Friday, February 27, 2015

"Rock, Paper, Scissors: A Guide to the New Victim Policies."

Interesting read from Tablet. 

I thought the "infographic" below  was hysterical.

Whoever did this up is really funny and very smart:

Muslim > gay, black > female, and everybody > the Jews

Read the whole thing: 

"As a gay, Jewish man (consider privilege duly checked), I am not unfamiliar with, or unsympathetic to, the idea of highlighting the problems faced by victimized minorities. Earlier this month, for example, I came across a story that made me want to mount the barricades in righteous indignation. Images circulated by the London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights showed a group of Islamic State thugs in the city of Tal Abyad shoving an elderly, blindfolded man from a plastic chair from the heights of a seven-story building. Nothing special in the land of the Islamic State, except for the “crime” that the man was accused of committing: homosexuality."

"According to the Observatory, the man survived the fall (one photo depicts Islamic State members huddling around their victim, sitting upright on the ground, checking to see if he was still alive). But he was soon put out of his misery when the crowd that had gathered to watch this macabre scene stoned him to death."


"Here is an instance when identity politics, put into practice, could be eminently useful. Islamists kill homosexuals for something they cannot change: their sexuality. It’s the same reason they kill Jews, by the way, and the motive is quite clarifying, or it at least should be. Indeed, the recent spate of attacks against Jews qua Jews in Western Europe ought be a wake-up call to that segment of the global left that insists there exists some sort of quasi-moral license for Arabs who kill Israeli civilians because of the existence of settlements. Those who obsess over identity politics—who believe that every political and social question can be reduced to somebody’s skin pigmentation or what’s between their legs—ought to realize that there is no truck with people who kill people precisely because of their immutable traits. When it comes to fighting violent Islamist supremacy—theocratic, sexist, genocidal, homicidally anti-gay—the identity politics brigade should put warmongering neocons to shame."

"Yet just at the moment when we need our identity-politics warriors to be most outraged, they are notably silent. Why?"