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I'm honestly getting sick of hearing the word 'antisemitic' as if this is some major moral standard that matters. It is honestly starting to make me...anti-semitic.
I'm a Catholic. If I were to imagine s/anti-semitism/anti-Catholicism/ for all of these things I keep hearing from official government sources, or from the news media (but I repeat myself, hey, oh!) it would just make me laugh. Imagine Karine Jean Pierre starting off her daily press briefing by talking about the "concerning rise of Anti-Catholic sentiment in The United States" or how "Anti Catholicism is never acceptable" or can you imagine the congress passing a law condeming "anti Catholicism" or changing some educational standard to make it so that public schools were required to teach students that Mary was born without original sin?
You know something funny happening in my neighborhood: there is some kind of Jewish center here for students. Since October 7th[1], there has been a police officer posted outside of this building every day, seemingly 24 hours a day. And yet, my house, 2 blocks away, routinely has things stolen from the yard, has had people attempt to break into it, etc. My Church, a few blocks away again from this Jewish student center, has had to put up a large fence, and get our own security to watch over things during mass. What the hell is going on here?
This stuff is ridiculous to me. Yes, don't hate the Jews for being Jewish, but also...you can absolutely criticize anybody for anything; this is America. This is one of our founding ideas.
[1]: I hate having to constantly say this, but October 7th was probably the most horrific thing I have ever seen. Just maximally horrible and brutal. I get why the Israelis want revenge for this. I just don't think I should have anything to do with it, and don't think I should be funding it.
I think the word is even worse than you think; it's not just that it's being overused, it's that it's so wrong.
What does 'Semitic' mean? It's a linguistic term for referring to people who spoke Semitic tongues. If Hamas is anti-Semitic then they might as well be called a "self-hating" group, since Arabic comes from the same Semitic family of culture as Hebrew.
What does "Anti" mean? It means to oppose something; but to oppose doesn't mean "a wish to destroy each and every single one of it's advocates". It's why it's so obtuse and disingenuous to use the term "anti-trans" to refer to someone who opposes any of the trans lobby's social and institutional takeovers; since the term "anti-semite" is the biggest culprit of "antis", you're basically implicitly putting someone who thinks male serial rapists who all the sudden identify themselves as female shouldn't be in women's prison in the same camp as someone saying "We should lock all transgender people into death camps and exterminate them until none are left alive, and hunt down all those who got away to the end of the world".
Gustavo Perednik, famous historian of Judaism and philosopher (who I met once!), uses the term "judeophobia" to describe this feeling, which is better because at least the targeted group is being accurately represented, but I still think it comes short; fear isn't the root of what we're talking about here. Guys who rub their hands on their shoulders after shaking them with someone gay can be called homophobic since he can be understood as being afraid of them; someone who wishes to place restrictions of homosexual behaviour on public places, put gay people into ghettos and make conversion therapy compulsory (or worse) isn't being homophobic since he isn't operating out of fear, but disgust and hatred.
The only "marginalized" group who's had the dubious luck to have the correct term for people who despise them are women: misogyny (ironically, they are also a group who despite all their oppression have never been a victim of genocide! "Women, can't live with them..."). Some times it can be over used (oppressing women of the "keep them in the kitchen" variety isn't misogynistic; raping, murdering them and treating them live slaves of the opposite sex is), but if you want to imply hatred or disgust of something, that's the correct prefix: "miso". Hence, the prefix "miso" should be used to describe someone/something that holds a group of people in contempt.
The result being: a force like Hamas, who wishes the genocide of Jews, should be described as miso-Judaic or having miso-Jewry at it's core. I think anti-judaic is a ludicrous label to place on someone chanting "They've got tanks, we've got hang gliders, glory to all the resistance fighters": it's a valid way of describing someone who mows the lawn on Sabbat while rubbing it in its Rabbi neighbour face, or someone who doesn't stop making dumb jokes about its co-worker's yarmulke because he can't stand it, but I think it comes short of describing in accurate dimensions the feeling harboured by Nazism/Islamic supremacism.
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Don't worry, The FBI will happily send one of its friendly agents to 'protect' your Catholic service - no invitation necessary!
IIRC the actual plan was to send FBI agents to infiltrate tradcath communities and hope they would squeal on other far right wingers, not something based on the idea that tradcaths were going to start a race war themselves. It’s hard not to notice that FBI agents would likely stand out quite a bit less among broadly middle class and socially conservative suburbanite tradcaths than among, say, prison Nazis or deep rural militia types.
My community’s source in the DHS tells us that this plan failed because the agents just kept going native.
"This Jesus feller's got a few good goddamn points! Oh - sorry"
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Tradcaths are extremely overrepresented on the far right which does on occasion advocate for political violence. Seems very cringe for the GOP to spend years being completely fine with the FBI spending billions infiltrating random mosques and then get upset when they target extremist tradcaths who openly advocate for violent revolution online. Obviously it isn’t any substantial percentage of tradcaths, but the same is true for Muslim extremists.
Where?
If you are going to seriously compare even the rhetoric being put out by Traditional Catholics and Fundamentalist Muslims, you really need to back it up with something.
It wasn’t even close to the same level, though. The FBI has hundreds, possibly a couple thousand people full time on Muslim extremism in the US; meanwhile they made a couple of reports and had a few agents look into the tradcaths. That’s not the same investment at all.
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I think you’re underrating the possibility of this being paid for by some kind of Jewish organization- off duty and uniformed police officers are common high end security and Jewish organizations are both wealthy and paranoid.
My Catholic Church has police presence during Mass because we pay for it. I really don’t think that this is a religious prejudice.
Synagogues in Australia do this - I believe the guards are mostly volunteers who are trained on the synagogue's own payroll.
In the past I found it a bit odd, since noticeably mosques and gurdwaras don't do this, despite Muslims and Sikhs also being religious groups that are widely hated, and which are actually more publicly identifiable than Jews due to their headscarves and turbans, but since October 7 I have re-evaluated a little and am more understanding of Jews feeling a need for special security.
I suspect socio-economic factors also play a role - Australian Jews are on average wealthier than Muslims or Sikhs, and thus more able to pay for security. It's also possible that the fact that Jews are indistinguishable in everyday life makes synagogues more vulnerable to random attacks, not less. If I want to attack a Muslim or Sikh, it's relatively easy to identify one on the street and then attack them when they're most vulnerable. (To be fair, most attacks on Sikhs are a result of people mistaking them for Muslims - actual anti-Sikh sentiment is quite rare.) However, if I want to attack a Jew, I need to go to a bit more effort to identify who's Jewish, and observing people going to synagogue is a good way to do that.
Eh, there was the mosque in Christchurch, NZ. That didn't have a cop out front, did it?
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The nonprofit security grant program (NSGP) almost entirely goes to Jewish groups, including Synagogues. Jewish groups have recently lobbied for massive increases in these grants, which have been $275-305 million the past couple of years due to the lobbying by Jewish groups.
I also wrote a post about the ADL's "Day of Hate" hoax which directly coincided with a successful lobbying effort by ADL and other Jewish groups to massive increase the funding for that program.
That security outside the Jewish community center mentioned by OP is almost certainly paid for by DHS and American taxpayers.
From wiki:
This seems like an odd thing to do if the whole thing is a Jewish scam.
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NGO corruption and special interests is not the same thing as what’s implied; at least theoretically the first Baptist church of wherever could get access to the NSGP, it’s just that Jews are better at skimming from the government by, like, a lot. The local government didn’t decide that the ‘Jewish student center’ is more important to protect than the Catholic Church, the ‘Jewish student center’ hired an off duty police officer with grant money that got laundered to it.
It’s politically convenient for both sides to pretend that largely nonexistent antisemitism is a major problem, but that doesn’t mean the government chooses Jews as winners over everyone else.
We do not know that at all. I'm sure there are a lot of Christian churches who would like handouts from the Federal government, you think they are just leaving money laying on the floor by not filling out applications?
Jews lobby for federal funds that almost entirely go to Jewish organizations, that is absolutely the government choosing Jews as winners over everyone else.
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In at least some cases, those are being paid for by the federal government through the Nonprofit Security Grant Program.
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And if you lived in Northern Ireland or somewhere else where Anti-Catholic sentiment resolved into both government and private action against your faith and Catholics? Or perhaps even 60 years ago in the US.
The reason it makes you laugh is because you haven't (presumably) lived somewhere where that sentiment creates action. And indeed, as part of our move away from that, we did have to say mandate a specific percentage of Catholic officers in the police, and increase funding for integrated faith schools and the like. The US is pretty well integrated when it comes to Catholics vs Protestants, but this is a fairly modern occurrence.
Just because the idea of Anti-Catholicism makes you laugh, doesn't mean that it can't be a problem if it actually occurred. Even just 20 years ago my brother marrying a Catholic was a huge scandal in my extended family. And my uncle still needles her about cannibalism, from time to time, though these days only when he is drunk, because my brother will kick him out.
Now there certainly can be an argument that the fear of anti-semitism in the US is overblown but I would caution against underestimating just how much sectarian problems Catholics can face.
Sure, anticatholicism is not a particularly serious problem in the modern USA, but neither is antisemitism- I think that’s his point.
Yeah my point is that he is probably a little too blase, about anti-Catholicism, history shows it can spill out quickly. Which is why I would certainly endorse the US being aware of that. It wasn't too long ago where it was actually open. As I said when we were talking about Christian nationalism, I think there is an underlying wedge there that can get worse.
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For a few years now my state has had a bill to do away with priest penitent privilege. They don’t have the votes yet, but they’re close.
Does that law not equally apply to Protestants? I haven't needed it, but I seem to recall hearing that it did in my jurisdiction a while back.
Very few Protestants do confession. Fewer still treat it as an inviolable sacrament that demands excommunication for those that violate the confessional seal.
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How many Catholic Churches were burned in Canada in the last 4 years?
AI search says 33 odd churches, CBC says 24 of those are confirmed arson, and approx. half were Catholic. So 12 or so by the look of it.
Hope that helps!
Maybe don't trust Gemini with that question
https://tnc.news/2024/02/12/a-map-of-every-church-burnt-or-vandalized-since-the-residential-school-announcements4/
Note that "100 Christian churches in Canada have been vandalized, burned down or desecrated" is a different measure than number of churches burned down. Your source lists around 50 churches that with a fire or arson attack. Of those it lists around 27 as destroyed or razed, with another few have no description of the severity.
My count only covered those burned down. 33 looks to actually be consistent with your source as well using that metric.
So perhaps adjust your trust in the AI counting somewhat?
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That seems substantial to me!
Without the context of how common arson is generally it may or may not be substantial. Plus we'd have to know the relative ratio of Catholic churches to other churches in order to know if half those being targeted means Catholic churches are at greater risk than churches generally (so Catholics are being targeted specifically for being Catholic).
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I see where you're coming from, but the history of anti-Catholic animus in the United States isn't short: you could point to reactions to Irish and Italian immigration, or more recently Hispanics. The Klan was, among many other things, anti-Catholic. Things like arson of churches (some Catholic) isn't unheard of even today.
And I say this as not-a-Catholic. On the other hand, we largely seem to have overcome this bias, and few seem worried about Biden's allegiance to the Papacy. This is probably for the better, and IMO a good model of what real integration looks like: I haven't seen any third generation Irish immigrants try to claim victimhood on the basis of Catholicism, which is probably better for society as a whole.
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To understand why "antisemitic" is an issue, you first have to understand that whether a protest is acceptable has little to do with the particular tactics of the protestors. Within a very broad range, protests for acceptable causes are acceptable even if they are disruptive or out-and-out violent, while protests for unacceptable causes are unacceptable if the slightest excuse can be ginned up. The argument over "antisemitism" is an argument over whether these protests are in the first class or the second.
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