re: #395 Alouette

It’s really a crapshoot. How many ‘points’ do you give for having Adbusters, who pulled a few antisemitic things, as the ‘organizer’ of OWS? How much is the Tea Party a White Supremacist thing? It seems impossible to make a comparison to me.

I really did meet quite a number of jews while I was down there. Given that Jews tend to be liberal, especially on social issues and stuff, I’d be surprised if there was a significant Jewish component to the Tea Party. I’d more expect it to break down along the lines of the Democrats and the GOP, where the Democrats have far more Jewish elected officials and more Jewish voters.

But then, how correlative is having Jewish members to not tolerating anti-semitism? That’s not a set amount.

I really don’t see how one could plausibly really analyze it, except to ask how the specific policies endorsed by each group would affect Jews. The anti-Shariah stuff that the Tea Party supports a lot definitely could affect Jews as well if it was written broadly enough, as could any laws that impact ritual slaughter. A percentage of the OWS people are definitely wrong-headed on Israel/Palestine— I’d guess more from being consistently misinformed rather than actual antisemitism— and if they’re a high enough percentage and they feel passionately about it, then that might be something to take into consideration. But I have no idea how many of them actually feel that way about Israel, nor what actual policy changes they imagine that they want.