Conservative activists, led by a local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate, pushed the district, Mission CISD, to excise books mostly about gender, sexuality and race. Their demands represented an extreme version of a nationwide culture war over books that has played out in recent years — and ensnared a number of books with Jewish themes.

In Mission, the long list of books on the chopping block includes a recent illustrated adaptation of Anne Frank’s diary; both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust graphic memoir “Maus”; “The Fixer,” Bernard Malamud’s novel about a historical instance of antisemitic blood libel; and “Kasher in the Rye,” a ribald memoir by Jewish comedian Moshe Kasher.

  • Tattorack@lemmy.world
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    6 days ago

    It’s very difficult to avoid comparing right wing America to fascists when they have this much of a problem with Maus.

  • Neps@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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    I swear this shithole takes every chance it can get at doing some of the most stupid shit ever its insane.

  • paddirn@lemmy.world
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    Wouldn’t want people learning from history, now would we? How else are we supposed to repeat it?

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    Are conservatives activists so concerned with information related to living under Nazism because they don’t want young people to be able to recognize the steps if those steps occur to young people today?

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        Not it’s 100% tied to the resurgence of white supremacy. These conservatives groups are backed by humongous PACs that fund groups that push their agenda. Just like with turningpointusa and groups like that. Don’t mistake careful planning masked by racist zealots as idiocy.

        • Optional@lemmy.world
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          Fair enough. All the actual humans I know that vote for these numbnuts are some flava of misplaced Jeebus worshipper. They don’t agree with racists (do they vote for them? Every time - while explaining how the candidate isn’t really racist) but they try not to do and say racist things. They don’t really know what fascism is in this context. Still they willingly hand over political power to those that do.

          The actual racist / fascist shitheel who supports this garbage will do the Wavy-Jesus-Hands when they pray ostentatiously, but don’t really believe that crap, it’s just an important part of the grift for “the weak-minded”.

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    local pastor and outspoken Israel advocate

    Anne Frank’s diary

    Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust graphic memoir

    Israel advocate

    Anne Frank’s diary

    Israel advocate

    Anne Frank’s diary

    You fucking disgrace

    Get out of my country

    For some reason this made me way more irrationally angry than just killing Palestinians. It’s killing Palestinians and running cover for the people who killed Anne Frank and Spiegelman’s brother, and doing it all at the exact same time with no sense of shame or embarrassment but, I’m sure, a smug sense of superiority like everyone else is the monster in this

    This guy better really hope that there isn’t a hell

    • Cyborganism@lemmy.ca
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      Hey man. If it looks like a Nazi, walks like a Nazi and quacks like a Nazi, it’s probably a Nazi

      • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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        If it quacks like a duck, walks like a duck, swims like a duck, and looks like a duck, then it’s…

        A swan! It claims to be a swan, therefore it is a swan! Swans are beautiful, therefore if you’re against swans you’re a bad person! You see ducks everywhere and accuse everyone being a duck! The word “duck” lost its meaning. In fact, we defeated the ducks in 1945, therefore any “ducks” we might have today are just edgy teens cosplaying as such.

        EDIT: If you ask me, I think conservatives are just “good cops” to the fascists “bad cops” (this gave me an idea for a potential video essay).

    • Commiunism@lemmy.wtf
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      It’s not really surprising - historically, the creation Israel state was helped massively by antisemitists, who wanted to get rid of jews in their own country and having them a place to immigrate to would be the easiest option (the phenomena is often referred to as Zionist antisemitism).

      So yeah, it does make sense - they can hate the jews, but also support Israel at the same time.

      • ZILtoid1991@lemmy.world
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        In fact, Zionism is built upon the antisemitic myth of “Jews and non-Jews cannot live together”.

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        It’s only wild if you believe their fable that their nation represents all Jews.

        If however you see them as just another bunch of ethno-Fascists, it actually makes sense that many of the victims of the other large ethno-Fascist group in the last century wouldn’t get along with them simply because they recognize many of the same signs.

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          I didn’t think that would happen in Armenia, but since it does - the way some Armenians act towards refugees from Artsakh is similar, I think.

          It’s easier for Israelis (especially when being fascists) to think that they themselves are strong, and those survivors are not like them, they are weak. It’s as they wanted to identify with Nazis more.

          With such Armenians too - it’s the worse part of them thinking they can be just like Turks if they suck up to Turks, and also because Artsakhtsis lost their homeland for being weak, and they are not weak.

          A bit like ignorant and cowardly people abandon relatives with chronic diseases, when there’s no evidence of those diseases being transferable.

          It’s just cowardice. Humans do it under pressure or when presented with dark events for their interpretation and self-identification. While good upbringing may reduce the risk of someone growing up a coward, it’s very human.

      • gedaliyah@lemmy.worldOPM
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        No, quite the contrary.

        You’ve probably read that in the early days of the State there was a lot of resentment towards Holocaust survivors. They were counter to the national narrative of the “New Jew” who was strong, hard-working, and living off the land. Shoah survivors represented Jews as victims, who did not fight back against the Nazis, instead going like “lambs to the slaughter.”

        This all changed after the Eichmann trial (1961), which is when most of the world first came to understand the true nature of how the Nazis operated. Many people did fight back, and many couldn’t.

        Holocaust survivors are revered and honored in Israel, although the country suffers from poor social services with a lot of gaps. Shoah survivors often fall through those gaps, along with other elders.

    • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works
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      But an Israel advocate would try to hide the holocaust least someone relate it to what Israel is doing to Palestine.

      Maybe you’re thinking of a Jewish advocate and not an Israel advocate?

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        In-Israel Israel advocacy, and American Judaism, are absolutely chock full of people who are disgusted with Netanyahu’s government and his “war,” in part because of how much he is doing to destroy Israel on the world stage and get Israelis killed for more or less no purpose, as well as the unfolding horror of the apartheid state and genocide he’s enacting in their name.

        Zionist advocates and Israel advocates and Jewish advocates and human rights advocates are four sometimes overlapping but distinct categories.

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          Netanyahu is an evil fuck, but this isn’t his war, Israel has been doing slow and steady ethnic cleansing of the region for 50+ years.

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            Rabin was closer than anyone to ending it, and Netanyahu’s stochastic terrorism led directly to his death. And he’s been propping up Hamas ever since, to give Israel an enemy to hate and prevent peace from ever coming to the region.

            Fuck him, he owns it now.

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              “No does more for Israel than I do”

              “What about that time you killed a democratically elected Israeli leader who was doing good things for Israel”

              “That’s what I said. He was doing more than me for Israel, and we can’t have that. No one does more for Israel than I do.”

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            True that. Netanyahu’s a little more extreme than the norm, but as I understand it, yes, Israeli politics is:

            • A majority that wants full-on ethnic cleansing
            • A minority party that wants oppression and murder but not in a way that’s explicitly genocidal or threatens their own security
            • And maybe a tiny dissident faction that wants actual human rights for the Palestinians

            I’m speaking well of the dissident faction and highlighting its existence in the first place; I’m not saying it’s anywhere near the mainstream.

        • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works
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          A Zionist advocate and an Israel advocate are the same thing.

          Human rights advocates never overlap with those.

          • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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            I sense the morass of an ever widening pointless argument opening up beneath me.

            I’ll say my feeling on it and be done, and you’re free to disagree: No one should be hated for where they were born, or for wanting a home or a safe place to be. Not a Palestinian, or a Russian, or an Israeli citizen, or someone who was born and grew up in Nazi Germany. If you got born in Israel and managed to penetrate through a significant haze of propaganda and groupthink to realize that what your country is doing on the world stage is a monstrous crime, what should you do?

            Advocate for the destruction of your home?

            Move away, never to return, renounce your citizenship and want nothing to do with your evil of a country? Yeah, maybe.

            But I can also see someone who sees it as their duty to resist Netanyahu’s government, tries to set their country back on the right course, advocates for the ICC, and turns out for protests against the government and gets brutalized and arrested for it. That stuff happens too. “Pro Israel” isn’t really the right word for those people, no. I actually don’t fully disagree with what you’re saying, that in the modern world if you are “pro Israel” you’re probably a piece of shit (or just totally propagandized / misinformed about what’s actually going on, which there’s a lot of also). So maybe I shouldn’t have phrased it in those terms. But definitely, I think there is a type of Israeli person who is trying to support their home, the only place they’ve ever known to live, by resisting the Netanyahu government, and is ashamed of Israel but not like “against” them in the sense of, I hate my home and all the people here. You can love the town you grew up in, you can have friends and allies (hopefully, ones who are also horrified by the death and destruction in Gaza) there. You can be “pro” that part of it while still hoping that Netanyahu somehow gets what’s coming for him, soon, and all of the killing that’s being done in your name stops.

            Like I say, I don’t think anyone should be hated for where they were born.

            (Oh, and also the far ends of the scale have 0 overlap, yes. You cannot be a Zionist and a human rights advocate, if my way of saying it made it sound like I thought you could.)

            • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works
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              No one in Israel is out there protesting the genocide.

              All the protests have been because not enough was done to rescue hostages or some other dislike of Netanyahu.

              Overall polling shows Israel supports what is happening to Palestine or thinks not enough has been done.

              • mozz@mbin.grits.dev
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                Yes they are. It’s the same groups that have been campaigning to end the occupation since before October 7th. It’s not a majority or even close to - two-thirds of Israelis support the continuation of the war. But saying “no one” is an absolute falsehood. And, I think propaganda and misunderstanding of the situation on the ground is also a large part (in addition to, yes, some large amount of pure racism and violent vindictiveness that says it’s okay if Palestinians are dying because they are bad.)

                The wheel you’re currently cranking on, is the same wheel that was turning right at the beginning of Israel, and managed to turn its way from “all the Nazis are wrong and evil” around to “the Jews are always the victims about everything” and has now arrived itself at “Israel can do anything it decides to and will still be the victim” and now, on the other side, “all the Israelis are always wrong and evil” is emerging into view coming in the other direction. I am telling you that no matter how hard you crank that wheel, on whichever side, your activity will never crank you around to arrive at a world that is peaceful or just.

                (I know I said I’d stop after saying my bit; I just wanted to say a little more on it and shoot down the absolutely false idea that no one in Israel opposes the war on humanitarian grounds.)

                • Deceptichum@sh.itjust.works
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                  That whole article talks more about protestors pushing for returning hostages and other dislikes of Netanyahu far more than it does generic ‘anti-war’ protestors.

                  So thanks for that really, just further solidifies my point.

                  Likewise life is not a fucking wheel, it doesn’t travel in some predetermined path you’ve created. Let me tell you something, no matter how hard you centrist “don’t do anything at all” approach it, you will never arrive at a world that is peaceful or just.

    • lets_get_off_lemmy@reddthat.com
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      I’m definitely not for banning books, but couldn’t you say the same thing about news media? Or Facebook memes? Those “get you to think”.

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        We should only be banning things that promote intolerance because there will never be an end to the bannings, there will always be some witch to hunt somewhere.

        To answer your question, yes it is the saying the same thing, that is why banning books is so stupid. A book, movie, TV show, meme, or news report isn’t necessarily going to change my mind but it might make me think about something from a perspective I didn’t consider before.

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        I don’t support banning memes or the news either, but they aren’t under attack currently.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      Yeah, but the New Testament says everyone who doesn’t worship Jesus is going to burn in hell forever, so that kind of lessens the whole Jewishness of the first half.

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      i cannot believe how openly anti-nazi some books are! we should burn these intolerant books!

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    The conservative groups are led by Pastor Luis Cabrera, who is active in Latino conservative circles in the state and whose Instagram profile picture is currently an upraised fist outlined with the Israeli flag. Originally from Guatemala, Cabrera is a member of several right-wing Christian activist organizations and has also posted numerous pieces of pro-Israel social media content.

    The thing about Uncle Tom’s are they come in all shapes, races, ethnicities, and backgrounds. Ironically the things they all hate and fight against

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      Another thing is that Uncle Tom was eventually flogged to death by the people whose admiration he so desperately sought to win.

      Fundamentalist only see things in measures of what helps them obtain what they want. Once the utility of someone is over, they have zero compunction with turning on the person that helped them and riving them to nothingness as demonstration.

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    I simply cannot wrap my head around this. How is this defensible? What possible justification could they provide for banning Maus?? Anne’s Diary?? How could you even link these to any contemporary agenda?

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        Wise person: “Those who do not know history’s mistakes are doomed to repeat them.”

        Actual Nazis: Great idea. Let’s burn some books.

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        Nah I get that they’re Nazis. But the article failed to mention the official justification to ban these. I want to know what’s the sugarcoated, duplicitous rationale they provided.

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          Their justification is that they would have banned them anyway if they’d thought of it on their own, but now that somebody’s brought it up they realize it exists and provided the smallest justification to ban it.

          It makes me glad that my state passed a law against banking books (in public libraries at least). Hopefully it’ll spread to public schools. Religious schools are probably a lost cause though.

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      See, us Jews control Hollywood, so all of that is just PR messaging about our Holocaust lie. And we also control the banks, so we’re the ones buying these books and bribing school librarians to put them on the shelves. Whereupon, I guess, something about the trans agenda happens? I’m a cishet Jew, so I’m only up on our side of the conspiracy.

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          There’s a reason for that, which I mentioned in a post elsewhere in the thread:

          “Outspoken Israel advocates” who are evangelical Christians don’t love Jews. Quite the opposite. They need Israel to exist so all Jews in the world can be forcibly deported to it, and then made to rebuild the Great Temple, so Jesus can come back and throw them all into Hell.

          And a red cow comes into the picture as well.

          None of that is sarcasm. That is really what they think.

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            Even without the whole Religion angle, racists the world over just love ethno-nationalism: each ethnicity living in their own corner, separate from the rest, is exactly what these people want.

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            In my experience something similar exists with a subset of Russians, - they hate Israel the particular way, they just love the fact that it exists and commits crimes.

            When you are Jewish and proud of yourself, it makes them just as livid as when you are Armenian and proud of yourself.

            Republic of Armenia is quite miserable and they enjoy that, Israel is strong, but lacks dignity even more than RoA and they enjoy that, so the emotion gets especially extreme when you put these states and your own pride and the fact that they can change and have dignity in contrast.

            (I have tested that.)

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              Armenians have suffered their own genocide as well, one the Turks still refuse to acknowledge. At least the Germans acknowledge the Holocaust.

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                one the Turks still refuse to acknowledge

                That’s actually imprecise.

                They acknowledge that “something” happened, but deny various separate traits, like intent or numbers or relevance for today or even just say that genocide wasn’t illegal then. There’s also that “it didn’t happen, but they deserved it, and we’ll do it again” thing. Which gives a very special feeling, considering they are well in position to do it again.

                And it’s illegal to publicly recognize it in Turkey, so not only malevolent, but also benevolent voices seem to be kinda in denial, while in fact not.

                Still had Germany not lost WWII so conclusively, I suspect we’d be amazed at how self-conscious a lot of Turks are as compared to Germans.

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                  True, I was not totally right in that. It just is so sad beyond the genocide and the genocide denial that Ataturk was such a force for good when it came to his own people and such an evil fuck when it came to Armenians. Until Erdoğan, Turkey was a generally secular state, a rarity for a predominantly Muslim country and that is down to Ataturk, who was an atheist. I wish I could praise him, but I can’t. He was part of the Young Turk movement and he was instrumental in trying to erase what happened from history.

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          It tracks! Nazi Germany was actually pro Jewish state as well, the rationale was that it gets all the Jews out of Germany. It also supposedly kicks off the rapture when the Jews return to Israel.

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          Well it’s a trick, they are more anti-muslim than anti-jew. They want the war to escalate because both sides die, and the one they hate more has more casualties.

          They can also sell them all the weapons used in the war… might as well fill the pockets with the new “solution.”

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          Why do you think Oregon is on fire right now? I swear, it’s like people don’t think I even know how to do my job sometimes…

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      They can link them to their own goals. They want to avoid that people might notice the signs and recognize them as a warning. Let me guess, “The Wave” has been banned there, too?