As the result of some of my writings about refugees, I recently became the target of online harassment from the neofascist Alternative Right (Alt Right) movement. To give our readers a small taste of the experience, I present these samples from an honest-to-goodness proud self-described white supremacist:
For the uninitiated: the Alt Right is a largely-disorganized group of self-described fascists, white nationalists and antisemites who consider themselves an alternative to mainstream US conservative politics and are generally unified by support for Donald Trump and opposition to political correctness and multiculturalism. Their “identitarian” politics stem from the 2013 manifesto of Austrian neofascist political science student Markus Willinger titled “Generation Identity: A Declaration of War Against the ‘68ers,” the ‘68ers being those Germans who built a political movement to insist that every aspect of the country’s Nazi past be dealt with.
I’m not going to beat a dead horse about the self-declared Alt Right’ers tweeting images like the above at me. The antisemitic digital activities of the Alt Right are well-documented by journalists like The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg or Jonathan Weisman of the New York Times, who have themselves been targeted to a much greater extent than I. As Goldberg puts it:
I recognize high-quality, handcrafted Jew-hatred when I see it, and the far-right, which has lately been gaining attention for supporting Donald Trump’s candidacy for president (and for trolling Jews such as yours truly), is so over-the-top obvious in its deployment of anti-Semitic memes; so uncreative in the manufacturing of Judeophobic tropes (call this the banality of oven jokes); so bad at Photoshop; and so awful at spelling, that I find them as pathetic as I find them offensive.
This is certainly true of the dozens of abusive tweets I received.
I’ve written previously on similarities between the Alt Right movement behind Trump’s rise and the movement of nationalism that tore apart Yugoslavia and brought about the vicious Balkan war crimes of the 1990s. Right now, though, I’d like to mention a difference in a quick defense of the Alt Right: by comparison to the Balkan nationalists who went after me in 2010 over my research on ethnic cleansing, these folks have been relatively civil. There’s an enormous difference, both in law and in deed, between these disorganized white American nationalists writing, basically, here’s a noose, I hope someone puts you in an oven, Jewboy, and an organized group of infamously violent Slavic war criminals writing explicit threats against my person in their own language with information showing their capacities to make good on them.
Digital threats are nothing new, they’re part of the job of investigative journalism if you’re doing it right. That’s old news, as is the antisemitism of the Alt Right’s assault on journalists, to the point that the Anti-Defamation League has even put together a Task Force to Address Anti-Semitic and Racist Harassment of Journalists on Social Media. Leaving the “mainstream” of the Alt Right behind, what’s interesting in the abuse I’ve been getting is that it’s not all from your party-line Nazis. There’s a strange, sinister, confusing trend I’ve noticed, one that has thus far gone seemingly undiscussed: The #AltJew.
A bit of digging shows this phenomenon as incredibly new, really only taking off in the past month. Twitter users engaging with the #AltJew hashtag include people who identify themselves as:
- “Amer Nationalist, AltRight, Welsh Anglo-Saxon Princess, Diaspora White European, Israelite, sheep among wolves…wise as a serpent harmless as a dove RT≠endorse”
- “i retweet todays reality, the brilliant the ridiculous the insane. you decide. cultural libertarian nationalist artist thinker trump supporter#altjew”
- “I<3 DAR/Iroquois, Sephardic/JEW. Alpha-Female. Anti-Feminist. Rated R @ times. Prescott, AZ. Locked and Loaded. NO MORE WAR FOR JOHN MCCAIN”
The one who drew my attention to the movement in the first place did so by choosing to indulge in this type of online abuse at me by tweeting such wondrous things as:
You read that right: a Jew suggesting that “Richard [likely a shout to US “identitarian” founder Richard B. Spencer] needs to make the oven great again. Scum like this [me] don’t belong in Israel or Germany or USA”. Yes, Joshua Seidel, who describes himself in his profile as “Alt-Right foodie supreme. Hiker, clings to guns. #Trump2016 #JewsforTrump #Altjew #Maccabees” has chosen to take part in the Alt Right movement by suggesting putting Jews in ovens, along with his friend R’ Baruch Levy, an interesting choice of handle, as R’ would be an abbreviation for Rabbi, and he identifies himself as “a rabbi with important questions” when he tweets at Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt to tell him that “The ADL is one of the reasons we’re [Jews] hated so much”.
Though social justice is a foundational tenet of Jewish ethics, some political movements within Judaism forget this at times. Jewish tendencies toward accidental fascism aren’t new, with Israeli flags being proudly waved at Germany’s far-right anti-immigrant PEGIDA demonstrations, and I’ve already taken on the tendency towards self-protective assimilationist racism in German and American Jewish communities. But most of the justifications for these tendencies sound almost humanitarian, or at least liberal, and the racism is most often at least somewhat accidental.
Most young Jewish Zionists I know seem to be simply unaware of the horrors visited upon Sephardic (expelled by Spain in 1492) and Mizrahi (descended from Middle Eastern or “Oriental” Jewish communities) and Ethiopian Jews by the Ashkenazim (white European Jews) in early Israel, from the kidnapping of Yemeni Jewish babies in order to have them be “assimilated” into Ashkenazi families to the spraying of new Jewish immigrants with DDT to clean them and other humiliating practices. These #AltJews are different: They seem to be not just aware of these atrocities but supportive of them, with one profile reading “Ashkenazi Jews should get their own homeland #WhiteGenocide #JewsAgainstNeocons #JewsForTrump #AmericaFirst #Birobidzhan #MAGA #Yiddnland #ProWhite #AltJew”.
They, along with a few others, seem to be at the forefront of a small but growing movement of young American Ashkenazi Zionists who take it upon themselves to be at least as bad to non-Trump-supporting Jews on the internet as their openly white supremacist “Identitist” peers, like a Jewish version of Samuel L. Jackson’s character Stephen from Django Unchained.
Interestingly, though, these people have historical precedent: the Jewish concentration camp overseers (kapos) of the Holocaust. The New York Times described the phenomenon in 1987 as one elderly Jewish Holocaust survivor, Jakob Tannenbaum, was being extradited to face wartime atrocity charges:
“the several hundred Jewish kapos, all selected by the Nazis to oversee and punish their own people, often with the hope of sparing themselves. Theirs was the conundrum within the catastrophe… [N]o one except his victims, the authorities allege, knew just how violent a kapo Mr. Tannenbaum had been – beating, whipping and kicking other inmates, with and without Nazi officers present.”
Mr. Tannenbaum’s excesses were not too uncommon among Jewish kapos in Nazi Germany. And in the growing white supremacy within today’s America, these #AltJews are volunteering to act as kapos for their emerging fascist overlords, perhaps in the hopes of being spared down the line.
Others, though, are showing their true, simpering colors, as the white supremacists make arguments about the dangers of Jewry and they respond I know “most Jews are shitlibs” but not me, boss! I ain’t like that!
To which the Boss Lady reassures him that he doesn’t count as “one of them,” he’s their good little house #AltJew.
But white supremacy and Judaism are simply incompatible. Recent history has repeatedly shown, from the fall of the Ottoman Empire to the Soviet Union to the Arab Spring, that once a movement based on racism and xenophobia has destroyed or deported a nation’s darker-skinned inhabitants, the crosshairs of the movement inevitably shift to the next most otherable group, the Jews. This classification of #AltJew is obviously untenable, as evidenced by the litmus tests already emerging from the antisemitic Alt Right such as:
Or the accusation that a “real” #AltJew wouldn’t block the insulting tweets coming from patriotic white Americans, so one that does is obviously a “subverter” and a “trickster”:
How quickly your crooked house of cards crumbles, my #AltJew friends. You just keep doing your simpering, subservient dance. I am a strong believer in the philosophy of “Don’t Tell Me How To Jew,” and I’m not going to stop you (though I am going to mute you). I’ve taken worse from better. But do watch your back. When the Alt Right gets their revolution, you may not be first against the wall, but you’re a safe bet for second.
Image By NORLU at German Wikipedia(Original text: N.Luffy) – Transferred from de.wikipedia to Commons.(Original text: Armbinde und Foto Privatbesitz N.Luffy; 52223 Stolberg), Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2988368
