Diversity Macht Frei
March 9, 2017
If I was in the business of making up fake news, this is the kind of fake news I would make up. But, fortunately, I don’t have to. Because it’s real.
From the Jewish Daily Forward:
Activists who call themselves “antifa,” short for anti-fascists, are inspired by early 20th-century responses to European fascism. They say they are influenced by militant left-wing and anarchist politics. A graphic shared by the Jewish Antifa Facebook page presents the German camp of Auschwitz as a justification for why “it’s OK to punch a Nazi in the face.”
A handful of loosely organized groups have cropped up to confront white nationalism online. There is the “Jewish Antifa” Facebook page, which promotes the Jewish history of confrontational protest (this is where the string of Yiddish punch descriptors appeared). Then there is the allied group “MuJew Antifa,” a collaboration between Muslim and Jewish activists.
And there are dozens of other individuals who are active from their own social media accounts. The Jewish Antifa page has fewer than 60 members, but the MuJu Antifa network boasts more than 2,000, one organizer said. Jews who identify as anti-facists could also be involved in groups like Black Lives Matter or other left-wing Jewish groups without belonging to one of these two antifa groups. One “MuJu” event last month brought a couple hundred people into the street to protest President Trump’s immigration ban. Activists marched down the street in Manhattan, carrying signs against Trump and chanting in Yiddish.
[Benny Koval is shown on the right of this photograph. She does indeed look very menacing.]For example, when a masked antifa activist dramatically clobbered “alt-right” figurehead Richard Spencer, the image sparked debate — but it was celebrated widely in more left-wing circles as a direct repudiation of mainstream liberalism.
“I disagree with liberal tactics,” Bethany “Benny” Koval, a New Jersey-based activist, wrote in an email to the Forward. “Some groups are naive enough to believe that if we display the nude white supremacist onstage, the crowd will simply laugh him away.”
Benny Koval (right), antifa commando
In the eyes of these Jewish antifa activists, mainstream advocacy groups need to do more than condemn far right-wing groups like the “alt-right.”
“The purpose of these groups is to condemn hate and violence,” Raphael Dreyfuss, a Los Angeles-based activist, wrote in a message to the Forward. “But the thing about Nazis is, they don’t care if they’re being condemned. You can condemn and condemn and condemn until you’re being marched towards a gas chamber — they don’t give a damn.”
“The only thing that can stop the growth of fascism is building power,” Dreyfuss wrote.
“That means confronting fascists in the streets but it also means building up community defense organizations, it means revitalizing our unions, it means confronting the material issues that create fascism in a way that liberalism is fundamentally unable to.”
This MuJew Antifa has a Facebook page and a blog page (although the blog is mostly empty). These guys must be spending all their time doing Krav Maga exercises. Too busy to update the blog.