcher’s constituency was Finchley.
7. “Tiocfaidh ar la” is a republican slogan coined by Bobby Sands and means “Our Day Will Come.”
8. There’s a theory, which must be embraced by N. Ireland anti-Catholic bigots, that Catholics aren’t real Christians.
9. Bangor is a medium-sized city (in the NI context, if Belfast is a large city, and Derry is also a medium-sized city) that’s almost entirely Unionist.
10. In my version the boos are coming from Nationalists and republicans.
11. The Provos is an earlier term for the movement made up of what we now call simply Sinn Fein and the IRA. I explain here how they had, 1981-1997 a comprehensive strategy for getting the British out and helping their community.
12. “The Falls Rd. Curfew” was a major turning point in the very first year of The Troubles. In Aug. 1969 there were massive anti-Catholic pogroms in Belfast which were destructively and lethally successful. Because of this, the British Army, who sort of saved the Catholics, was welcomed by a decreasing number of Catholics in the first several months after the BA came onto the streets of N. Ireland. On June 27th there was a major and partly armed, attack by loyalists on the isolated Catholic enclave of the Short Strand in East Belfast. The British Army wouldn’t help but about four members of the Provisional IRA successfully defended the area and killed five armed loyalists. 9 days earlier a British general election had been won by the Conservatives. The Unionists were furious about the PIRA action in the Short Strand and demanded action. The following is from the Conflict Archive on the InterNet:

********

Friday 3 July 1970
Falls Road Curfew
Beginning in the afternoon, the British Army carried out extensive house searches in the Falls Road area of Belfast for members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) and IRA arms. A military curfew was imposed on the area for a period of 34 hours with movement of people heavily restricted. The house searches lasted for two days and involved considerable destruction to many houses and their contents. During the searches the army uncovered a lot of illegal arms and explosives. However the manner in which the searches were conducted broke any remaining goodwill between the Catholic community and the British Army. During the period of the curfew there were gun battles between both wings of the IRA and the Army. Two people were killed by the British Army during the violence; one of them deliberately run over by an Army vehicle. Another person was shot and mortally wounded by the Army and died on 10 July 1970.

Saturday 4 July 1970
 The Falls Road curfew continued throughout the day. A man was killed by the British Army.

**************

(I should clarify something- I don’t think there was any inter-republican fighting, but both the Provos and the Officials, separately, fought the British during the Curfew; also, although the official record doesn’t totally reflect this, a Polish-British photojournalist was killed by the BA, bringing the total to 4 civilians killed; one of the two local men shot was 62 years old)

13. The red, white, and blue are the colors of the British flag.
14. The Civil Rights Movement in N. Ireland in the late 1960s and the early 1970s was inspired by its counterpart in America, and at the very end, a delegation from the Southern Christian Leadership Conference attended the Bloody Sunday funerals.
15. **77% of this version is me, 23% is the original.

Jet turbines keep on turnin’
Carrying British soldiers to the Six
Singin' songs about the Southland
Occupying northeast Ireland because of Tory politics

Well I heard Mrs. Thatcher say the North is
as British as Finchley
Well, that’s nonsense and won’t stop us from
creating a border in the Irish sea

Chorus
Tiocfaidh ar la Derry
Where the skies are so blue
Tiocfaidh ar la West Belfast
Where Catholics believe in the Lord, too

In Bangor they love the Queen, (Boo! Boo! Boo!)
Now the Provos are doing all that they can do
The Falls Rd. Curfew angered me
An atrocity carried out under the red, white and blue

Now Southern Blacks had “We Shall Overcome”
And they overthrew segregation
They inspired us to march for our rights
And it turned into a struggle for liberation

***************

“Skinhead Unity” based on “European Unity” by Brutal Attack. Original lyrics are here.

1. This is about anti-racist skinheads. Although there might not be any left in America, they used to exist, so I’m going to occasionally do poems about them.
2. I get the impression that when Nazi skinheads became part of the skinhead scene, non-racist and anti-racist skinheads initially didn’t do much to stop them.
3. D-Day was the Allied invasion of Europe during WWII.
4. Skinhead was started in connection with Jamaican immigrants in England. Nazi skinheads claim it isn’t true.
5. Most anti-racist skinheads are patriotic.
6. Anti-racist skinheads are frustrated by those skinheads who are more or less neutral.
7. Ska is a kind of Black music that a lot of non-racist and anti-racist skinheads (as well as others of course) listen to.
8. As far as I can tell in the 1980s and 1990s a LOT of anti-racist skinheads were homophobic, but I have reason to believe that, as homophobia became less common among youth in the last 20-30 years, it became less common among anti-racist skinheads.
9. Although anti-racist skinheads occasionally used guns, Nazis love guns. And there was a similar gap when it came to knives.
10. A mask is sometimes defined as a PROTECTIVE covering. So, they’re not hiding their reasons for being more or less neutral. I wouldn’t be surprised if they can’t handle the kind of beating that Nazis give anti-racists.
11. **50% of this is me, 50% is the original.
12. I just added "great" to the 4th line. It makes more sense, I forgot I'm not writing 10 years ago, when I wrote most of my poems.
13. Bonehead is an anti-racist term for Nazi skinhead.
14. UPDATE 4/14/20 I just changed "from" to "of" in the last line of the chorus.

You know our scene’s been taken over by fools
Mis-using their strength, inspired by the Nazi tools
Some of us are to blame for not stopping them right away
But now we’re fighting the fash like our great-grandfathers did on D-Day

Chorus
Skinhead unity
friendship, class pride, a diverse community
Skinhead unity
Our culture free of the Nazis

Our skinhead forefathers were Black English people you see
But that’s not what the boneheads would have you believe
So how come our scene’s been overrun?
By alien ideologies, the fascist atrocities, with the knife and the gun

So listen skinheads, listen very carefully
It’s time to wake up, time to make a stand you see
United we'll win, come here our call
If we stick together nothing’s gonna make us fall
It wont be easy it'll be a long hard task
And there are those fools who hide behind the neutrality mask
But we'll pull through, ‘cos ska wins in the end
To anti-Semitism and homophobia we will never bend

Most Oppressed People on Earth

In a recent post, which is largely about the question, Are Jewish Americans oppressed as Jewish Americans? I added something fairly relevant about US foreign policy in relation to Ireland, specifically the Famine years and The Troubles. I meant to attach the following update to the paragraph about the Famine, but for a few minutes or (more likely) a few hours it was attached to the paragraph about The Troubles:

(UPDATE 3/12/20 Some would say it was a different USA back then, but has any American President ever apologized for the failure of the US to do something? In some bizarre alternate history where the US sat out WWII and Nazi Germany was defeated anyway and there were a whole bunch of Holocaust survivors, the US would have at some point between then and now apologized for their inaction)

After moving that update to the Famine paragraph I added a brief note to the Troubles paragraph about the mistake. I don’t know if anyone saw the post before I fixed things but I worry that they did. Although I AM worried, it also occurred to me that it’s far from total nonsense to compare N. Ireland with Nazi Germany. First, here I’ll quote or describe and evaluate three statements by political figures who are more or less mainstream in Ireland.

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1. During something called the Siege of the Short Strand, a senior politician of the moderate nationalist and Christian-/social-democratic party the Social Democratic and Labour Party (a year earlier they had gone from getting about 60% of the Nationalist vote to getting 40-47%) compared the situation to what happened with the Jewish ghetto in Warsaw, Poland during WWII. That article (it’s not the most widely respected news source, but A) at the TIME, I read about some SDLP politician making the comparison, B) I found another article online referring specifically to McDonnell, and C) I can’t find anything better) offers some info about the Siege, and I’ll provide more in a minute, but a VERY thorough description of what happened is available from a very credible, academic source here.

The Short Strand is an isolated Catholic enclave in East Belfast surrounded on three sides by Unionist areas and on the fourth side by a river. Although I believe the Short Strand might be slightly middle-class on average, as far as I can tell their most immediate neighbors and/or those about a mile away are on average working-class. The Siege lasted for about 3 months in the late Spring and early Summer of 2002. There were frequent periods where the sky was saturated by rocks and other missiles being thrown into the Short Strand. There were 1-2 incidents of of close quarters fighting, and a small number of shots were fired. According to the link right above:

As previously noted, ‘one consequence of the interface violence was the inability for people from the Short Strand to access crucial services due to a Loyalist blockade of the area’. These included the doctor’s surgery; chemist; post office; dentist; baby clinic and shopping centres. The knock-on effect was that many elderly people were unable to collect their pensions; people who were ill could not visit the surgery or collect prescriptions; and mothers could not receive baby food supplies. It emerged through further discussions that women from the area took it upon themselves to organise ‘the relief effort for the community’. They organised transport for people to collect their pensions at post offices not in East Belfast, and they facilitated the community centre as a makeshift surgery

At one point a Catholic funeral procession was attacked. There was some violence by the security forces aimed at the Short Strand and little was done to break the Siege (less than a year earlier, after the Ulster Defense Association (a loyalist paramilitary) killed a Catholic and a Protestant who was hanging out with Catholic friends, in separate attacks, the British government minister for N. Ireland said that the UDA cease-fire was intact) (In July 1996 during 5 days of loyalist rioting throughout N. Ireland, 662 plastic bullets were fired; immediately after that, during 3 days of nationalist rioting, 5,340 plastic bullets were fired, according to a report by the Pat Finucane Centre).

As I wrote elsewhere on this blog, I think that the SDLP politician went too far, but it wasn’t absolute nonsense. Especially because the Siege was, in the end, broken by the Jewish Combat Organization (the group that carried out the rebellion in the Warsaw Ghetto). … No, it wasn’t  :  ). But I love that clip and the movie in general.

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2. Michael Farrell is one of my top political heroes. He wrote an amazing book “Northern Ireland: The Orange State.” It’s a great book- it’s fairly introductory at the beginning and is a history of N. Ireland ending at some point in the 1970s depending on which edition you read. It’s also almost a labor history of N. Ireland, offers a lot of analysis, exposes the sectarian, brutal and near-authoritarian nature of the Northern state. It highlights the contributions made by Protestants and leftists to the struggles for justice, equality, and freedom. It exposes the role that capital played in creating and maintaining N. Ireland and the ways that capital benefited from the partition of Ireland and Orange rule in N. Ireland. Farrell was a leading member of People’s Democracy whose politics and activities I describe in the first half of this post (starting in the very early 1970s they expressed support for the Provisional IRA).

According to his wikipedia page:

After moving to Dublin and becoming a solicitor, Farrell was co-chairperson of the Irish Council for Civil Liberties from 1995 to 2001. He was appointed a member of the Irish Human Rights Commission in 2001 and reappointed in October 2006, serving until 2011. In 2005 he was appointed to the Steering Committee of the National Action Plan Against Racism [according to his ECRI page, it was 2001-2003- TS]. He is currently working for Free Legal Advice Centres, Dublin, and has brought cases to the European Court of Human Rights and the UN Human Rights Committee. In 2011 he was appointed to the European Commission against Racism and Intolerance, and in 2012 he was appointed to the Irish Council of State by President Michael D. Higgins.

I can confirm pretty much all of it (including the Council of State part), and there’s also the fact that people who were (between 1970 and 1990) very vocal and active Northern supporters of the Provisional IRA are not appointed to the Council of State (by a mainstream Labour politician) 20 years later without being (for example) a ridiculously well respected human rights/civil liberties lawyer.

In “The Orange State” he writes on page 97 that in 1936:

The NCCL [the British National Council on Civil Liberties] commission commented that the Unionists had created “under the shadow of the British constitution a permanent machine of dictatorship.” They compared Northern Ireland with the fascist dictatorships then current in Europe. In so far as the total identification of party and state was one of the hallmarks of European fascism, the comparison was apt.

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3. Mary McAleese was a two-term President of Ireland, who was returned unopposed for her second term. She had grown up and spent probably half her life in the North when she was first elected. In 2005 she compared sectarian hatred of Catholics in N. Ireland with the hatred of Jews in Nazi Germany. She was seriously criticized by Unionists and quickly walked back the comments and apologized. She shouldn’t have. The best evidence of widespread hatred of Catholics is the following:

A: The popularity of the Orange Order, whose anti-Catholic nature and centrality to the Unionist community (for decades until about 2005 they had a bloc vote in the leadership of the UUP (then the largest of the two main Unionist parties)) is described here. (Orange Order parades were often forced through Catholic areas by the security forces including the local police)

B: In 1971 Catholics were twice as likely to be unemployed as Protestants, and in 1988 they were two and a half times as likely to be unemployed as Protestants. According to the documentary OFF OUR KNEES, in 1988, 17 out of 26 local government districts refused to sign a tame “declaration of intent” that as employers they would not discriminate, and I guarantee you that the 9 who signed it had a large Nationalist majority and that their populations added up to probably less than a 1/4 of the North’s population.

C: 1969-2005 722 Catholic civilians, only about 27 of whom were identified in the Sutton Database as political activists, were killed by the loyalist paramilitaries or the locally recruited security forces. A similar scenario in America during the same years would have seen 57,000 unarmed people of color killed by cops or Nazi skinheads (etc.) (A: based on what I’ll describe at the very bottom, I would guess that the actual number for that was probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000; B: I'm not saying the racist system in this country wasn't, ideologically or programmatically, capable of killing 57,000 people of color in those years if the "rebellion" among people of color here had been as militaristic as the one among Catholics in N. Ireland; but the reality is that as bad as it was for people of color here in those years, it was, in terms of deaths, MUCH worse for Catholics in N. Ireland). It gets worse. As I more or less wrote elsewhere on this blog:

1) In the early and mid 1970s, during internment without trial, 107 loyalists were interned, 1,874 republicans (and two leftists who were not republicans) were interned, and on average the republicans were interned longer because the first 1.5 years not a single loyalist was interned. Practically all the loyalists did was kill Catholic civilians because they were Catholic (see this). As I proved here, the Provisional IRA only targeted civilian life in .3% of their operations and only .3% resulted in civilian death (when I say 
“operations” that doesn’t include things like keeping loyalist mobs or (towards the beginning of the conflict) the security forces outside Catholic areas or interface incidents with loyalist paramilitaries). Therefore, the government (either the local one or the State-wide one influenced by the local Unionist leaders) was more concerned about IRA attacks that almost never resulted in civilian death than about the sectarian slaughter of Catholic civilians because they were Catholics.

2) From its formation in 1971 until 1992, the main loyalist paramilitary, the Ulster Defence Association, was considered a legal organization by the British government. In 1974, when the gov't finally got around to declaring Sinn Fein a legal organization, they "balanced that out" by declaring that the Ulster Volunteer Force, the other main loyalist paramilitary, was legal. That lasted for about 18 months, during which the UVF was blamed for about 50 murders.

3) This indicates that the Army and (crucially, in this post) the police, were sympathetic to loyalist paramilitaries. Some new information about collusion is in a new post here.

4) There was widespread and systemic collusion with loyalist paramilitaries and this definitely included the locally recruited police. And there is evidence here and there that then two main Unionist parties, who like to talk like supporting loyalist paramilitaries is a working-class thing, frequently hinted in different ways that the Unionist middle-class was into it as well. Large elements of the Unionist middle-class accepted the crucial role of the UDA in bringing down the power-sharing Sunningdale peace agreement in 1974. Middle-class Unionist leaders often shared a platform with people representing or associated with the paramilitaries. They never objected to the double standard of Internment, and they practically never called for the UDA to be banned until shortly before it was banned.

D) Between 1998 and 2018, with the exception of 2011 (when this question wasn’t asked), Northern Ireland Life and Times asked people if they prefer to live in a neighborhood entirely of their own religion, and in an average year 22% of Protestants said that they prefer a neighborhood that’s entirely Protestant. NILT also asked people (1998-2018 with the exceptions of 1999, 2000, and 2011 (when this question wasn’t asked)) if they would mind if a close relative married someone of a different religion, and in an average year 11% of Protestants said they would mind a lot and 19% said they would mind a little. And those surveys started the same year that the Good Friday Agreement was created and a year after the IRA went on cease-fire (as I prove here, in only .3% of their operations did the IRA target civilian life and probably 2/3 of that time it wasn’t aimed at Protestants who were INNOCENT civilians; but I’m sure that the now-permanent cease-fire by the IRA had a positive effect on sectarian attitudes among Protestants).

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If, in an alternate history, the Nazis had stopped at anti-Semitic propaganda, the various laws (like the ones named Nuremberg) that created a kind of Apartheid for German Jews (and stripped them of their citizenship), and periodic orgies of violence against Germany’s Jewish population like Kristalnacht (in 1938), Nazi Germany would have been only a little more anti-Semitic than N. Ireland was anti-Catholic.

People are probably shaking their heads and thinking of how the Nuremberg laws created what I would call a kind of Apartheid for German Jews and took away their citizenship. There was informal apartheid in N. Ireland (Stormont was the regional parliament and government):

1) Even in a majority-Nationalist city like Derry, in the early 1970s anti-unionist marches were banned from the city center.

2) There were laws (during almost all of the Stormont era (1920-1972)) about voting which, without mentioning Catholics, were anti-Catholic. In local elections, you had to own a house (remember the unemployment and some stuff below) to vote and certain kinds of businesspeople, who were disproportionately Northern Protestant, had MORE than one vote in local and regional elections.

3) There was clear evidence of discrimination in the allocation of public housing in the Stormont era (partly because of that it was incredibly common during the Stormont era for more than one Catholic family to be living in a small home and this may have continued to a small degree in the 70s and 80s, although apparently DISCRIMINATION stopped in the very early 70s).

4) Although it wasn’t formal, there was segregation in housing- crucially, Catholics in mixed areas were often intimidated out of their homes.

5) Although I doubt it was enforced more than 5% of the time during the conflict, until 1988 there was a law criminalizing the display of the Irish flag, and in the mid-60s twice riot police in Belfast raided a Sinn Fein election office in solidly Nationalist West Belfast and removed a tri-color that was in the window.

Were N. Ireland Catholics stripped of their citizenship during The Troubles? Yes, and they also picked cotton for master Paisley. :  ) …No, they weren’t and they didn’t (Ian Paisley was between the mid-1960s and around 2005 a very visible, extremely Unionist and anti-Catholic politician). But between 1975 and 1998, with practically zero influence on law and policy beyond local government, they were ruled by a state they quite reasonably saw as both foreign and hostile. And according to this, there was a small but significant gap in pay between Catholics and Protestants who were employed. As far as I can tell (no, I don’t have a finance or economics degree) the average employed Catholic made 75% of what the average employed Protestant made.

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Criostailoíche. That’s my half-assed attempt, using Google, at translating Kristalnacht into Irish. In August 1969, in response to the growing confidence of nationalists, the RUC police and a Unionist mob launched a determined attack on the Catholic Bogside ghetto in Derry. The area was successfully defended by local youths over 2-3 days, and the "Battle of the Bogside" sparked off similar confrontations in Belfast. There, where Catholics were more vulnerable, unionist mobs (led by the RUC) unleashed a wave of terror- in one night alone, 650 Catholic families were burnt out of their homes (in general, 83% of the homes and buildings either destroyed or needing re-building were occupied by Catholics; many of the Protestant victims were attacked by the same mobs as their Catholic neighbors were attacked by; but some were forced out in retaliation by Catholics (the odds are that the Catholic-occupied homes and buildings contained more families and a LOT more people than the Protestant-occupied homes and buildings)). Around 5-6 Catholic civilians were killed. That figure for deaths is either much lower than what happened to German Jews or almost nothing compared to what happened to German Jews (adjusting for the different population sizes). But (in July, August, and September) 1,505 Catholic families fled their homes (probably something like 18% of Belfast’s Catholic population, probably something like 1.8% of the North’s Catholic population). Kristalnacht was worse/much worse but not tons worse, especially if you consider what the police and loyalists had intended in Derry, which probably would have matched Belfast in terms of deaths and property destruction and people evicted from their homes.

Also, it would have been much worse in N. Ireland if there hadn’t been militant, and intermittently ARMED, resistance. I realize that if Jews in Germany had tried that, it almost certainly wouldn’t have saved them and there MAY have been more support among Gentile Germans for what Hitler wanted to do. But, it also MAY have encouraged those Gentile Germans opposed to anti-Semitism to resist. In the medium term it might not have stopped Nazi Germany. But IF there had been massive armed resistance by Jews and non-Jewish anti-Nazi elements, at a time when the German military wasn’t as strong as it was when the war started, it may have encouraged some European countries to attack Germany and since many elements of the German officer corps. considered deposing Hitler when it looked like he was leading Germany to disaster (and when there were fewer alumni of the Hitler Youth (who adored Hitler) than there were at any point between then and the end of the war), Hitler may have been removed from power by the military. Of course if it were the Soviet Union that attacked, that would have just united everyone remotely fond of Hitler, but they were pretty far away and seemed less than totally committed to the anti-Nazi cause. But liberal democracies may have threatened Germany enough that elements of the officer corps, with few Hitler Youth alumni in their ranks or the military in general, may have deposed Hitler.

I don’t mean to criticize German Jews of that time, but I do believe that what I just wrote is accurate (that is, how things likely would have worked out if there had been resistance), and I like talking about Nazi Germany and anti-fascism.

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So, yes, there are some small differences, some big differences, and one MASSIVE difference between what happened to Germany’s Jewish population during WWII and what happened to Catholics during The Troubles. But there are a lot of similarities as well.

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What makes me confident about my statement “probably somewhere around 7,000-8,000”?

1. Between 1996 and 2005 according to the FBI there were 38 racist murders. I have read that the Department of Justice officially estimates that for every hate crime reported to the FBI there might be 20-30 that aren’t reported because not all local law enforcement agencies report such crimes to the FBI. So I came up with 1,140 for those years.
2. I heard (from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest) that in a 12 month period during a 2014 (apparent) surge in police murders of black people including those of Eric Garner in NY, Tamir Rice in OH, and Michael Brown in MO among other highly publicized such cases, that around 200 black people armed or unarmed, had been killed by cops in America. Although I’m very open-minded about accusations that cops plant guns, this country also has a ridiculous number of guns.
3. Bear in mind that decades ago the number of people of color and the number of cops in this country were both smaller or much smaller than they are today.
4. If it’s worth much, about 10 years ago I read a huge amount of what the Southern Poverty Law Center put on their web-site in the previous 10-15 years. I also got an Ethnic Studies degree if that’s worth much.
5. There was little or no talk about “Brown Lives Matter” so I get the impression that very few Latinos/Latinas/Chicanos/Chicanas have been killed by cops in recent years (as far as I know, even Arpaio’s sheriff’s department in AZ didn’t kill a single such person) and that might reflect the situation in earlier decades. I have practically never heard of Asian-Americans being killed by cops. And if Native Americans were being killed at a high rate in the 80s and 90s I would have heard (a massive chunk of my major was Native American Studies).

UPDATE 6/9/21 I just found a Democracy Now! story relevant to this. It's about the last 20 years, but there's a small overlap between that and the period I was looking at Catholics and people of color (1969-2005), and it's possible that what I said about this comparison is off a little. Bear in mind that the figure I refer to in item #2 above came from organizers of a Black Lives Matter protest.