Mark Levin’s McCarthyist JournoList membership list rapidly turns anti-Semitic
Update: Mark Levin removes anti-Semitic comments, dares his readers to say I’m into goats.
Conservative pundit and talk radio screamer Mark Levin put his researchers to work assembling posted a list assembled by a Free Republic user of members of JournoList, the nefarious cabal that ensured that John McCain was not elected President of the United States of America. He left me off. I feel so unimportant. I had really hoped to be included in this wave of digital McCarthyism that the screaming right-wing is hoping to foment. Then again, I only became a member this winter long after the election was done and over.
But what’s more interesting than the list is the comments. While members of JournoList are being slammed for intemperate remarks in an off-the-record listserve, apparently it’s OK with Levin if his readers express virulent anti-Semitism on his Facebook page. The readers must have a pretty bad case of cognitive dissonance to get into this line of thinking (Levin’s surname is ‘Levin’ after all), but they just can’t help from noting the interesting coincidence that many of the members of JournoList happen to be Jewish.
Below are all screengrabs taken around 6:30 pm from Levin’s Facebook page.
There’s the snide suggestion that without Jews, there would be no liberals:
Then there’s the version that calls Jews sick:
Then there’s the version that says American Jews don’t truly support Israel:
Then there’s the “why are you a self-loathing Jew” version:
If you’re mad about JournoList just ask yourself: are these the people you’d like to pal around with? At the very least, I hope Levin will do the decent thing and delete these comments from his Facebook page. I’ll keep watch.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by mattyglesias, Tricia Llanes, Bonnie Sonder, Lindsay Beyerstein, Jamil Smith and others. Jamil Smith said: RT @mattyglesias: Apparently the right's war on JournoList has brought out the old-school rightwing anti-semitism: http://bit.ly/9L4HIm [...]
Michael,
Don’t you understand that when conservatives do things like this it’s TOTALLY AND COMPLETELY DIFFERENT than when liberals do it because…because…hey, quick, look over there, evil Muslims!
[...] that Mark Levin’s McCarthyite effort to post a JournoList membership list (which excluded me) had attracted anti-Semitic commenters whose remarks were left in place for at least six hours (they were still up when I went to sleep [...]
Strange that it’s not an emergency when any liberal piece on Israel attracts hundreds of anti-Semitic comments on Huffington Post or the Guardian. Oh, right. It’s no longer anti-Semitic to say that Jews (sorry, Israel) controls the media, the banks and Congress.
The most scary part about anti-Semitism is that it now become an accepted discourse on the Left and Right. If anti-Semitic comments were reason to take down Web sites, half the Internet would be toast.
I’m not sure I grasp the strawman you’re setting up Michael (“It’s no long anti-Semitic to say…”).
It probably doesn’t matter. The Huffington Post (I don’t read the Guardian much) has community management staff who zap anti-Semitic comments. They may not always do a great job, but they try. Had I not called out the anti-Semitism brewing on his page, anti-Jewish thoughts would have gone hand-in-hand with Mark Levin’s McCarthyist effort to black list dozens of journalists and intellectuals simply because they are avowed liberals. The comments, which were getting ‘liked’ by other users, have been removed now. I commend Mark Levin for having the intellectual honesty to remove the remarks. I don’t commend his inability to acknowledge that his efforts will inherently attract the most unhinged audience members.
In response to another comment. See in context »Mr. Peck,
You have confused anti-Semitism with opposition to Israel’s policies in particular or Zionism in general. Anti-Semitism was a political movement which sought to expel Jewish immigrants from whatever nation that they were living in (US, England, France, Germany). Its fundamental tenet was Jews could never be assimilated into the nation, they were inherently and permanently “foreign”. Further their first loyalty was to Jews, who were a homogeneous and undifferentiated corporate whole, and no loyalty to the nation in which they lived. In some varieties later in the 20th century they had massive but secret powers, e.g. they controlled both the Communist Parties and “World Banking”.
Criticizing Israel’s actions in the Middle East is not based on any such ideology but rather upon specific policies of a government. Criticizing Zionism is based on the inherent logic of Zionism and how it has been implemented. Neither of these critiques requires any of the racist ideological assumptions of the anti-Semite.
In response to another comment. See in context »I don’t think this point is fair to Michael. Many strictly anti-Semitic, Jew-hating comments like the kind I identified are appended to the comment threads of articles and blog posts about Israel at the places he names. He’s not conflating fair criticism of Israeli government action with anti-Semitism in this case.
In response to another comment. See in context »What’s really disturbing is that the Facebook comments that Michael R. cited didn’t even face me. I’m so accustomed to seeing this kind of poison on the Web (and often a lot worse than this) that I barely notice it now. The real danger is that we’ve become so desensitized that hate speech that would have drawn condemnation 20 years ago now doesn’t raise an eyebrow.
In response to another comment. See in context »That’s partly the power of anonymity of the Internet. Levin’s commenters were all commenting under their presumably real Facebook identities.
In response to another comment. See in context »Michael,
These reprehensible comments have coalesced my thinking about your post on the Civil Rights Commission. It is still a necessary, if temporarily misguided, facility. These stupidities do not exist in a vacuum and their societal and institutional impact needs to be examined. Racism, sexism and class-ism in America are, by definition, very politicized topics. I definitely want our side to have a shot at these jerks, even if we have to tolerate the occasional right wingnut.
“Update: Mark Levin removes anti-Semitic comments, dares his readers to say I’m into goats.”
Entirely false. Here’s what he actually says: “If, for instance, someone were to post a comment accusing Michael Raston of having relations with a goat, which would obviously be preposterous and untrue, the fact that someone posted a comment like that doesn’t mean I would agree with it. And we’d do our best to remove such a comment.”
Enough with the smears, Michael. You’re not going to come out ahead with a guy like Levin if you think you can play like this.
6 goat-related comments and counting, evanm. Even more than the anti-Semites last time around.
In response to another comment. See in context »Indisputable evidence that Levin was actually encouraging them with a wink and a nod despite saying the exact opposite!
In response to another comment. See in context »A man as rhetorically skillful as Mark Levin knows how to wink and nod with the best of them.
In response to another comment. See in context »Rhetorical skill…Is that what Tony Hayward has?
Palin has the wink and the nod down pat.
If we could just work Glen Beck into the goat thing we would have a trifecta plus a wingnut.
In response to another comment. See in context »Then why would you make such a weak handwaving point against such a rhetorically skillful man? That’s the point I was making when I said “You’re not going to come out ahead with a guy like Levin if you think you can play like this.”
In response to another comment. See in context »evanm, it doesn’t really matter how ‘handwaving’ my point is about Levin. The point is that because of my blog post, he felt compelled to delete the anti-Semitic comments that were being normalized around his effort to ruin the careers of dozens of journalists and pundits. Those comments are gone now. Mission accomplished. But it’s just the mission. Sadly, the belligerence that Levin intends to attract goes on.
So Mark Levin, a Jew and staunch supporter of Israel, intended to attract belligerence against Jews?
In response to another comment. See in context »No, not what I am saying at all. Levin intends to attract belligerence – thus his habit of calling people like me ‘cockroaches’. Anti-Semitism is the kind of belligerence he doesn’t want, but it’s what he gets because he engages the most unbalanced, small-minded audience he can find.
In response to another comment. See in context »[...] But that was more than enough to set the gears of the right-wing outrage machine in motion. Soon Daily Caller folks were being interview by Fox News’ Megyn Kelly, a woman whose reporting technique consists primarily of modulating the degree to which her eyeballs bulge with rage and incredulity. Glenn Beck weighed in, and rush Limbaugh, and the guy who posted that fake video that led to Tom Vilsack railroading an innocent woman out of her job at the USDA, and so on. Right-wing radio host mark Levin published a McCarthyite list of known Journolist members on his Facebook page. It turns out that a lot of the people who like to post comments on Levin’s Facebook page are either tremendously stupid (“Why aren’t these people arrested and charged with conspiracy to influence an election!”), violent (Wouldn’t you like to grab these elitist media types by the collar and knock a few teeth out?), or–surprise!–anti-semitic. [...]
[...] attention from the freaked-out right. And frankly, after seeing the tenor that the freak-out over Journolist took, I’m definitely of the mind that this is anti-Semitic. With Beck, the unspoken but [...]