Behind the Aegis

Behind the Aegis's Journal

December 26, 2020

Graffiti reading 'murdering Jews we will hang you' painted at Spanish Jewish cemetery

Graffiti reading “good Jew dead Jew’ and “murdering Jews we will hang you” were written on the gate of a Jewish cemetery near Madrid, Spain.

The graffiti, featuring spelling mistakes in Spanish and some German-language words, were spray-painted in Hoyo de Manzanares, a northern suburb of the capital, on Wednesday night, the news site 20minutos reported. The perpetrators also painted a Star of David with the word Raus, German for “out,” on the gate. Another slogan featured a mashup of the Spanish-language word for Holocaust and fairytale.

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Interesting mix of Spanish and German.

December 26, 2020

Bulgarian synagogue and Halle memorial targeted in spate of crimes on Jewish sites in Europe

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In Bulgaria, the words “Free Palestine Israel=Nazis Antifa Bulgaria” were spray-painted Wednesday on the gate to the synagogue of Plovdiv, a city situated about 100 miles southeast of Sofia the capital, the Jewish organization Shalom wrote on Facebook.

In Halle, a Plexiglas panel on the monument of the shooting was smashed. The vandals also tried to set fire to a flag of Israel under the Plexiglas, the Jewish Community of Halle wrote Tuesday on Facebook.

A 28-year-old far-right extremist killed two people near the Halle synagogue in October 2019. He targeted a kebab shop and a passerby after failing to break through the synagogue’s armored door on Yom Kippur, when the synagogue was full of worshipers.

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In a third incident, a structure inside the Jewish cemetery of the town of Krumbach, in southern Germany, was damaged. Police are treating the vandalism as an anti-Semitic case because earlier this year, a nearby picnic table was dismantled and the wooden polls comprising it rearranged on the floor in the shape of a swastika, the website AllgaeuRechtsaussen reported Monday.

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December 21, 2020

Washington DC bans gay & trans "panic" defenses in criminal cases

Washington D.C. has passed legislation that would ban the so-called “gay panic” defense meant to excuse a violent response to being propositioned by someone of the same sex.

The dubious and homophobic defense has been used for decades to excuse violence against LGBTQ people.

Defense attorneys have also argued the same theory when it comes to crimes against transgender people, saying that when their clients discovered their sexual partner was transgender, they panicked or flew into a rage and couldn’t be held accountable for their actions.

While the self-defense ploy was commonly accepted for decades, some states have started passing bans on the tactic and even in states where there isn’t a ban, the defense has been disallowed by judges.

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A similar proposal is pending in Congress that would ban “panic” defenses from being used in federal courts. Yet, 39 states still allow the supposed defense strategy in courtrooms.

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December 1, 2020

July 3, 1981 - RARE CANCER SEEN IN 41 HOMOSEXUALS

Doctors in New York and California have diagnosed among homosexual men 41 cases of a rare and often rapidly fatal form of cancer. Eight of the victims died less than 24 months after the diagnosis was made.

The cause of the outbreak is unknown, and there is as yet no evidence of contagion. But the doctors who have made the diagnoses, mostly in New York City and the San Francisco Bay area, are alerting other physicians who treat large numbers of homosexual men to the problem in an effort to help identify more cases and to reduce the delay in offering chemotherapy treatment.

The sudden appearance of the cancer, called Kaposi's Sarcoma, has prompted a medical investigation that experts say could have as much scientific as public health importance because of what it may teach about determining the causes of more common types of cancer. First Appears in Spots

Doctors have been taught in the past that the cancer usually appeared first in spots on the legs and that the disease took a slow course of up to 10 years. But these recent cases have shown that it appears in one or more violet-colored spots anywhere on the body. The spots generally do not itch or cause other symptoms, often can be mistaken for bruises, sometimes appear as lumps and can turn brown after a period of time. The cancer often causes swollen lymph glands, and then kills by spreading throughout the body.

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Today is WORLD AIDS DAY. The above article was the first in regards to a disease which would become a pandemic and decimate the gay community. It is a pandemic that many ignored, because it was "killing all the right people."

Bill, Mary, Jim...I remember you.

WORLD AIDS DAY 2020

October 11, 2020

Today is National Coming Out Day (10/11)! (PIC/Tweet heavy)

National Coming Out Day (NCOD) is an annual LGBT awareness day observed on October 11, to support lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) people (and sometimes other groups typically grouped within the LGBT community) to "coming out of the closet".[1] First celebrated in the United States in 1988, the initial idea was grounded in the feminist and gay liberation spirit of the personal being political, and the emphasis on the most basic form of activism being coming out to family, friends and colleagues, and living life as an openly lesbian or gay person.[2] The foundational belief is that homophobia thrives in an atmosphere of silence and ignorance, and that once people know that they have loved ones who are lesbian or gay, they are far less likely to maintain homophobic or oppressive views.[3]

October 6, 2020

Jewish pols experienced 6,000 antisemitic tweets in a month, says ADL

Jewish incumbents running for reelection were bombarded with antisemitism on Twitter over the summer, according to a study released Tuesday by the Anti-Defamation League.

The ADL found that between July 23 and August 22, 30 incumbent Jewish members of the House and Senate received a total of nearly 6,000 antisemitic tweets, about 10% of the tweets directed at the group as a whole.

Nearly half of the tweets questioned the loyalty, honesty, ideology or faith of Jewish incumbents, the report said. Other common themes included misinformation about Democratic donor George Soros, including conspiracy theories that he is bankrolling Black Lives Matter protests and “antifa” in order to support “Jewish supremacy;” allegations of Jewish control over the media, the financial world or the government; and accusations that incumbents were secret Communists or Marxists. Some of the tweets “targeted incumbents with claims of pedophilia,” a nod to a QAnon conspiracy theory that purports the government is running a child sex-trafficking ring.

“Social media platforms are breeding grounds for hate and antisemitism at a frightening scale, and as very public and sometimes polarizing figures, Jewish members of Congress often experience the worst of this on Twitter,” said ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt in a statement.

The majority of the tweets dealt in antisemitic tropes rather than direct anti-Jewish slurs, said the report; fewer than 10% of the tweets contained explicitly antisemitic language. Twitter has yet to remove any of those that do.

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ETA:

Related:
Online Hate Index Report: The Digital Experience of Jewish Lawmakers

In late 2018, Pew Research Center reported that social media sites had surpassed print newspapers as a news source for Americans, when one in five U.S. adults reported that they often got news via social media.i By the following year, that figure had increased to 28% and the trend is only risingii. Combine that with a deeply divided polity headed into a bitterly divisive 2020 U.S. presidential election season and it becomes crucial to understand the information that Americans are exposed to online about political candidates and the topics they are discussing. It is equally important to explore how online discourse might be used to intentionally distort information and create and exploit misgivings about particular identity groups based on religion, race or other characteristics.

In this report, we are bringing together the topic of online attempts to sow divisiveness and misinformation around elections on the one hand, and antisemitism on the other, in order to take a look at the type of antisemitic tropes and misinformation used to attack incumbent Jewish members of the U.S Congress who are running for re-election. This analysis was aided by the Online Hate Index (OHI), a tool currently in development within the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) Center for Technology and Society (CTS) that is being designed to automate the process of detecting hate speech on online platforms. Applied to Twitter in this case study, OHI provided a score for each tweet which denote the confidence (in percentage terms) in classifying the subject tweet as antisemitic.

This study presents a snapshot in time of “Problematic” content, which for the purposes of this report we have defined as including both antisemitic tweets as well as tweets that include antisemitic tropes but require more context to be definitively categorized as antisemitic. The findings of this report are based on a review of 5,954 tweets directed at all 30 Jewish incumbents up for re-election on November 3, 2020. The tweets in our sample were all posted between July 23, 2020 to August 22, 2020.

The findings of this report, while limited, are alarming and, unfortunately, not surprising. We find distinct antisemitic tropes targeting Jewish incumbents, many of which have been recently amplified by QAnoniii, as well as other conspiracy theorists. For a full list of incumbents and details on OHI and methodology, please refer to the Methodology section.

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October 1, 2020

How are you voting? or How did you vote?

I know there are a few here, like me, you have already voted. I was curious who has voted and how and when.

September 26, 2020

The Changing Racial and Ethnic Composition of the U.S. Electorate

The upcoming 2020 presidential election has drawn renewed attention to how demographic shifts across the United States have changed the composition of the electorate.

In all 50 states, the share of non-Hispanic White eligible voters declined between 2000 and 2018, with 10 states experiencing double-digit drops in the share of White eligible voters. During that same period, Hispanic voters have come to make up increasingly larger shares of the electorate in every state. These gains are particularly large in the Southwestern U.S., where states like Nevada, California and Texas have seen rapid growth in the Hispanic share of the electorate over an 18-year period.1

These trends are also particularly notable in battleground states – such as Florida and Arizona – that are likely to be crucial in deciding the 2020 election.2 In Florida, two-in-ten eligible voters in 2018 were Hispanic, nearly double the share in 2000. And in the emerging battleground state of Arizona, Hispanic adults made up about one-quarter (24%) of all eligible voters in 2018, up 8 percentage points since 2000.

To be sure, the demographic composition of an area does not tell the whole story. Patterns in voter registration and voter turnout vary widely by race and ethnicity, with White adults historically more likely to be registered to vote and to turn out to vote than other racial and ethnic groups. Additionally, every presidential election brings its own unique set of circumstances, from the personal characteristics of the candidates, to the economy, to historic events such as a global pandemic. Still, understanding the changing racial and ethnic composition in key states helps to provide clues for how political winds may shift over time.

Black, Hispanic and Asian registered voters historically lean Democratic
The ways in which these demographic shifts might shape electoral outcomes are closely linked to the distinct partisan preferences of different racial and ethnic groups. Pew Research Center survey data spanning more than two decades shows that the Democratic Party maintains a wide and long-standing advantage among Black, Hispanic and Asian American registered voters.3 Among White voters, the partisan balance has been generally stable over the past decade, with the Republican Party holding a slight advantage.

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September 22, 2020

11-year-old boy blows shofar in front of Supreme Court to honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Micah Blay confessed that blowing a large shofar in front of the U.S. Supreme Court for some 250 people was “definitely like kind of scary.”

Micah, 11, accompanied his mother, activist Dana Marlowe, on Saturday to the Washington, D.C., building from their suburban Maryland home to pay their respects to the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Marlowe said her son blew the shofar several more times as more and more people arrived at the site, and that he was performing a mitzvah for Rosh Hashanah.

They also brought stones on behalf of nearly 300 people to lay in front of the building in lieu of placing them on her gravesite.

Marlowe told the “Good Morning Washington” show on WJLA-Ch. 7 that she also printed out several copies of the Mourner’s Kaddish to say at the Supreme Court in honor of Ginsburg.

https://twitter.com/DanaMarlowe/status/1307413260438851589

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August 29, 2020

Joe Biden calls Delaware Chabad torching 'deeply disturbing'

Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden condemned the torching of the Chabad center at the University of Delaware.

The incident “is deeply disturbing — as an alum of @UDelaware and as an American,” read a tweet Thursday from Biden’s Twitter account. “We need a full and swift investigation into what happened Tuesday night. With anti-Semitism on the rise across the country, we all have a moral obligation to speak out and give hate no safe harbor.”

The Tuesday night blaze, which resulted in damages estimated at $150,000-$200,000, was ruled an arson by the state fire marshal on Wednesday. The blaze required 45 firefighters, including from neighboring fire companies, to bring the fire under control, according to local media reports.

https://twitter.com/JoeBiden/status/1299145925273612288

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Thank you, soon-to-be President Biden!

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