Links for the day

This interview (links to .mp3) with David Hirsch on the relationship between anti-Zionism and antisemitism is smart. In particular, when Hirsch attacks the defense that "Anti-Zionism is not antisemitism." While it's true that they're not the same thing, it's just bad logic to assume that therefore no anti-Zionism is antisemitic. I've seen such sophistry presented in two ways. Sometimes it's like saying that not all dogs are dachshunds, therefore dachshunds aren't dogs. Sometimes it's worse, like saying cats aren't dogs, therefore Dachshunds aren't dogs. Talking about a Jewish conspiracy with a "stranglehold on Congress" (M&W's words there in quotes) is not legitimate criticism of Israel because it isn't criticism of Israel at all.

SPLC on FAIR.

Day in and day out, FAIR is taken seriously as a mainstream commentator on the immigration debate.

It shouldn’t be. The founder, chief ideologue and long-time funder of FAIR is a racist. Key staff members have ties to white supremacist groups, some are members, and some have spoken at hate group functions. FAIR has accepted more than $1 million from a racist foundation devoted to studies of race and IQ, and to eugenics — the pseudo-science of breeding a better human race that was utterly discredited by the Nazi euthanasia program. It spreads racist conspiracy theories.

dnA at Too Sense deconstructs a peculiar bit of contemporary, Christian antisemitism:

The reason the above excerpt makes my skin crawl is because when someone says they *love* Jewish people, or black people, what they're really saying is they love the racist shorthands that have come to represent us in public consciousness. They don't love you; they don't even see you as a person. They see you as a cartoon, a caricature, a cosmic joke to which your ethnic or religious background is the punchline.

Via the left-wing, Evangelical magazine Sojourners, comes the Burger Scrooge campaign and this editorial from Eric Schlosser:

THE migrant farm workers who harvest tomatoes in South Florida have one of the nation’s most backbreaking jobs. For 10 to 12 hours a day, they pick tomatoes by hand, earning a piece-rate of about 45 cents for every 32-pound bucket. During a typical day each migrant picks, carries and unloads two tons of tomatoes. For their efforts, this holiday season many of them are about to get a 40 percent pay cut.

Growing up, my mother wouldn't let me eat grapes because of Cesar Chavez's boycott. These days, I don't eat meat (except in peculiar circumstances, like meeting apaneem), but I still support unions. I've been known to spontaneously sing Billy Bragg's "There is Power in a Union." And if you find it odd that a more-or-less atheistic BuJu gets emails from Sojourners, maybe it is.