Google diversity head in 2007: Jews have ‘insatiable appetite for war’
nypost.com
nypost.com
Speaking as a Jew, the worst thing about it is the atrociously thin font choice. The "If I were a Jew" framing is a little strange (I would never in a million years write an "If I were a black man" essay), but I find myself agreeing with everything he's saying. This was also written 14 years ago, and a lot has changed in the cultural discourse since then. I suspect he wouldn't again use this framing if he were to write said post now.
I tend to think the last few thousand years have given us well-honed antisemitism detectors. I definitely see this as antisemitic.
Would anyone dare to say about literally any other group "If I were x I wouldn't be able to live with myself because..."?
I'm not saying everyone who says something like that 14 years ago should be fired. But a head of diversity?
Addendum: Unfortunately, and very sadly for me, my antenna is also beeping at the fact that every post related to this story is getting flagged to death here on HN.
I see x=white everywhere these days. Still almost no one calls it anti-white sentiment
Muslims. Since 9/11 the West has demanded that all Muslims publicly decry the actions of other supposed Muslims for actions they had no control or influence over. If they don't, they risk being labelled extremists themselves.
Externally, we monitor them because of their religion. They end up on watch- and no-fly-lists for sharing a name and skin colour with somebody else.
I'm not comparing, it's not a competition. It's all awful.
And yes, it's a crying shame HN can't face frank discussions on racism.
Is there unintentional antisemitism in the sense of conflating all Jews with the subset of Israel/Likud/Israeli military/extreme settlers vs. the intentional antisemitism of "all Jews are X"?
How should we distinguish, treat, and respond to this to make such instances teachable moments and interrupt the lack of nuance and/or the othering conspiracy theories/hate?
(I think hate is taught or memetically-acquired in the absence of sane reasonableness and the Golden Rule; and ignorance is the lack of experience, knowledge, or wisdom. The Nature of Prejudice by Allport and Anti-Semite and Jew by Sarte are good reads.)
Seriously, the whole thing is based on this trope that all Jews answer for the failings of other Jews. Yes, we also frequently demand the same of Muslims whenever somebody does something in the name of Muhammad, or an "Islamic" country.
It's racist.
If I say I support Israel, or more traditional terrorism, come at me for that. But this nonsense is racist.
But then, if we say that, we have to apply it to RMS too, don't we?
They see Israel/Palestine through this lens, as well as the racial justice issues in the US.
It doesn't take much of a leap to get to, "Jews are perpetuating a global racist conspiracy..."
Sound familiar?
1. Saying “whites” like it’s the 20th century is unnecessarily evocative of pre-civil-rights-era vibes.
2. To call it a “global conspiracy” implies there are far more people in on it than actually are.
3. When you choose a word like “perpetuating”, it doesn’t make sense to call out white people alone: the antiracist movement makes it clear that people of all shades “perpetuate” our society’s systemic injustices.
4. Finally, “against people of color” is not even the full scope of the issue: homogeneity breeds weakness, and another pillar of antiracism is a recognition of the strength in diversity.
5. The “sound familiar?” bit at the end is inviting a comparison that would be in incredibly poor taste IMO and smacks of DARVO tactics
Antiracism is a self-serving strategy if one identifies with humanity as a whole. It’s not a wild idea that’s “gaining steam” - people have been writing and speaking these truths for many years.
2. I'm glad we agree it's a conspiracy theory.
3. Yes, yes. "Internalized white supremacy" and other related BS. Yawn.
4. "Diversity is our strength" is a hypothesis that I've seen very little supporting evidence for. The Chinese would agree. It's painfully obvious that ethnically homogenous societies have an easier go of things. That will never happen in the US, and we should not wish for it to. But we should be clear eyed about it, and not pretend it's some sort of competitive advantage.
5. You taught me a new acronym today, thanks. You're way off the mark, though. Reasonable people see the parallels between what the old anti-semites believed, and what the new ones do.
They also see the difference between the likes of Ibram Kendi and MLK. But please, keep pushing this line that contemporary "antiracism" is philosophically equivalent with the Civil Rights era movement. It's obviously bullshit to anyone who isn't already an acolyte, which suits my purposes just fine.
Can you list examples of antisemitism on the left? I'm not saying that it doesn't exist I simply have only seen people make comments about the Israeli government's use of military force. Most of those comments aren't antisemitic. There's a lot of blame for each side to share when it comes to violence in that region of the world.
What I have seen frequently is people labeling anything other than unequivocal support for anything and everything Israel wants to do as antisemitism.
There are videos online of Jews in New York and other cities getting assaulted by large groups in recent weeks. Watch them for yourself, listen to the language being used and decide whether or not it constitutes antisemitism.
One report explained, "For a particular left, anti-Semitism is of an economic nature. The Jew is no longer the murderer of Christ, nor the representative of an inferior race, but the sovereign banker, businessmen. In pro-Palestinian demonstrations, banners bearing the inscription "Gaza the new Shoah" do not bother the far-left leaders present. The discourse of the far left is simplistic: Israel is a colonialist state and therefore a state where apartheid reigns and Zionism is a form of colonialism, colonialism is racism and Jews are racist and are like Nazis.” (PDF: https://www.ohchr.org/Documents/Issues/Religion/Submissions/...)
* [1]: https://www.jpost.com/diaspora/french-philosopher-left-wing-... * [2]: https://www.timesofisrael.com/french-jews-face-trinity-of-ha... * [3]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-france-antisemitism-prote...
Hard to say. I know among the people I know personally quite a few of them. I myself above said there's plenty of blame to go around on each side for the violence in that region.
Some of the people that have commented on Israel might have some reasonable comments about Palestine and Hamas' responsibilities as well. Often we are only given a brief snippet of what people say on the news so as far as politicians it would require a lot of research.
I'd bet that some of the people criticizing Israel are doing so due to antisemitism but there are likely many people that aren't. It shouldn't be a surprise that lots of people are generally anti-war and anti-human suffering in general.
My issue is that people are so quick to claim antisemitism at the slightest criticism that its more reasonable to assume that the people who do so are hysterically pro-Israel than to assume the person that was being critical is an antisemite.
Another thing to consider is that even if a person decides that Israel is entirely at fault, you and I might disagree with them, but that opinion could easily have nothing to do with Judaism.
The thing is, people on the left emphasize more with being expropriated for no good reasons, having strikes broken by threatening families and generally being treated as 3rd class citizens, than being threatened with missiles. At least I do. I understand that both sides are shit, but I will still boycott Israel products, as i boycott China's.
https://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/our-work/news/investi...
Are Jews being harassed by colleagues at work, when working (not engaging in political debates)?
Could you say something like that about any other group of people and not get fired?
It doesn't help that the choice of headline wording I've seen on every single instance of this report is, while not absolutely a lie, certainly misleading and clickbaity, and should be changed.
Let me be more literal for you. Does Google employ short people at a rate consistent with community demographics? What about paraplegics? People on the autism spectrum? People whose family heritage is from Ghana? People with a strong “southern” accent?
You might argue that some of these cohorts aren’t facing discrimination, but are you sure? Currently we only concern ourselves with axes of discrimination that are loud and obvious. Is the discrimination any less real if its victims don't know to be angry about it? Or does discrimination only occur when its victims are aware of it?
At what point do we declare one person’s discrimination more important than another? At what point do we declare that one person's discrimination is worthy of upending the default behaviour of billion dollar companies, and others can be dismissed as equally ridiculous to demanding a toddler join senior leadership?
Here's another reductio: Imagine if the NFL (that's American Football right?) started doing the exact same thing—requiring teams to work towards reflecting the demographics of their communities. There would cause outrage for obvious and correct reasons. And yet it's a direct parallel.
To be clear, I agree with the principle of applying active introspection to how your hiring outcomes compare with demographics. This is a good thing. But I don't agree with the argument that private employers should be responsible for fixing (or more precisely, compensating for) problems which exist upstream of the hiring process. Because it doesn't fix the problem. In fact it can make it harder to fix the problem. It papers over the actual problems so that society has greater license to ignore them.
Therefore, they may be treated as white for the purposes of "antiracist" hiring.
Furthermore, even were he to be doing so, that in itself is anti-Semitic, and the entire blogpost is full of anti-Semitic devices.
Your reply is contradictory: on the one hand, in response to a direct quotation from the blog post you claim that it is "clear" that one can swap "Jew" for "Israeli" in that quotation, and on the other you go on to say that using the word Jew is "provocative, but not outright wrong", which implies that this post is directed therefore at all Jews, and that's basically fine by you in this context.
It doesn't matter who reported it if it's true.
You can literally still read the blog post on his blog.
The real question should be why other media would see a verifiably true story and refuse to cover it. It wouldn't be news if it were about the guy serving burgers down the street, but it is certainly newsworthy when it's the anti-racist head of one of the largest companies on the planet being explicitly racist.
>It doesn't matter who reported it if it's true.
The entity reporting on a topic absolutely matters. Trust matters, and history matters. It's unrealistic to say an entire article "is true". That's not a reflection of reality. E.g. a headline or a sentence may be objectively true or false, or subjectively true or false, or misleading, or omitting context, or cherry-picking, etc.
Yes, we should mostly pay attention to the more salient things we have access to, in this case the actual blog post, but the act of criticizing an article is absolutely valid regardless of that.
Past thoughts or beliefs shouldn’t be used to get people fired.
The people that complain there’s a double standard when a minority says something racist about someone that’s white, are the same ones that think you shouldn’t be cancelled for saying things decades ago, and yet they see this type of thing, where a thing was put in writing in 2007, and now they want to cancel him.
I don’t agree with the his statement, but it was from 14 years ago.
If you have a track record of racism, how can I put you in charge of anti-racism?
Could a Jew working at Google approach him and trust he has their best interests at heart?
There must certainly be better candidates out there.
I don't have a strong opinion about whether the blog post in question is fire-worthy - I just think your line of reasoning is often misguided, and wanted to provide the piece that's frequently missing.
Why is it so hard to see his intention? He generalised to them that was wrong , it's like saying black people are x y z. However, the rest of his talk is pretty much true.
The doors to the lost and banned is open to all hypocrites I guess if one loves to call to cancel those for past comments and 'crimes'.
Downvoters: Goodness me, don't downvote the messenger.